The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness [First Edition] 9781135136109, 9780415656146, 2014002630, 9780203078129

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The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness

Since ancient times, character, virtue, and happiness have been central to thinking about how to live well. Yet until recently, philosophers have thought about these topics in an empirical vacuum. Taking up the general challenge of situationism—that philosophers should pay attention to empirical psychology—this interdisciplinary volume presents new essays from empirically informed perspectives by philosophers and psychologists on Western as well as Eastern conceptions of character, virtue, and happiness, and related issues such as personality, emotion, and cognition, attitudes, and automaticity. Researchers at the top of their fields offer exciting work that expands the horizons of empirically informed research on topics central to virtue ethics. Nancy E. Snow is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University, US Franco V. Trivigno is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo, Norway

Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory

1 The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy Ethics after Wittgenstein Paul Johnston 2 Kant, Duty and Moral Worth Philip Stratton-Lake 3 Justifying Emotions Pride and Jealousy Kristján Kristjánsson

9 Deprivation and Freedom A Philosophical Enquiry Richard J. Hull 10 Needs and Moral Necessity Soran Reader 11 Reasons, Patterns, and Cooperation Christopher Woodard

4 Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill Frederick Rosen

12 Challenging Moral Particularism Edited by Mark Norris Lance, Matjaž Potrč, and Vojko Strahovnik

5 The Self, the Soul and the Psychology of Good and Evil Ilham Dilman

13 Rationality and Moral Theory How Intimacy Generates Reasons Diane Jeske

6 Moral Responsibility The Ways of Scepticism Carlos J. Moya

14 The Ethics of Forgiveness A Collection of Essays Christel Fricke

7 The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle Mirrors of Virtue Jiyuan Yu

15 Moral Exemplars in the Analects The Good Person is That Amy Olberding

8 Caste Wars A Philosophy of Discrimination David Edmonds

16 The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity William H. Smith

17 The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics Virtues and Gifts Andrew Pinsent 18 Social Humanism A New Metaphysics Brian Ellis 19 Ethics Without Morals In Defence of Amorality Joel Marks 20 Evil and Moral Psychology Peter Brian Barry 21 Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective Edited by Julia Peters 22 Modern Honor A Philosophical Defense Anthony Cunningham 23 Art and Ethics in a Material World Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy Jennifer A. McMahon

24 Defending Associative Duties Jonathan Seglow 25 Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics Edited by Avram Hiller, Ramona Ilea, and Leonard Kahn 26 The Ethics of Vulnerability A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice Erinn C. Gilson 27 Eudaimonic Ethics The Philosophy and Psychology of Living Well Lorraine Besser-Jones 28 The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno

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The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The philosophy and psychology of character and happiness / edited by Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno. — 1 [edition]. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in ethics and moral theory ; 28) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Character. 2. Happiness. I. Snow, Nancy E., editor of compilation. BJ1521.P465 2014 171′.3—dc23 2014002630 ISBN: 978-0-415-65614-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-07812-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Introduction

1

NANCY E. SNOW AND FRANCO V. TRIVIGNO

PART I Persons, Situations, and Virtue 1

The Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics from Psychology

15

CHRISTIAN B. MILLER

2

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons, No Reasons, and Reasons of Virtue

35

NEERA K. BADHWAR

3

Following Kurt Lewin Beyond the Situation—and the Person

54

C. DANIEL BATSON

PART II The Moral Psychology of Virtue 4

Automaticity in Virtuous Action

75

CLEA F. REES AND JONATHAN WEBBER

5

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue

91

ERIK J. WIELENBERG

6

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue

113

FRANCO V. TRIVIGNO

7

The Having, Doing, and Being of Moral Personality DANIEL LAPSLEY AND DARCIA NARVAEZ

133

viii Contents

PART III Asian Philosophy and Psychology on Virtue and Happiness 8

Seeing Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ in Light of Contemporary Psychology

163

STEPHEN C. ANGLE

9

Is Self-Regulation a Burden or a Virtue? A Comparative Perspective

181

HAGOP SARKISSIAN

10 The Geography of Thought Revisited: Reflections on Situationism and the Psychology of Asians

197

NANCY E. SNOW

11 The Psychology of Virtue and Happiness in Western and Asian Thought

215

SAMUEL M. Y. HO, WENJIE DUAN, AND SANDY C. M. TANG

PART IV Happiness 12 Adventures in Assisted Living: Well-Being and Situationist Psychology

241

DANIEL M. HAYBRON

13 Aristotelian Well-Being for the Modern World: Taking the Capabilities Approach to the Next Level of Specificity

266

HOWARD J. CURZER

14 A Virtuous Cycle: The Relationship between Happiness and Virtue

287

PELIN KESEBIR AND ED DIENER

Contributors Index

307 309

Introduction Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno

I.

BACKGROUND TO THE VOLUME

In her seminal paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” first published in 1958, Elizabeth Anscombe lamented the inadequate attention then paid to moral psychology in philosophical ethics and urged philosophers to look to the Aristotelian tradition for inspiration. Though philosophers after Anscombe studied virtue—most notably, Philippa Foot, James Wallace, Edmund L. Pincoffs, and Alasdair MacIntrye—it was not until the late 1990s that a true renaissance of interest in virtue began.1 Linda T. Zagzebski’s book, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge, published in 1996, and especially Rosalind Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics, published in 1999, heralded a new era of investigations into virtue.2 Hursthouse introduced the idea of virtue ethics as a type of ethical theory that would take virtue, as opposed to rules or consequences, as its central moral concept and provide an alternative to the major theory types that had long dominated the ethical scene, deontology, and consequentialism. Virtue ethics has since blossomed. Not only have major monographs that develop versions of virtue ethics appeared, such as those by Michael Slote, Christine Swanton, Daniel C. Russell, Julia Annas, and Mark LeBar, but also numerous articles, critical and otherwise, have been devoted to various aspects of virtue ethics, such as the problem of virtue ethical right action, the charge of egoism, and the relationship of virtue to happiness, just to name a few.3 One of the most trenchant critiques of virtue ethics has come from philosophers, most prominently Gilbert Harman and John Doris, who use social psychology to question the empirical adequacy of traditional philosophical conceptions of virtue and character.4 According to these conceptions, virtues are entrenched traits that reliably produce action across a variety of types of situations. An honest person, for example, can be expected to be honest when under oath in court, on her income tax forms, in conversations with her spouse, and so on. Psychologists call traits that produce such cross-situationally consistent behavior ‘global’ or ‘robust.’ In addition, the philosophically traditional view takes character to be strongly unified

2 N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno and “evaluatively integrated.”5 A person who possesses positively valenced traits—virtues—is assumed to have others; kind people are thought to be compassionate and generous, for example. Similarly, someone with negatively valenced traits—vices—is assumed to be vicious in other respects. Harman and Doris mount a challenge to this picture. Drawing on a trove of experiments from social psychology, such as those conducted by Isen and Levin, Darley and Batson, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Milgram studies, they argue that situational factors have a far greater impact than character in determining an agent’s behavior.6 In the Isen and Levin study, subjects who found a dime in the coin return slot of a telephone booth were more likely to help someone pick up dropped papers. In the Darley and Batson study, Princeton seminarians, hurrying to give a talk, did not stop to help someone slumped over and moaning in a doorway. The Stanford Prison Experiment, which simulated a prison environment, had to be canceled when ‘guards’ began abusing ‘prisoners.’ The Milgram studies are well known for their unsettling results; many subjects proceed to administer dummy shocks to ‘learners,’ thereby inflicting what they were told were lethal shocks at the behest of an ‘experimenter.’ These experiments attest to the power of situations in influencing behavior. They also, according to situationists, call into question assumptions about traits. Based on these studies, Harman questions the existence of virtues as traditionally conceived in philosophy and doubts that we can become the kinds of people that virtue ethics urges us to be.7 Doris admits that empirical studies are compatible with small numbers of people possessing global traits but maintains that their significance in actually producing behavior is quite minimal.8 Harman, Doris, and other situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate and formulates a normative ideal that is impossible for creatures with our psychology to achieve. Since the notions of virtue and character are fundamental to virtue ethics, this constitutes a major threat to virtue ethics in general. This challenge has stimulated an industry of articles defending virtue ethics, but with a few notable exceptions, the defenders have been content merely to defuse the threat from the situationist literature.9 However, the situationist challenge has demonstrated the need for philosophers to take a more empirically informed approach to traditional philosophical topics. Thus, developing empirically informed conceptions of virtue and happiness is a main aim of this volume. The notions of virtue and happiness are central to virtue ethical frameworks. Virtue is typically conceived of as a stable state of character that is sensitive to morally relevant features of a social situation and reliable issues in morally and socially appropriate behavior. On most theories, virtue is thought to be at least necessary to happiness—eudaimonia in Aristotelian terms—which is conceived of not as pleasure or desire-satisfaction but rather as the overall flourishing of the human being. Though the situationist tradition in social psychology has been used to undermine virtue ethics, there

Introduction 3 are ample resources in other traditions that can provide virtue ethics with a measure of empirical confirmation. For example, there is much research in the field of personality psychology that could support philosophically interesting conceptions of traits, virtues, or character.10 In addition, the field of positive psychology investigates different conceptions of happiness and well-being, and research in this tradition—in particular, research into eudaimonic well-being—seems well-placed to provide insights about philosophical conceptions of happiness.11 One aim of this volume, then, is to provide a cross-disciplinary perspective on character and happiness that showcases the thought of psychologists as well as philosophers on these rich and fascinating concepts. The thinking of the scholars whose work is included here is meant to move beyond the situationist debate and open new and creative lines along which practitioners of both disciplines can pursue empirically informed thinking about character and happiness. Interdisciplinary research on virtue and happiness is in its infancy, and the existing literature is usually focused on Western philosophy and psychology. With this volume, we aim not only to extend and to deepen this interdisciplinary research but to broaden the horizons of the debate by including Asian perspectives as well. Thus, our second aim is to encourage the development of the multicultural study of character and happiness. Philosophers and psychologists who work on East Asian traditions, especially Confucianism, bring many insights to bear on our understanding of these topics. What kind of trait is virtue? How are these traits related to the overall character of a person? How do situations come into play in developing virtue and forming character? How is subjective well-being related to happiness? Have Western notions of character and happiness been empirically documented in East Asian cultures, or has evidence been found to support different conceptions? These and other fascinating questions are pursued in depth and with insight by the contributors to this volume. With this approach, we move beyond situationism to stimulate empirically informed cross-disciplinary and multicultural work on character and happiness. Were Anscombe alive today, we hope she would approve of our efforts, and those of our contributors, to deepen and extend our understanding of the moral psychology of character and happiness.

II.

THE STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF THE BOOK

The volume is divided into four sections, each one featuring contributions by psychologists as well as philosophers. Part I, “Character, Situations, and Virtue,” contains contributions that attempt, in one way or another, to move beyond the original terms of the debate between situationism and personality and virtue theorists. Each chapter offers reconceptualization of some of the core terms of the debate and brings different empirical research to bear on the core issues.

4 N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno Christian B. Miller (Chapter 1) shows that, though the core of the situationist challenge can be met, psychological research presents a deeper challenge to virtue ethics. He reveals a gap in Harman and Doris’s situationist critique: He grants them the first part of their critique—namely, that most people do not possess virtues or vices, but he argues that this does not provide sufficient reasons for doubting the viability of Aristotelian virtue ethics as a normative theory, since virtue ethicists can and typically do deny the widespread possession of virtue. Miller then formulates what he calls “the real challenge” psychological research poses: Can advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics outline realistic and empirically informed ways for most human beings, who are not virtuous, to improve their moral characters so as to become virtuous? In the last section, he outlines two promising, empirically supported practical strategies to which virtue ethicists might appeal in addressing the challenge: using exemplars or virtue and raising awareness about the implicit psychological biases and subconscious processes that might lead us astray. In her “Reasoning about Wrong Reasons, No Reasons, and Reasons of Virtue,” Neera K. Badhwar (Chapter 2) focuses on the requirement in virtue ethics that virtuous action be done for the right reason and the challenge from experimental research that seems to show that, in morally significant situations, most of us act for reasons we are not aware of or for no reason at all. Badhwar argues that Aristotle operates with two versions of virtue: an ideal or perfect one for us to aspire to and a realistic or actual one that describes a state of excellence that is not ideal or perfect. She shows that Aristotle’s standards for virtue are lower than his contemporary critics assume and that Aristotle himself rejected the globalist doctrine that has been the target of the situationist critique. With this picture of Aristotelian ethics in hand, she turns to an analysis of some empirical research, which has been used to question the empirical adequacy of virtues ethics by showing the limits of practical rationality: mood research, the bystander effect, and the Milgram experiments. In each case, Badhwar shows how the results of these experiments are compatible with the picture of human nature espoused by her version of Aristotelian virtue ethics. C. Daniel Batson (Chapter 3) invites us to attend to the work of Kurt Lewin in order to move beyond the person—situation opposition. On Lewin’s account, the person and her environment are mutually dependent variables; thus, it is both true that the environment is a function of the person, E = F(P), and that the person is a function of the environment, P = F(E). Building on Lewin, Batson formulates five “conditional-genetic concepts” for psychology that make values, emotions, goals, motives, and behavior into a set of interdependent factors: On this picture, values, activated by opportunity or threat, produce emotions and goals, which in turn produce goal-directed motives, which generate behavior. Using this framework, he outlines and evaluates four general classes of motivation for acting morally: (1) egoism, or motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing one’s own

Introduction 5 welfare; (2) altruism, or motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare; (3) collectivism, or motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing a group’s welfare; and (4) principlism, or motivation with the ultimate goal of promoting some moral standard, principle, or ideal. Only the last is true moral motivation, according to Batson, and he concludes by proposing that this model might provide a way to test empirically whether morality is ever valued in its own right. Part II, “The Moral Psychology of Virtue,” contains contributions that draw on various programs of empirical psychological research in order to conceptualize virtue or some important aspects of it. The central positive theme is that conceptions of virtue can and should be empirically grounded. Clea F. Rees and Jonathan Webber (Chapter 4) focus on the relation between automaticity and virtuous action, more specifically what contribution automaticity makes to the ethical virtue of an action. Differentiating between the automaticity of technique and the automaticity of motivation, the authors argue that the automaticity of skilful action does not itself contribute to the ethical virtue of an action; it is rather the automaticity of motivation that contributes to virtue. The authors distinguish between the automaticity of modifying motivations, which are continually active through an action already initiated, and the automaticity of initiating motivations, which can initiate either action or practical deliberation. Then, they consider two candidates for empirically grounding the account of virtuous motivation: goal psychology and attitude psychology. The authors argue that neither attitudes nor goals could by themselves provide the cognitive architecture of ethical virtue. Instead, they propose that goal psychology could empirically ground those virtues primarily concerned with one’s own action, whereas attitude psychology could do the same for those virtues primarily concerned with states of the world. In “Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue,” Erik J. Wielenberg (Chapter 5) takes on the problem of the influence that emotions have on moral judgment, asking whether emotional influence precludes moral knowledge and, with it, virtue. He takes up this challenge using disgust, a notoriously irresponsible emotion, as his case. Distinguishing between operations of the adaptive unconscious (or “System 1”) and those of the conscious mind (or “System 2”), Wielenberg first formulates and defends a version of System 1 reliabilism, which shows how System 1 nonconscious classifications can generate epistemically justified moral beliefs. He then defends a version of the hidden principles claim, whereby we have principles morphologically. Having principles morphologically is, roughly, to make moral inferences that systematically conform to a principle without any conscious appeal to or awareness of the principle. These two elements make up the core of his model of moral knowledge—what he calls the Morphological Reliablism Model (MoRM). Moving to the case of disgust, Wielenberg shows how disgust has been extended beyond its original evolutionary function to avoid biological pathogens into the moral realm: Disgust causally influences

6 N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno conscious moral beliefs, it can be an effect of conscious moral beliefs, and it is malleable in light of conscious moral judgments. Noting the compatibility of Aristotelian ideas about emotion and MoRM, Wielenberg argues that disgust’s malleability means that it can be calibrated in precisely the way that Aristotle recommends that we attune our emotional dispositions with the moral reality. So calibrated, disgust could be a reliable indicator of moral truth and thus play a role in generating moral knowledge. Franco V. Trivigno (Chapter 6) tries to situate the empirical research on empathic concern within a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethical framework. He begins by distinguishing among cognitive, imaginative, and emotional accounts of empathy in order to motivate his focus on a particular emotional version, Batson’s empathic concern, defined as an other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need. Trivigno then provides an account of empathic concern, its two necessary causal antecedents—namely, perceiving the other in need and valuing the other—and its role in causing altruistic behavior. He then compares the causal structure of virtue and empathic concern, arguing that they have a structural isomorphism, which makes empathic concern a plausible candidate for providing the psychological architecture of certain virtues. Trivigno then argues that, whereas empathic concern is not sufficient for virtue, it is nonetheless necessary for the development of certain other-regarding virtuous dispositions. In short, appropriate empathic concern may be the relevant emotional component of some other-regarding virtuous action or feeling, and/or causally necessary to the development of the relevant virtuous disposition. He ends by briefly exploring how, given this account, one would train one’s empathic concern in order to develop the relevant other-regarding virtues. Daniel Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez (Chapter 7) claim that accounts of virtue must be compatible with well-attested models of personality, but personality psychologists are themselves divided on the issue of how to conceptualize the basic units of personality. The authors frame this debate in psychology in terms of models that emphasize ‘having’ versus ‘doing’: The ‘having’ model of personality appeals to broadband dispositional traits, whereas the ‘doing’ model appeals to social-cognitive units. Taking up the latter option, the authors give an account of the three basic elements of social-cognitive theory: (1) schemas, or organized knowledge structures that filter experience and memory, (2) tasks, or the demands of social life that we take up as goals, and (3) strategies, or the goal-directed behaviors that bring tasks to fruition. On this model, the distinctive organization, mutual influence, and dynamic interaction of these three elements give rise to various configurations of personality. Thus, schemas rather than traits wind up being the bearers of dispositions that would be relevant for conceptualizing virtue. Then, drawing from evolutionary theory, Lapsley and Narvaez construct a model for understanding the development of moral virtues in children. In the end, they propose a third perspective—namely, that of ‘being,’ which consists in one’s attentional habits, emotional dispositions,

Introduction 7 self-regulation, and practices of relational attunement and openness—that may be more fundamental to moral personality than either ‘having’ (traits) or ‘doing’ (social-cognitive units). The contributions in Part III, “Asian Philosophy and Psychology on Virtue and Happiness,” all share a concern with the alternative perspective provided by Asian philosophical thinking and Asian empirical psychological research on both virtue and happiness. These perspectives might help to broaden the scope of the relevant debates, which all too often restrict themselves to Western philosophy and empirical research, and to provide valuable insights that Western thought has overlooked. In his “Seeing Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ in Light of Contemporary Psychology,” Stephen C. Angle (Chapter 8) claims that given the surprising amount of common ground between neo-Confucianism and post-Kohlberg contemporary psychology research, a fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue between the two is possible. He begins by outlining the turn in psychological research away from moral reasoning and towards moral personality and identity, focusing in particular on the ways in which humans are ready to interpret the world in moral terms and the role that nonconscious automaticity plays in these moral perceptions. Angle then turns to neo-Confucianism; he shows that a commitment to view the world as structured by Universal Coherence (tianli), and thus harmonious, will result in active moral perception, whereby one experiences the world as demanding to be interpreted as a harmony. One’s motivated engagement with the process of perception is a ‘good knowing’ (liangzhi), which entails that one looks for harmony in the sense of being primed to see and react favorably to opportunities for harmony. Angle finds interesting parallels between neo-Confucianism and contemporary psychology regarding both ‘shallow’ knowledge, or when explicit knowledge and action or perception fail to match up, and moral development, in particular, the importance of family and community. He then formulates and attempts to partly disarm two challenges to the neo-Confucian picture that empirical research poses: It seems to undermine the possibility of achieving a fully developed moral capacity that good knowing would entail and seems to conceptualize moral development in terms that are alien to neo-Confucian thought. Hagop Sarkissian (Chapter 9) considers the role of ritual propriety (li) in Confucian ethics—in particular, the possible burdens that ritual propriety might place on an agent. Ritual propriety refers to the appropriate manners, customs, strictures, and protocols of social, political, and familial life. Sarkissian argues that the main burden of ritual propriety lies in the demand that individuals constantly monitor and regulate their social behavior, and that this requires self-regulation. This self-regulation requires both discernment of one’s situation and awareness of how one might be interpreted by others. He then turns to a critical examination of the experimental psychological research on self-regulation, with particular attention to two potentially

8 N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno troubling outcomes: First, many studies suggest that our limited cognitive resources doom efforts at self-regulation to failure; second, other evidence suggests that those who consciously attempt to regulate their social conduct suffer undesirable social consequences. Sarkissian shows that these studies (of primarily Western subjects) are not decisive, since there is experimental evidence that East Asians, who engage in self-regulation, frequently suffer comparatively little cognitive or social costs in doing so. Sarkissian ends by exploring some of the benefits of self-regulation—in particular, the moral power to positively impact situations in ways that lead to positive social outcomes that might outweigh the costs. Nancy E. Snow (Chapter 10) challenges the way that Richard Nisbett’s book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why, has been appropriated by John Doris as evidence in favor of situationism.12 Snow begins with a summary and analysis of The Geography of Thought. Employing the social origins theory, Nisbett argues that differing landscapes, economies, and social structures shaped the different value systems and psychologies of Westerners and Easterners, in particular, their conceptions of the self: Westerners conceive of the self as stable and independent, whereas Easterners seem to endorse a mode of self that is fluid and context-dependent. After showing the limitations of Nisbett’s analysis, Snow turns to Doris. Doris, she claims, cannot appeal to the difference between Westerners and Asians to support either his claim that the Western conception of character is parochial or that we should abandon this conception. Snow argues that the Eastern and Western conceptions of character are more similar than allowed by either Doris or Nisbett, and that the three formal conditions of the purportedly Western globalist conception of character—namely, consistency, stability, and evaluative integration—can apply to Eastern traits as well. Snow ends by sketching a Confucian conception of character and its development in which persons, though more relational than Western counterparts, retain core commitments and motivational states that keep them in harmony with the dao. Samuel M. Y. Ho, Wenjie Duan, and Sandy C. M. Tang (Chapter 11) explore the role of culture in shaping Chinese conceptions of happiness and virtue. The authors begin by briefly outlining the core ideas behind the four major schools of philosophical thought in China: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and I-Ching. Turning first to happiness, the authors distinguish between two dominant conceptions of happiness—namely, the hedonic view, whereby happiness is understood in terms of subjective emotional states, and the eudaimonic view, whereby happiness is understood in terms of self-realization and leading a virtuous life. They claim that happiness in Chinese culture can be understood from a eudaimonic well-being perspective, with a distinct component of happiness focusing on the well-being of others. Then, focusing on virtue, the authors identify three core virtues in Chinese culture: (1) relationship, or a person’s love, concern, and gratitude towards others; (2) vitality, or a person’s curiosity and zest for creativity;

Introduction 9 and (3) conscientiousness, an intrapersonal virtue that describes people who persist in achieving goals and exhibit self-control. They further claim that research indicates a positive relationship between these virtues and life satisfaction among the Chinese. The authors end by considering the effect of external factors on happiness—in particular, the recent economic growth in China and some recent major natural disasters. Part IV, “Happiness,” contains contributions that shed light on the causes, conceptions, and components of happiness, or well-being. Each contribution engages with the difficult question of whether and to what extent situational or personal factors play a causal role in contributing to happiness, or well-being. In his “Adventures in Assisted Living: Well-Being and Situationist Psychology,” Daniel M. Haybron (Chapter 12) argues that the implications of situationist research may be more significant for well-being than it is for virtue. He begins by articulating the situational determination of behavior (SDB), which holds that what we do is ineliminably shaped by contextual influences in ways that are not governed by rational processes. It raises serious problems for a familiar view of human agency, Rational Control (RC), according to which human action is under the command of rational or controlled processes. Though Haybron thinks that there is good evidence to accept a strong version of SDB, one that would make human behavior largely and ineliminably determined by situational influences, he takes as his conjecture a moderate version, which allows greater space for rational processes in determining behavior. He goes on to consider the implication of the moderate SDB for Aristotle’s conception of well-being and for appropriate strategies for advancing well-being. On the first issue, he argues that moderate SDB would seem to make happiness, in Aristotle’s sense, rare if not impossible, would threaten Aristotle’s ideal of rational control, and would suggest that we should rule out happiness for people on the basis of their counterfactual misdeeds. On the second, he argues for a contextualist approach to well-being in which the promotion of happiness is best achieved by a context that influences choices in beneficial ways. Howard J. Curzer (Chapter 13) formulates and defends an Aristotelian account of well-being, which he uses in order to modify and supplement the Capabilities Approach (CA). He first lays out the central components of CA: Within each sphere of human life, a person’s level of well-being is a function of (1) internal capabilities, or intrinsic abilities to perform certain acts; (2) combined capabilities, or internal capabilities plus opportunities; and (3) functionings, or actually performance of the acts. Curzer then compares this view to Aristotle’s account of well-being; after noting several similarities, he identifies some key differences: CA ignores Aristotle’s claim that one must exercise essential human capabilities appropriately. In short, it lacks a place for virtue. After fielding some objections and making some modifications to the Aristotelian picture, Curzer moves on to articulate his Synthesis of the Capabilities Approach and Aristotle’s Ethics (SCAARE).

10 N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno The crux of this synthesis involves the addition of several additional steps within each of the spheres: (4) reasoning and choosing well, or in the right way and for the right motive; (5) performing good actions, or performing the actions chosen; (6) desiring and feeling well, or enjoying the actions performed. Only at the last level would one achieve virtue, whereas level 5 is compatible with continence and level 4, with incontinence. Curzer ends by arguing, via appeal both to common sense and to social science, that moving up each step brings with it a greater level of well-being. Pelin Kesebir and Ed Diener (Chapter 14) review the burgeoning empirical literature on the relationship between virtues and happiness, finding that happiness and virtue are bidirectionally related: Virtue leads to happiness, and happiness leads to virtue, resulting in a ‘virtuous cycle.’ The authors begin by laying out the core of their notion of happiness: subjective wellbeing (SWB) refers to people’s evaluation of their lives (including life satisfaction, satisfaction with important life domains, like one’s work, health, relationships, and so on) and positive affect, and it thus incorporates both cognitive and affective elements. Research further suggests that a person’s happiness level is determined by three major factors: (1) genetics (about 50%), (2) life circumstances (about 10%), and (3) activities and practices one engages in (about 40%). The authors then turn to the empirical research showing the core ways in which virtue could increase one’s happiness. They show, first, that virtues, like courage, hope, and so on, serve to prevent unhappiness and stave off undesirable life outcomes. Then they present the plethora of research showing that virtue promotes happiness and desirable life outcomes. The authors then consider two objections: They first deny that there can be an excess of a virtue, arguing that undesirable outcomes only result because of the absence of other balancing virtues; second, they show why the fact that many people do not act virtuously is not evidence against virtue’s contribution to happiness. The authors end by presenting empirical evidence for the other half of the proposed biconditional—the ways in which happiness can increase one’s virtue. We believe that the essays in this volume are important contributions to the refinement of our understanding of moral psychology and its importance for character and happiness. We hope that they stimulate further research on these seminal questions. NOTES 1. Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–16; Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); James Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Edmund L. Pincoffs, Quandaries and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); Alasdair MacIntrye, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 2. Linda T. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge

Introduction 11

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

University Press, 1996); Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Michael Slote, Morals From Motives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Daniel C. Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009) and Happiness for Humans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012); Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Mark LeBar, The Value of Living Well (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Robert Johnson, “Virtue and Right,” Ethics 133 (2003): 810–834; Liezl van Zyl, “Agent-Based Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Action Guidance,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6, no. 1 (2009): 50–69; and Christopher Toner, “The Self-Centredness Objection to Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy 81 (2006): 595–618. Gilbert Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999): 315–331 and “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 223–226; John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Doris, Lack of Character, 22. Alice M. Isen and Paula F. Levin, “Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (1972): 384–388; John Darley and C. Daniel Batson, “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27, no. 1 (1973): 100–108; Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics of a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69–97; Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: HarperCollins, 1974). Harman, “Moral Philosophy,” 316; Harman, “Nonexistence,” 223–224. Doris, Lack of Character, 6. Nancy E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010); Russell, Practical Intelligence; and Christian Miller, “Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics,” The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 365–392. Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure,” Psychological Review 102, no. 2 (1995): 246–268. For example, Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer, “The Contours of Positive Human Health,” Psychological Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1998): 1–28. Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (New York: Free Press, 2003).

REFERENCES Annas, Julia. Intelligent Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Anscombe, Elizabeth. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–16. Darley, John and C. Daniel Batson. “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27, no. 1 (1973): 100–108. Doris, John M. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

12 N. E. Snow and F. V. Trivigno Foot, Philippa. Virtues and Vices. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Haney, Craig, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo. “Interpersonal Dynamics of a Simulated Prison.” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69–97. Harman, Gilbert. “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999): 315–331. ———. “The Nonexistence of Character Traits.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 223–226. Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Isen, Alice M. and Paula F. Levin. “Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21, no. 3 (1972): 384–388. Johnson, Robert. “Virtue and Right.” Ethics 133 (2003): 810–834. LeBar, Mark. The Value of Living Well. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. Miller, Christian. “Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics.” The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 365–392. Mischel, Walter and Yuichi Shoda. “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositons, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure.” Psychological Review 102, no. 2 (1995): 246–268. Nisbett, Richard E. The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why. New York: Free Press, 2003. Pincoffs, Edmund L. Quandaries and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986. Russell, Daniel C. Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009. ———. Happiness for Humans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012. Ryff, Carol D. and Burton Singer. “The Contours of Positive Human Health.” Psychological Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1998): 1–28. Slote, Michael. Morals from Motives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Snow, Nancy E. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010. Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Toner, Christopher. “The Self-Centredness Objection to Virtue Ethics.” Philosophy 81 (2006): 595–618. van Zyl, Liezl. “Agent-Based Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Action Guidance.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6, no. 1 (2009): 50–69. Wallace, James. Virtues and Vices. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Zagzebski, Linda T. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Part I

Persons, Situations, and Virtue

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1

The Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics from Psychology Christian B. Miller

For over ten years now, Gilbert Harman and John Doris have advanced what has become a well-known line of criticism against certain forms of virtue ethics.1 Very roughly, the strategy involves drawing on the situationist tradition in psychology to argue that there is compelling evidence against the widespread possession of the traditional virtues and vices. I join many philosophers in thinking that their particular line of criticism against virtue ethics is not very compelling.2 However, unlike many of these critics, I also do not think that virtue ethics is off the hook with respect to the relevant psychological evidence. Rather, in the spirit of this volume to try to move ‘beyond’ situationism, I will argue that there is another challenge that is independent of the situationist tradition and that poses a real threat to virtue ethics and indeed any other ethical theory that supports the cultivation of the traditional virtues. In section one, I briefly comment on Harman and Doris before developing what I take the real challenge to virtue ethics to be in section two. The final section of the paper suggests two strategies for beginning to address this challenge.

I.

THE HARMAN/DORIS STRATEGY

Since the editors of this volume already present the main line of reasoning offered by Harman and Doris, I will pass over the details in the interest of space. Instead, let me only note that their discussion proceeds in two stages. First, they draw on experimental results from psychology, such as the famous Milgram experiments, to argue for the following: (HD) We are justified in believing that most people do not possess the traditional virtues (such as compassion or honesty), and nor do they possess the traditional vices (such as callousness or dishonesty). Let me simply grant this negative claim in this paper.3 In the second stage of their discussion, Harman and Doris use (HD) to assess the plausibility of Aristotelian virtue ethical accounts, along with any

16 Christian B. Miller other theories in ethics that rely on such traits. Unfortunately, here it is much less clear how their argument is meant to go. According to Harman, “this sort of virtue ethics presupposes that there are character traits of the relevant sort, that people differ in what character traits they have, and these traits help to explain differences in the way people behave.”4 This does seem accurate as a description of certain commitments of standard forms of virtue ethics. But none of these claims seems to be threatened by the empirical results that they present. Simply denying that there is widespread possession of the virtues and vices is straightforwardly compatible with, for example, still thinking that these traits exist and that people differ in whether they have them or not. Some people might have one virtue, others one vice, and still others several virtues or vices, whereas perhaps the majority do not have any virtues or vices at all. Doris claims in his 1998 paper that “Aristotelian virtue ethics, when construed as invoking a generally applicable descriptive psychology . . . [is] subject to damaging empirical criticism.”5 This quote isolates what, according to Doris, is the key assumption that Aristotelian virtue ethics is committed to—namely, that it provides a descriptive account of our psychologies, which attributes the virtues or vices to most people. Unfortunately, though, little evidence is offered that there actually are any virtue ethicists who accept this assumption.6 Indeed, by his 2002 book, it is hard to find Doris offering any clearly developed arguments connecting (i) the denial of the widespread possession of traditional virtues and vices to (ii) an assessment of the truth of Aristotelian virtue ethics as a normative theory. Instead, the main project seems to have evolved into showing, first, that approaches in moral psychology that appeal to traditional character traits are empirically inadequate as descriptive accounts of most people, and second, to then raising concerns about how practically relevant virtue ethics would be if most of us do not have such traits.7 Questions about the truth of the ethical theory do not now seem to be raised, and instead, we are presented with a practical concern that needs further clarification. I will return to issues about the practicality of virtue ethics in section two. Whatever exactly the Harman/Doris concern is with virtue ethics, it seems to center on the idea that the theory is committed to the widespread possession of traditional virtues or vices, and that this commitment, once rendered empirically inadequate, somehow threatens the plausibility of the view. To this there is a now familiar response, which we can call the rarity response. It denies that any reasonable form of virtue ethicists is committed to the widespread possession of the virtues as a descriptive claim.8 According to this line of response, virtue ethicists can readily agree that studies in psychology justify the belief that there currently is not widespread possession of the virtues—there was never any justifiable expectation otherwise. As Aristotle himself writes, “the many naturally obey fear, not shame; they avoid what is base because of the penalties, not because it is disgraceful.

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 17 For since they live by their feelings, they pursue their proper pleasures and the sources of them, and avoid the opposed pains, and have not even a notion of what is fine and truly pleasant, since they have had no taste of it.”9 While contemporary virtue ethicists need not commit themselves to these particular empirical claims, they can accept that many people have characters that are for the most part mixed, continent, incontinent, or in some other way nonvirtuous.10 There is much more that could be said about the rarity response as well as about the other replies that have been made in the literature in order to respond to Harman and Doris. But at this point, I want to try to take the debate one step further by outlining what I think is the real challenge to virtue ethics from psychology.

II.

THE REAL CHALLENGE

I do not think that virtue ethicists are completely in the clear just yet. In fact, I want to switch gears here and ultimately agree with Harman and Doris that there is a potential concern for virtue ethics lurking in this neighborhood, and I want to try to do a better job of identifying exactly what it is. The concern has to do with showing how becoming a virtuous person is psychologically realistic for beings like us.11 This concern has been alluded to briefly in the literature. Harman, for instance, writes that, “if we know that there is no such thing as a character trait and we know that virtue would require having character traits, how can we aim at becoming a virtuous agent? If there are no character traits, there is nothing one can do to acquire character traits that are more like those possessed by a virtuous agent.”12 It may also be what Doris intends as his primary criticism of virtue ethics in Lack of Character, although in my mind, the discussion is not clear there. At one place, he does say that “[a] practically relevant character ethics should have something to say about securing ethically desirable behavior.”13 But this is a claim about behavior, not about character traits themselves. In this section, I want to begin to make this vague concern more precise. In order to do so, it is important to appreciate just how stark the contrast is between the psychological picture of what most of us actually seem to be like and the nature of the virtuous character traits that we should attain. On the one hand, the following are what I consider to be commonplace platitudes about virtue: (i) A person who is virtuous will, other things being equal, typically attempt to perform virtuous actions when, at the very least, the need to do so is obvious and the effort involved is very minimal. (ii) A person’s virtuous trait will, other things being equal, not be dependent on the presence of certain enhancers or inhibitors such that if

18 Christian B. Miller these they were not present, then the person’s frequency of acting virtuously would significantly decrease or increase. (iii) A person’s virtuous trait will, other things being equal, typically lead to virtuous behavior, which is done for motivating reasons that are morally admirable and deserving of moral praise and not for motivating reasons that are either morally problematic or morally neutral. (iv) A virtuous person does not, other things being equal, regularly act from egoistic motives, which are so powerful that they would lead the person to not pursue a virtuous course of action if an alternative is deemed to be more desirable in contributing to his or her own egoistic pursuits. For instance, a compassionate person is expected to at least attempt to help when, say, a person has dropped a stack of papers or has a tear in a shopping bag, which is now leaking. In addition, the person’s frequency of helping would not be reliably sensitive to, for instance, a variable like guilt or positive mood. A compassionate person is expected to regularly help address at least the moderate needs of others regardless of whether the helping would relieve her guilt or contribute to maintaining a positive mood. And when she does help, it should be primarily for morally admirable motivating reasons. In the case of compassion, for instance, these might be altruistic reasons, which are ultimately concerned with what is good for another person. At the very least, they should not primarily be egoistic reasons, such as helping to maintain a good mood or relieving feelings of guilt. Finally, the last requirement should not need much explanation—that is not the pattern of behavior I think most of us would expect from a virtuous person. How are most people today doing with respect to these standards? Well, if the results of hundreds of relevant psychology experiments conducted over the past fifty years tell us anything here, it is that the answer appears to be— not well. There is no way I can possibly summarize this research in the space remaining. So what I will do instead is use the example of compassion and review one representative study per requirement while emphasizing that I am not drawing any conclusions just from this one study, but rather collectively from a whole host of relevant ones.14 Let me begin with the following claim: (i*) Most people do not attempt to perform various virtuous actions even when the need to do so is obvious and the effort involved is very minimal. Dennis Regan and his colleagues observed twenty female control participants in a shopping mall who each were approached by a male confederate asking to have his picture taken using an expensive looking camera. The man went on to say that the camera was rather sensitive, and each participant who then tried to take a picture found that the shutter did not work.

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 19 Fortunately, these control participants were assured that the camera “acts up a lot” and that the participant did not do anything wrong. The confederate then left the participant, and a few stores away, a second confederate disguised as a shopper walked across her path carrying a “bag of groceries from which a corner at the bottom had been torn, such that if she walked, candy fell out of the bottom of the bag.”15 Every indication is that the shopper had no idea that the candy was leaking out of the bag. To the participants, it should be clear what the problem was, and the effort involved in solving it was very minimal and would not delay any more pressing engagements. No doubt the shopper would also most likely be very grateful. And helping the shopper was clearly what a good person would be expected to do, other things being equal. But it turned out that only three of the twenty participants made any attempt to help. The other seventeen simply let the candy continue to fall. Dozens of other experiments on helping have also found very low rates among control subjects. Here is a second claim: (ii*) Most people exhibit behavior which is dependent on the presence of certain enhancers or inhibitors such that if these they were not present, then the person’s frequency of acting virtuous would significantly decrease or increase. Stick with helping behavior again. Such helping has been found to increase significantly with the presence of such enhancers as positive moods, guilt, embarrassment, and even negative moods (more on this in a moment). It has also been found to decrease significantly with the presence of such inhibitors as anger, anticipated embarrassment, anticipated guilt, and (again) negative moods. While a compassionate person would be expected to perform certain helping tasks independently of whether she is in, say, a positive or negative mood, most of us seem to be greatly influenced by these factors. As a representative example, consider the rest of the Regan study. In the experimental condition, twenty other participants were in almost the same setup as above. The one key difference was that each of them was instead told by the camera owner that she must have done something wrong and jammed the camera and that it would now have to be fixed (presumably at significant expense to the owner). Did this change in the setup lead to a subsequent change in helping behavior? Indeed, it did. Fifty-five percent of these participants helped (eleven out of twenty), as compared to only 15% of the controls.16 The natural explanation for this difference is that the participants in the second group were being influenced by feelings of guilt while those in the first were not.17 Michael Cunningham and his colleagues built on this study and examined the relationship between positive mood, guilt, and helping. Positive mood was manipulated by having participants find a free dime in the coin return slot of a pay phone. Guilt was manipulated by following the same

20 Christian B. Miller broken camera technique developed by Regan. And the helping task was assisting a confederate pick up papers that had been dropped in front of the participant. The results were as follows:18 Table 1.1

Positive Mood No Positive Mood

Guilt

No Guilt

33% 80%

73% 40%

So positive mood and guilt each had a dramatic impact on elevating helping when operating on their own, but together they seemed to cancel each other out. Again, this is not what should be expected from a compassionate person. The third claim is this: (iii*) Most people exhibit morally relevant behavior that is often done for motivating reasons that are either morally problematic or morally neutral and not for motivating reasons that are morally admirable and deserving of moral praise. To be virtuous, at least on traditional ways of thinking about the virtues, is to not only perform certain virtuous actions but to also do them for virtuous motivating reasons. Someone who reliably helps, but does so only to improve his resume or to elevate himself in society, is not a compassionate person. Research on helping suggests that motivation to help can come in a wide variety of forms. If Daniel Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis is correct, for instance, then genuinely altruistic motivation to help exists and can be a powerful motivator.19 But empathy is not the only or even the most common psychological variable behind actual helping. Often the motivating reasons are instead straightforwardly egoistic. To take one example, there is wide support for a mood management hypothesis about the relationship between negative moods and helping.20 According to this view, experiencing a negative mood can cause the formation of motivation to relieve the mood, and helping another person in need can be one such means to making oneself feel better. This is what James Weyant found in his well-known 1978 study. Some participants had their mood levels lowered by being made to believe that they had performed poorly on a fake anagram test. After learning the results of the test, they were presented with an opportunity to donate their time to charity work. Random assignments were made as to which participant would be presented with one of the following opportunities: American Cancer Society (high benefits) and Door-to-Door Work (high costs) American Cancer Society (high benefits) and Desk Work (low costs)

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 21 Little League Baseball (low benefits) and Door-to-Door Work (high costs) Little League Baseball (low benefits) and Desk Work (low costs) The breakdown for the proportion of participants who volunteered their time was as follows:21 Table 1.2

High Benefits / High Costs High Benefits / Low Costs Low Benefits / High Costs Low Benefits / Low Costs

Negative Mood

Controls

29% 71% 5% 33%

33% 33% 29% 33%

As predicted by the mood maintenance hypothesis, it was only in the high benefit / low cost scenario that mood-lowered participants exhibited a greater degree of helping than controls. Note that in the low benefits / high costs scenario, helping was instead inhibited relative to control levels. Negative mood relief is only one form of motivation that seems incompatible with what might be expected from a compassionate person. Other forms of motivation that seem also to be widespread and that give rise to helping include embarrassment avoidance, guilt avoidance, positive mood maintenance, guilt relief, and embarrassment relief. Finally, I claim that: (iv*) Most people do regularly act from egoistic motives that are so powerful that they would lead the person to not pursue a virtuous course of action if an alternative is deemed to be more desirable in contributing to his or her own egoistic pursuits. In a recent study, Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist provide a nice illustration of this.22 They asked participants to recall an unethical action that they had performed in their past. Next, participants were divided into two groups, one of which used an antiseptic wipe to cleanse their hands and one of which did not. After completing a survey about their emotional state, they were given an opportunity to be an unpaid volunteer for a desperate graduate student in another study. The results were that 74% of participants who did not use the wipes volunteered to help, whereas only 41% who did use the wipes volunteered.23 Note that the cleansing involved here was not a moral cleaning, such as going to confession, which might be considered a means of trying to repair the wrong-doing; rather, it was simply an act of physical cleansing for eliminating germs from the person’s hands.24 Thus, it seems that some participants might have otherwise volunteered were it not for their performance of an action that had no bearing on repairing their

22 Christian B. Miller prior unethical behavior. If these results are representative of the population at large, then note how such a minor thing as using hand wipes was able to deflate motivation to help and divert so many people from otherwise helping. Again, far more needs to be said about these studies and the other support that might be offered for (i*) through (iv*). But I trust that anyone familiar with the relevant literature in moral psychology should not find these claims too surprising. Let me tentatively accept them for the remainder of this paper. Given the contrast between some of the standards required for having the virtues (in the form of (i) through (iv)), and the claims made above regarding how most people are actually doing in these respects, the real challenge to virtue ethics can be stated as follows: (1) The central ethical goal according to Aristotelian virtue ethics is to become a virtuous person. (2) Four important features of being a virtuous person are outlined in (i) through (iv) above. (3) But most of us are better described in the ways outlined in (i*) through (iv*) above, and because of this, we fall far short of being virtuous people. (4) Hence, advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics need to outline realistic and empirically informed ways for most human beings to improve their moral characters so as to become virtuous, and so far they have not done so. (5) Therefore, the view faces an important challenge that it needs to address. Call this the ‘realism challenge.’ Less formally, the idea is that the Aristotelian needs to develop some account of how we can start with people whose characters are deficient in these ways and outline steps to best help them gradually transform into virtuous people who, for instance, reliably help when needed for the right reasons and independently of what mood or state of guilt they happen to be in.25 The realism challenge should not be underestimated. Habituating oneself to resist immediate and familiar forms of temptation (or to not have them serve as temptations in the first place) is one thing. Perhaps most of us have familiar techniques to strengthen our wills against temptations to, for instance, eat excessively or look inappropriately at an attractive person. But the real concern here is with trying to regulate the subtle and often subconscious influences on our moral behavior, examples of which are widespread in the psychology literature.26 These include mood, guilt, and embarrassment enhancers, and (certain) negative mood, anticipated guilt, and anticipated embarrassment inhibitors. They also include a vast array of powerful egoistic motives, some of which are working subconsciously. To take just one

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 23 illustration, in the group effect literature, the last thing that tends to come to mind is the effect that a stranger has on inhibiting helping, and yet it can act as a powerful inhibitor that generates egoistic motivation to not help. The realism challenge applies far more broadly than to just Aristotelian virtue ethics. Most leading ethical theories would accept a modified version of (1), which claims that at least one central ethical goal is to become a virtuous person. In addition, I take the features of being a virtuous person, which are outlined in (i) through (iv), to be platitudes of our ethical thought—commonsense and largely uncontroversial features that are not specific to any particular ethical theory but rather can serve as constraints when thinking about virtue that any such theory should respect (other things being equal). But we should not stop just with professional ethicists. Most people in general, regardless of whether they have studied ethics or not, already accept both that one central ethical goal is to become virtuous and that the virtues include the features in (i) though (iv). So if I am right at the descriptive level about claims (i*) through (iv*), then just about everyone, whether an ethical theorist or not, has to address this challenge. It needs far more work than it has received so far, and calling attention to it is one of the main objectives of my recent work. It is important to stress that the above argument in (1) through (5) is only stated as a challenge, not as an objection to the truth of virtue ethical accounts. I have offered no reason to think that the realism challenge could not eventually be met, only that it will be very difficult to do so. Unfortunately, it is also a challenge that has gone almost completely neglected in the virtue ethics literature and indeed in the philosophical literature on moral development more generally.27 Let me end this section by mentioning two of the options for responding to the realism challenge. The first is to simply deny premise (1). The idea would be to take seriously the distinction between a moral criterion and a way of life and to argue that virtue ethics should only be understood as invoking the virtues to ground a criterion for morally right action. For instance, on one version of the Aristotelian view, moral obligation is grounded in what a fully virtuous person, acting in character, would do in the circumstances.28 This could indeed be the correct account of moral obligation even if we reject (1) and so reject the goal of becoming virtuous people ourselves. There is nothing incoherent about this response. But virtue ethicists would be the last ones to invoke it. One of their leading slogans has always been emphasizing ‘being’ over ‘doing.’ In other words, the moral life starts for them with becoming a virtuous person rather than with simply performing virtuous actions. As Aristotle himself famously said, “the purpose of our examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no benefit to us.”29 Furthermore, although it might not be inconsistent, there is still something very odd about claiming that a fully virtuous person is the basis for a central part of morality

24 Christian B. Miller (deontology), but at the same time, is not the kind of person whom we should strive to become in our own lives. This concern becomes even more pronounced from the perspective of ordinary morality—it would take a serious revision to our ordinary thinking to claim that we should not try to emulate the characters of our moral heroes and saints such as Jesus, Gandhi, or one of our friends or family members. The second option that I will note here for addressing the realism challenge is to dive right into the messy empirical work of devising and testing approaches to character development, which claim to be able to make us virtuous. I will take two small steps towards doing so in the next section.

III.

TWO SMALL STEPS TOWARDS ADDRESSING THE REALISM CHALLENGE

In this section, I want to briefly focus on premise (4) of the realism challenge: (4) Hence, advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics need to outline realistic and empirically informed ways for most human beings to improve their moral characters so as to become virtuous, and so far they have not done so. A proper treatment of moral education and character development would need an entire book. But for now, let me end this paper by only very briefly gesturing at two areas of investigation that strike me as initially promising. Naturally, I will not be claiming that these strategies are the only promising ones.30 Models of Virtuous Character and Action. It has long been held that virtuous models should play a significant role in cultivating the virtues. What exactly this role might be is not easy to say. It could, for instance, involve actually seeing a person in front of you demonstrate what it is to act virtuously in a given situation. Or it could involve news reports of what others are doing today, or historical records of how people have handled difficult situations in a virtuous manner in the past. These kinds of models are all based in the actual world. But many have stressed the use of what might be called counterfactual models—thinking about how a given person of strong moral character would behave in a particular situation can give us guidance as to what I should do as well. For instance, here is Epictetus: “When you are about to meet someone, especially someone who seems to be distinguished, put to yourself the question, ‘What would Socrates or Zeno have done in these circumstances?’ and you will not be at a loss as to how to deal with the occasion.”31 Today, that specific question might not be as common as it once was, but most of us have seen the WWJD wristbands that some Christians wear. We can also look to narratives, works of fiction, stories, plays, poetry, movies, television programs, and the like to find still other instances

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 25 of models of morally appropriate (and, of course, inappropriate) behavior. Finally, note that all the above pertains to models of specific actions. But a certain person’s life (whether actual or fictional) can serve as a powerful model as well for the type of person I might strive to become.32 There is a longstanding literature on models in the psychology literature, especially with respect to helping behavior. Stephen Holloway and his colleagues, for instance, found that participants who had just been exposed to a news report involving a human agent bringing about good in the world were more cooperative in one round of a nonzero sum game, both than were participants who heard a news report involving a person doing great harm, as well as other participants who heard reports about good or bad events brought about solely by natural forces.33 John Wilson and Richard Petruska, drawing on the group effect literature, staged an ambiguous accident in the room next to where a subject was working, followed by a confederate crying out in pain that he had broken his foot. Helping behavior was evaluated on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being staying in your seat and saying nothing and 10 walking in the other room and offering assistance.34 Participants who were in the presence of an active model (who “looked up from his work and said, ‘Jesus, what was that?’ and walked into the control room and asked, ‘What happened? Are you okay? Let me help you!’ ”35) helped at a mean level of 9.05, whereas those with a passive model (who “remained in his seat and essentially ignored the crash”36) helped at a mean level of 6.21.37 Finally, to mention just one other study, Cashton Spivey and Steven Prentice-Dunn report that participants who saw a model donate money to an experimental assistant at a high level during twenty trials of a particular task, were themselves much more likely to do so at a comparatively high level.38 So these studies, and plenty of others besides them, provide good initial empirical support for this traditional strategy for improving one’s actions and character. It is commonly held that models can have the effect they do “through cognitive mechanisms such as . . . priming, self-perception, or changes in social outlook.”39 But we do not yet have a detailed account of how this process works. Without such an account, it is hard to evaluate the moral quality of the motivation that arises from exposure to models and to see whether it is compatible with virtuous motivation.40 So much more needs to be done in this area. Getting the Word Out. If there are a number of psychological processes that have important implications for moral behavior and that can prevent that behavior from having moral worth (or can even lead to the performance of morally forbidden actions), then a natural strategy to use in trying to become a more virtuous person is to first become better aware of and familiar with these processes. Once people recognize their presence, the thought is that we can then be more attuned to situations in which they might be activated and work to compensate for, correct, or counterbalance them.41 As Aristotle himself noted long ago, “We must also examine what we ourselves drift into easily. For different people have different natural tendencies

26 Christian B. Miller toward different goals, and we shall come to know our own tendencies from the pleasure or pain that arises in us. We must drag ourselves off in the contrary direction; for if we pull far away from error, as they do in straightening bent wood, we shall reach the intermediate condition.”42 To take an example of how this might go in practice, if we become aware of the processes responsible for the group effect on helping behavior, for instance, we might become more alert to the effect that nonresponding others can have in emergency situations, and so try to focus more on our moral principles and less on the fear, say, of what others might think if we tried to help. A similar idea would apply not just to our own morally relevant behavior but also to our attributions of traditional moral traits to others. If we better understand the processes that went into such attributions and the dangers that might result from making them too hastily, then we might be able to counter our natural inclinations or use information about how they work as a check on the judgments we make about the characters of other people.43 A study by Lee Ross and his colleagues provides some initial data that is suggestive of these proposals.44 Participants were presented with twenty-five cards, each containing a real and a fake suicide note, and were asked to pick out the real one. In the success condition, participants were told that they had gotten twenty-four correct answers, whereas participants in the failure condition were told they got only ten correct answers. Participants in each of these groups were then further divided into a no-debriefing condition, an outcome-debriefing condition (where they were told that they had actually been randomly assigned to the success or failure groups), and a processdebriefing condition (where they received this same outcome information but were also told about how impressions persevere and what processes and costs are associated with this perseverance).45 Finally, all participants were given a questionnaire and asked to estimate, among other things, how many questions the person thinks she would get right if faced with another, equally difficult set of twenty-five cards. Here were the results for this question:46 Table 1.3 Predicted Number of Correct Answers No Debriefing Success Failure Outcome Debriefing Success Failure Process Debriefing Success Failure

21.08 11.42 18.33 14.25 16.33 16.08

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 27 Note that with the outcome debriefing, even despite the experimenter stressing to the participant that her score “contained absolutely no information about the subject’s actual task performance,” still the participants continued to have a mistaken impression of their own abilities.47 It was only when they were told about the psychological processes that can produce such mistaken impressions in the process debriefing that it seems they were able to prevent this bias from working. The hope, then, is that similar education about the work of psychological biases and subconscious forces with respect to moral behavior can help correct for their operation. For instance, in two studies, Arthur Beaman and his colleagues had college students hear a social psychology lecture explaining the Latané and Darley model of group effects.48 They were subsequently presented with a staged emergency—a victim of a bicycle accident in the one case, and a man sprawled against a wall in the other. Helping in the presence of a nonresponsive confederate was 67% versus 27% for controls in the first study and 42.5% versus 25% in the second (even though in this study, the helping opportunity was two weeks later than the lecture).49 In a less rigorous study, Steven Samuels and William Casebeer contacted students from a social psychology class up to two years later, and for the question “Did learning about helping behaviour lead you to help in any situation in which you believe you would not have otherwise helped?” 72% answered positively.50 Once again, though, the data that is relevant to this strategy for becoming more virtuous is only at the most preliminary of stages.51

IV.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, I have tried to move the discussion of virtue and empirical psychology forward by arguing that the real challenge for ethical theories that appeal to traditional virtues, such as compassion or cruelty, is not where Harman and Doris claim it is to be found. Rather, it has to do with how psychologically realistic it is for people, as they are presently constituted, to come close to meeting the standards of virtue.52

NOTES 1. See Gilbert Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999): 315–331; “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 223–226; “Virtue Ethics without Character Traits,” in Fact and Value, ed. A. Byrne, R. Stalnaker, and R. Wedgewood (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 117–127; “No Character or Personality,” Business Ethics Quarterly 13 (2003): 87–94; John Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics,” Noûs 32 (1998): 504–530;

28 Christian B. Miller

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Maria Merritt, John Doris, and Gilbert Harman, “Character,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. J. Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 355–401. For my early attempt at criticism, see Christian Miller, “Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics,” The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 365–392. Indeed, in Christian Miller, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I provide much more empirical support for it than do Harman and Doris. Harman, “Moral Philosophy,” 319. Later, he writes that “Character based virtue ethics may offer a reasonable account of ordinary moral views. But to that extent, these ordinary views rest on error” (327). Doris, “Persons,” 520. Similarly, John Sabini and Maury Silver claim that “virtue ethics will be troubled if the data show that there aren’t many people who do (or are) what virtue ethics says they should (be)” (“Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued,” Ethics 115 (2005): 538). So too, Gopal Sreenivasan states that “I shall also assume that a theory of virtue should conform to certain standards of empirical psychological adequacy, standards which would be violated if next to no one actually turned out to have a character trait in the relevant sense” (“Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution,” Mind 111 (2002): 48). And again, that it is a “virtue-theoretic assumption that certain people actually have character traits in the relevant sense” (48; but see also page 57, 63). And here is Maria Merritt on situationism: “it seems to present a challenge to virtue ethics . . . undermining too our beliefs about the psychological nature of the virtues” (“Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000): 366). But none of them offers any explanation for why the virtue ethicist would need to be committed to any of these claims. See Doris, Lack of Character, chapter six. Michael DePaul was perhaps the first to develop this response to Harman and Doris in his “Character Traits, Virtues, and Vices: Are There None?” Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy. Philosophy Documentation Center 1 (1999): 150–153. See also Nafsika Athanassoulis, “A Response to Harman: Virtue Ethics and Character Traits,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 215–221; Sreenivasan, “Errors about Errors,” 57; Miller, “Social Psychology,” 2003; Rachana Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character,” Ethics 114 (2004): 466; and Kristján Kristjánsson, “Aristotelian Critique of Situationism,” Philosophy 83 (2008): 66–67, among many others. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985), 1179b11–16. Aristotle seems to locate most people somewhere between continence and incontinence when he writes that “[i]ncontinence and continence are concerned with what exceeds the state of most people; the continent person abides [by reason] more than most people are capable of doing, the incontinent person less” (1152a25–27). Cases of continence and incontinence would both be marked by psychological conflict of the relevant kind in the person in question, whereas both the virtues and vices are traditionally thought to not involve at least certain kinds of conflicts between judgments and motivation. Thanks to the editors for suggesting that I note this.

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 29

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

In his original 1998 paper, Doris anticipates the rarity response and seems to even concede that it is sufficient to block the alleged threat from psychology to virtue ethics. But then, in his view, new problems would emerge for the virtue ethicist who makes use of it. Given limitations of space, I cannot address these concerns here, but I do so in Miller, “Social Psychology,” 2003 and Character and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chapter eight. For discussion of psychological realism, see Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 32 and Kristjánsson, “Aristotelian Critique,” 60. Harman, “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” 224. Doris, Lack of Character, 110. And again in the chapter on ethical theory, he claims that the “present question concerns whether there are modes of moral training that could produce more in the way of sturdy good character than systematic observation presently reveals” (122, see also 123). For a more thorough discussion of relevant studies, see Miller, Moral Character. Dennis Regan, Margo Williams, and Sondra Sparling, “Voluntary Expiation of Guilt: A Field Experiment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 43. Regan, Williams, and Sparling, “Voluntary Expiation of Guilt,” 44. More precisely, according to this hypothesis, they were currently being influenced by guilty feelings they had incurred previously for a past action. This is not a case where they were being influenced by feelings of guilt avoidance in the present situation. Some might argue that guilt avoidance is not an egoistic motive and so is not incompatible with virtuous motivation, although I myself find such arguments implausible. Thanks to the editors for suggesting that I clarify these issues. M. Cunningham, J. Steinberg, and R. Grev, “Wanting to and Having to Help: Separate Motivations for Positive Mood and Guilt-Induced Helping,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (1980): 184. For more on the hypothesis and for reviews of the experimental support for it, see C. Daniel Batson, Altruism in Humans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For an overview, see Miller, “Social Psychology, Mood, and Helping: Mixed Results for Virtue Ethics.” The Journal of Ethics 13 (2009): 145–173. J. Weyant, “Effects of Mood States, Costs, and Benefits on Helping,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 1173. C. Zhong and K. Liljenquist, “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing,” Science 313 (2006): 1451–1452. Ibid., 1452. For more on the relationship between physical and moral cleanliness, see C. Zhong, B. Strejcek, and N. Sivanathan, “A Clean Self Can Render Hard Moral Judgment,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010): 859–862. This way of developing the realism challenge is a bit misleading in that Aristotelians will typically want to develop, not an account of how to improve adults as they already are today but an account of ways of raising children, which will set them on the path to becoming virtuous. By the time people first think about virtue, they have already been brought up by their families and society, and so already have a character in place that may face all kinds of obstacles to realizing the virtues. For them, moral improvement may still be possible, but attaining significant moral virtue might not be.

30 Christian B. Miller This is a reasonable point for virtue ethicists to make, but a revised version of the realism challenge would still remain. In particular, premise (4) could be restated as: (4*) Hence, advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics need to outline realistic and empirically informed ways for most human beings to not be raised so as to be disposed in the ways described by (i*) through (iv*) above, or if they have already developed these dispositions, to improve them so that they are transformed into virtues. So far they have not provided such an account.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

How, for instance, are children to be educated in such a way that over time they become disposed to reliably help or tell the truth or refrain from harming others, to reliably do these things for the appropriate motives, and to reliably not be significantly influenced by certain morally problematic enhancers and inhibitors? Thanks to the editors and to Julia Annas for relevant discussion here. As Owen Flanagan writes, “In addition to fantastic scenarios involving unrestricted license, and in addition to those everyday and well-understood situations in which the temptation to knavery is expectable, and thus a certain amount of knavery is too, there are subtle, mundane, and largely unnoticed forces that produce odd moral effects” (Varieties, 292). For an exception, see Steven Samuels and William Casebeer, “A Social Psychological View of Morality: Why Knowledge of Situational Influences on Behaviour Can Improve Character Development Practices,” Journal of Moral Education 34 (2005): 73–87, whose view will be mentioned in section three. For some brief remarks, see Merritt, “Virtue Ethics”; Kamtekar, “Situationism,” 487–489; Lorraine Besser-Jones, “Social Psychology Moral Character, and Moral Fallibility,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2008): 328–330; Edward Slingerland, “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics,” Ethics 121 (2011): 404–415; and Peter Railton, “Two Cheers for Virtue, or, Might Virtue be Habit Forming?” in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 1, ed. M. Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 295–329. Compare Justin Oakley, “Varieties of Virtue Ethics,” Ratio 9 (1996): 129 and Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103b29–30. See also Doris, “Persons,” 519; Merritt, “Virtue Ethics,” 370–371; and Sabini and Silver, “Lack of Character?” 536. For a more extensive discussion, see Miller, Character and Moral Psychology, chapter nine. Epictetus, The Handbook, trans. N. White (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 33, 12–13. For philosophical discussion of the importance of moral models and exemplars, see, for example, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1388a30–35; Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 35–36; Kamtekar, “Situationism,” 487; Kristjánsson, “An Aristotelian Critique,” 72; and Slingerland, “The Situationist Critique,” 411–412. S. Holloway, L. Tucker, and H. Hornstein, “The Effects of Social and Nonsocial Information on Interpersonal Behavior of Males: The News Makes News,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (1977): 514–522. J. Wilson and R. Petruska, “Motivation, Model Attributes, and Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (1984): 458–468.

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 31 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Ibid., 461. Ibid., 462. Ibid., 464. C. Spivey and S. Prentice-Dunn, “Assessing the Directionality of Deindividuated Behavior: Effects of Deindividuation, Modeling, and Private SelfConsciousness on Aggressive and Prosocial Responses,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 11 (1990): 387–403. S. Algoe and J. Haidt, “Witnessing Excellence in Action: The ‘Other-Praising’ Emotions of Elevation, Gratitude, and Admiration,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 4 (2009): 106. In addition, there is some evidence that modeling effects do not generalize beyond the situation or environment in which the modeling occurred, which would not be conducive to the cultivation of cross-situationally consistent moral virtues. See, for example, J. Grusec, P. Saas-Kortsaak, and Z. Simutis, “The Role of Example and Moral Exhortation in the Training of Altruism,” Child Development 49 (1978): 920–923; and J. Grusec and E. Redler, “Attribution, Reinforcement, and Altruism: A Developmental Analysis,” Developmental Psychology 16 (1980): 529. A fuller discussion of the moral quality of the motivation involving models would have to consider actual models and counterfactual models separately. As the editors reminded me, appealing to virtuous actual models for guidance might be a sign that one is improving morally and so is not yet virtuously motivated oneself. But perhaps there might not be any difficulty with actually being a virtuous person and still appealing to counterfactual models. Given limitations of space, these issues will have to be pursued another time. As Samuels and Casebeer argue, “effective deliberation is enhanced by knowing both how human beings tend to react in certain environments and what stimuli reliably activate those dispositions. . . . Once they are able to see what environmental factors have the potential to influence, they may be better prepared to make a decision based on their true beliefs and feelings” (“Social Psychological View,” 77). See also Merritt et al., “Character,” 388–389. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1109b2–8. For doubts about how successful this strategy will be, see M. O’Sullivan, “The Fundamental Attribution Error in Detecting Deception: The Boy-WhoCried-Wolf Effect,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29 (2003): 1325–1326 (but they do advance a positive suggestion that is very much in line with the approach—namely, to “develop more sophisticated dispositional descriptors” (1326)). For related discussion, see Samuels and Casebeer, “Social Psychological View,” 77–80. L. Ross, M. Lepper, and M. Hubbard, “Perseverance in Self-Perception and Social Perception: Biased Attributional Processes in the Debriefing Paradigm,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975): 880–892. Ibid., 885. Ibid., 886. Ibid. A. Beaman et al., “Increasing Helping Rates through Information Dissemination: Teaching Pays,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1978): 406–411. Ibid., 407–408, 410. Samuels and Casebeer, “Social Psychological View,” 80. But see also Z. Kunda and R. Nisbett, “The Psychometrics of Everyday Life,” Cognitive Psychology 18 (1986): 195–224, who found that even trained psychologists still badly overestimated the correlations between one person being more honest than another in one situation, and the same relation obtaining in the

32 Christian B. Miller next situation. And this was the case, even despite Walter Mischel “seated prominently in front of the room!” (Ibid., 210). Yet, they conclude that “it would be premature to be pessimistic about the possibility that training might improve people’s ability . . .” (222) and offer some suggestions for improvement (221–222). 51. For related discussion of this strategy, see Flanagan, Varieties, 314; Merritt et al., “Character,” 388–389; and especially Samuels and Casebeer, “Social Psychological.” 52. Thanks to Nancy Snow and Franco Trivigno for inviting me to be a part of this volume and to them and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments. For an expanded discussion of the issues raised in this paper, see Miller, Moral Character and Miller, Character and Moral Psychology. Support for this work was funded in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Foundation.

REFERENCES Algoe, S. and J. Haidt. “Witnessing Excellence in Action: The ‘Other-Praising’ Emotions of Elevation, Gratitude, and Admiration.” The Journal of Positive Psychology 4 (2009): 105–127. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by T. Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985. Athanassoulis, Nafsika. “A Response to Harman: Virtue Ethics and Character Traits.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 215–221. Batson, C. Daniel. Altruism in Humans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Beaman, A., P. Barnes, B. Klentz, and B. McQuirk. “Increasing Helping Rates through Information Dissemination: Teaching Pays.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1978): 406–411. Besser-Jones, Lorraine. “Social Psychology, Moral Character, and Moral Fallibility.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2008): 310–332. Cunningham, M., J. Steinberg, and R. Grev. “Wanting to and Having to Help: Separate Motivations for Positive Mood and Guilt-Induced Helping.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (1980): 181–192. DePaul, Michael. “Character Traits, Virtues, and Vices: Are There None?” Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy. Philosophy Documentation Center 1 (1999): 141–157. Doris, John. “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics.” Noûs 32 (1998): 504–530. ———. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Epictetus. The Handbook. Translated by N. White. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. Flanagan, Owen. Varieties of Moral Personality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Grusec, J. and E. Redler. “Attribution, Reinforcement, and Altruism: A Developmental Analysis.” Developmental Psychology 16 (1980): 525–534. Grusec, J., P. Saas-Kortsaak, and Z. Simutis. “The Role of Example and Moral Exhortation in the Training of Altruism.” Child Development 49 (1978): 920–923. Harman, Gilbert. “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999): 315–331.

Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics 33 ———. “The Nonexistence of Character Traits.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 223–226. ———. “Virtue Ethics without Character Traits.” In Fact and Value, edited by A. Byrne, R. Stalnaker, and R. Wedgewood, 117–127. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. ———. “No Character or Personality.” Business Ethics Quarterly 13 (2003): 87–94. Holloway, S., L. Tucker, and H. Hornstein. “The Effects of Social and Nonsocial Information on Interpersonal Behavior of Males: The News Makes News.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (1977): 514–522. Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kamtekar, Rachana. “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character.” Ethics 114 (2004): 458–491. Kristjánsson, Kristján. “An Aristotelian Critique of Situationism.” Philosophy 83 (2008): 55–76. Kunda, Z. and R. Nisbett. “The Psychometrics of Everyday Life.” Cognitive Psychology 18 (1986): 195–224. Merritt, Maria. “Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000): 365–383. Merritt, Maria, John Doris, and Gilbert Harman. “Character.” In The Moral Psychology Handbook, edited by J. Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group, 355–401. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Miller, Christian. “Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics.” The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 365–392. ———. “Social Psychology, Mood, and Helping: Mixed Results for Virtue Ethics.” The Journal of Ethics 13 (2009): 145–173. ———. 2013. Moral Character: An Empirical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Character and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oakley, Justin. “Varieties of Virtue Ethics.” Ratio 9 (1996): 128–152. O’Sullivan, M. “The Fundamental Attribution Error in Detecting Deception: The Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf Effect.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29 (2003): 1316–1327. Railton, Peter. “Two Cheers for Virtue, or, Might Virtue be Habit Forming?” In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 1, edited by M. Timmons, 295–329. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Regan, Dennis, Margo Williams, and Sondra Sparling. “Voluntary Expiation of Guilt: A Field Experiment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 42–45. Ross, L., M. Lepper, and M. Hubbard. “Perseverance in Self-Perception and Social Perception: Biased Attributional Processes in the Debriefing Paradigm.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975): 880–892. Sabini, J. and M. Silver. “Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued.” Ethics 115 (2005): 535–562. Samuels, Steven and William Casebeer. “A Social Psychological View of Morality: Why Knowledge of Situational Influences on Behaviour Can Improve Character Development Practices.” Journal of Moral Education 34 (2005): 73–87. Slingerland, Edward. “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics.” Ethics 121 (2011): 390–419. Spivey, C. and S. Prentice-Dunn. “Assessing the Directionality of Deindividuated Behavior: Effects of Deindividuation, Modeling, and Private Self-Consciousness on Aggressive and Prosocial Responses.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 11 (1990): 387–403.

34 Christian B. Miller Sreenivasan, Gopal. “Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution.” Mind 111 (2002): 47–68. Weyant, J. “Effects of Mood States, Costs, and Benefits on Helping.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 1169–1176. Wilson, J. and R. Petruska. “Motivation, Model Attributes, and Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (1984): 458–468. Zhong, C. and K. Liljenquist. “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing.” Science 313 (2006): 1451–1452. Zhong, C., B. Strejcek, and N. Sivanathan. “A Clean Self Can Render Hard Moral Judgment.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010): 859–862.

2

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons, No Reasons, and Reasons of Virtue1 Neera K. Badhwar

I.

INTRODUCTION

Aristotle holds that the moral virtues are enduring or stable integrated intellectual-emotional dispositions to deliberate, feel, and act rightly, that they are global or cross-situationally consistent, and that they are reciprocal or united. Guided by phronesis, or practical wisdom, the virtuous person always does the right thing for the right reason, in the right manner, at the right time, whatever the circumstances. The virtuous individual “will never do hateful and base actions,”2 because he acts “from a firm and unchanging state.”3 Indeed, virtuous activities are “more enduring even than our knowledge of the sciences.”4 Contemporary virtue ethicists are by and large agreed that actual virtue— virtue as instantiated in human beings—falls short of the ideal described here. This, however, is not a problem if we understand that the ideal in the texts is just that: an ideal to aspire to, even if no one can ever reach it.5 Shane Drefcinski has argued that Aristotle gives us another, more realistic picture of virtue in the NE and Politics, alongside the picture of perfect virtue as an ideal to aspire to.6 Since the text sometimes presents virtue as a state of perfection, and sometimes as a state of excellence-but-not-perfection, I agree with Drefcinski that Aristotle presents us with two pictures of virtue, ideal and actual, rather than with an entirely idealistic or entirely realistic picture.7 The arguments against globalism, unity, and stability over an entire lifetime have been thoroughly hashed, so I will not spend much time on them. My focus will be the requirement of right reason and the challenge it faces. The challenge, in brief, is that in many morally significant situations, most of us act for reasons we are unaware of—or for no reason at all. If we do the right thing, it is often for the wrong reason. If we do the wrong thing, it is often because features of our situation trigger automatic cognitive processes that bypass intentional control.8 Our lack of awareness of our real reasons for, or causes of, our behavior, challenges the idea that we are in rational control of our actions and that most of us have any genuine virtues. This, say the critics, makes virtue ethics ‘empirically inadequate.’ But the requirement that the agent act for the right reason and be in rational control of her

36 Neera K. Badhwar actions is a requirement of almost every ethical theory: Kantian as well as rule-, motive-, virtue-, and even some versions of act-, consequentialist theories. So if it turns out that most actions, even right actions, are unwittingly done for the wrong reason, or no reason, then every ethical theory is empirically inadequate and must be modified. I will argue that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics can best meet the challenge from descriptive psychology because it is committed to basing its requirements on human nature. If some of its requirements are beyond our capacities, then those requirements have no place in the theory, except as part of a regulative ideal. A good life for virtue ethics is, in some sense, a fulfillment of human nature. By contrast, Immanuel Kant’s theory calls for a purity of motive that depth psychology has shown to be impossible. And although most consequentialist theories can trim their requirements in light of our psychological capacities, the imperative to do so comes not from any theoretical commitment to psychological realism but from the pragmatic imperative to offer a theory that most people can follow. Too often, however, the critics’ claim that people unwittingly act for the wrong reason or no reason is itself made without good reason, because the evidence supports alternative interpretations that are compatible with the agent acting for the right reason. Or so I will argue. In Section II, I provide an overview of Aristotle’s conceptions of ideal and actual virtue in the NE and Politics and contemporary virtue ethicists’ views of virtue as a less-than-perfect excellence. In Sections III and IV, I describe the experiments that lead situationist critics to argue that the virtue ethical model of rational deliberation is mistaken or that most of us don’t have genuine virtues, and I challenge some of their interpretations of the experiments. II.

VIRTUE: IDEAL AND ACTUAL

(i)

Cross-Situational Consistency and the Unity of Virtue

In NE Bk. VI, Aristotle argues that each virtue requires phronesis, that phronesis is one, and that phronesis entails all the virtues.9 Hence, one virtue entails all the virtues. For example, if Generoso is generous, he must also be just, courageous, honest, and so on. This is the unity of virtue doctrine. The unity thesis in this pure form has long been rejected by many philosophers, including those who accept Aristotle’s conception of virtue as consisting of both phronesis and emotional and action dispositions to act for the right reason in the right way at the right time.10 Common sense concurs because, after all, ‘Aren’t there people who are generous but not very courageous?’ Implicit in the argument for the unity doctrine is the claim that the virtues, like phronesis, are global or cross-situationally consistent. It is this assumption, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that is the truly problematic one because it is inconsistent with recognition of our epistemic and emotional limitations vis-à-vis the high bar set by virtue ethics.11 Globalism claims that phronesis

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 37 is one or global in the sense that we cannot have it in some areas of our lives and not others. Since phronesis entails each of the virtues, and each of the virtues entails phronesis, it follows that each virtue is also global or cross-situationally consistent. For example, if Generoso is generous towards his students, gladly giving freely and appropriately of his time to his students, he must also be generous towards his siblings, parents, children, coworkers, and so on, insofar as giving them freely of his time (or money, or praise) is appropriate. (Here and throughout I ignore Aristotle’s thesis of the proper spheres of the virtues: for example, that generosity concerns only wealth, mild-temperedness concerns only unjustified slights, and so on.) If Justine is just in the courtroom, she must also be just in the classroom. Both history and everyday observation of human nature and behavior give the lie to this globalist doctrine, and social and cognitive psychology provide experimental evidence against it.12 We are familiar with figures famous for their unwavering dedication to noble causes at great cost to themselves— along with surprising character flaws in their lives as husbands or fathers. We also all know that our fantastic spouse or parents or children or siblings (and maybe even our own selves) are not paragons of virtue. A few rare individuals may have what virtue requires in every aspect of their everyday lives: the self-understanding and understanding of others that is necessary for a sure grasp of the true worth of things, the motivation to consistently act on this understanding easily and with pleasure, and the fine sensitivity to particulars necessary for discerning what is required in a given situation. But even these rare individuals are bound to be partisans of at least some false theories about the nature of government, law, free markets, or drugs, theories that ensure that many of their public actions, such as teaching or writing about political, legal, or economic matters, engaging in political discourse, voting, aiding this or that cause, serving on a jury, and so forth, are contrary to virtue—or would be contrary to virtue if they were to engage in them. Interestingly, even Aristotle seems to reject globalism at NE 1115a 20–22, where he states that some people who are cowards in war nevertheless face the prospect of monetary loss with confidence, as required by courage. Admittedly, he goes on to say that such people are courageous only “by similarity” with the brave in war, who are the truly brave, because bravery should be defined with reference to the “greatest and finest danger,” and only war is such a danger because it threatens death, is fought for a good cause, and allows the brave to use their strength.13 But this argument is not very persuasive, since facing the fear of financial ruin (or, for that matter, other dangers) well also meets these criteria. So if Aristotle accepts that the virtue in question is bravery proper, his view implies that bravery (and thus phronesis) is not global because some brave-in-money-matters individuals are cowardly on the battlefield. If he insists that the virtue in question isn’t really bravery, we reach the same conclusion about phronesis not being global, since the virtuous-in-money-matters individual must have phronesis

38 Neera K. Badhwar in money matters but not on the battlefield.14 And both readings entail that, if the virtues are united, they are united only within certain spheres, such that the virtuous-in-money-matters but cowardly-on-the-battlefield individual has all the other virtues concerned with money, but none concerned with the battlefield.15 Contemporary virtue ethicists generally accept that globalism as a thesis about actual virtue and phronesis—as opposed to ideal virtue and phronesis— has been defeated. The defeat of globalism, however, does not spell the defeat of virtue ethics. Even if dispositions are not global, if people exhibit reliable patterns in their attitudes and behavior, if their deliberative, emotional, and behavioral responses to people and events they encounter daily in pursuit of their goals are usually consistent and predictable, they have dispositions, and if those goals and dispositions are praiseworthy, they have virtues.16 For example, if Eidos is kind in most important everyday contexts but surprisingly unkind in a few, she is still pretty kind. To use a metaphor: if the strands in a skein of multicolored wool are mostly red, then the skein itself is pretty red, even if it contains many black, white, and green strands. This “aggregative solution,” first endorsed for personality traits by social and personality psychologists such as Walter Mischel and Seymour Epstein, works just as well for character traits.17

(ii)

Ideal Virtue and the Power of the Situation

The question of perfection can come up even if people’s virtues don’t extend over all important contexts. Do context-specific virtues require contextspecific perfection, or are they compatible with sometimes doing the wrong thing, or the right thing for the wrong reason? Can the actions they lead to be virtuous even if motivation sometimes lags, one’s manner is a little off, or the timing is not quite opportune? The common sense answer to these questions is ‘Yes.’ Eidos’s kindness as a teacher and mother is genuine kindness, even if she is sometimes uncharacteristically unkind or less than wholeheartedly kind. And common sense is right here since, after all, we don’t expect perfection in any other human skill or achievement. Some philosophers also argue that a trait is a virtue so long as it is good enough, or satis.18 Indeed, in the following passages, Aristotle himself offers a ‘good enough’ conception of virtue and virtuous action. One of Aristotle’s reasons for this more realistic conception of virtue is epistemic. He argues that it is hard to say exactly what the right thing to do is in each case; hence, even the virtuous individual can find it hard to always discern the mean.19 Thus, although the generous person takes care of his own property and gives the right amount for the right reason with pleasure, he sometimes “deviates from what is fine and right” and, to his own regret, gives too much.20 He sometimes deviates in the other direction as well, failing to spend “what it was right to spend” and is “more grieved” by this than by the opposite mistake.21 Likewise, although the good-tempered

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 39 or mild person is disposed to be “angry at the right things and toward the right people . . . in the right way, at the right time, and for the right length of time,” he sometimes errs “in the direction of deficiency, since [he] . . . is ready to pardon, not eager to exact a penalty.”22 Some deviations from perfect virtue, then, are unavoidable, given the complexity of situations and the multifaceted nature of virtuous responses. Precisely because they are unavoidable, however, these deviations are not very serious. But Aristotle also makes exceptions for situations that “overstrain human nature.”23 For example, a man may succumb to the tyrant’s demand to do something shameful in order to avoid grievous harm to his family.24 In such situations, people are either praised or excused for their shameful action, even though it was avoidable.25 In Politics 1286b 27, Aristotle goes further, excusing a (virtuous) king who allows his unfit son to inherit his throne because, he claims, denying one’s son the throne is too much to ask of a human being. Some of us might question Aristotle’s claim that the right action in the latter situation would be too much to ask of a person. The point, however, is that Aristotle realizes that there are limits to what human beings can be expected to do, and that certain situations test these limits and render people’s wrong actions excusable. But Aristotle makes even more surprising concessions to the frailties of human nature and the power of the situation: he allows that in situations of great temptation or passion, even a virtuous man can defraud another or commit adultery without losing his virtue.26 Here, Aristotle’s standards are rather lower than those of contemporary critics who sometimes suggest that just one unjust act is enough to defeat someone’s claim to justice.27 Of course, some singular acts of injustice are enough. For example, no one would argue that murdering someone in order to inherit her fortune just once is compatible with being a just or mostly just person.28 What’s important here, however, is that Aristotle is aware that certain situations can lead even a virtuous person astray, and he regards this as being consistent with the virtuous person’s continuing to be virtuous— unless and until, of course, his vicious actions become a theme of his life. This last is a real possibility if the corrupting situation lasts long enough. A well-known situation of this kind is political power unconstrained by the rule of law, “for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts the minds of rulers, even when they are the best of men.”29 So although virtue is enduring, it is not immune to the influence of situational factors and the passions they evoke: A virtuous man can become vicious if he remains in a corrupting situation. If asked what cognitive-affective processes lead to this outcome, Aristotle would probably reply that human beings tend to be tempted by power and that when they are surrounded by sycophants, it is easy for them to believe that they are acting in the best interest of the public. Over time, they lose all critical insight and start thinking that their tyrannical policies and actions are justified. Such blindness, indeed, is the very essence of the vicious man, who acts viciously on principle. Contemporary virtue ethicists,

40 Neera K. Badhwar aware of the many ways our minds can trick us, can also cite self-deception and confirmation bias: a refusal to pay attention to disturbing truths, rationalizing our bad actions as done for good reasons, avoiding those who see us as we are in all our unflattering unloveliness and seeking those who don’t in order to preserve our shining conception of ourselves, and so forth. All these are ways in which we human beings are alike. Where we differ is in what we do about these tendencies when we become aware of them. Whereas some people try to resist them by changing their actions and ways of thinking, others say, in effect, ‘Well then, so be it, I’m human after all.’ How does the model of the mind emerging from cognitive science complicate this picture, according to situationist philosophers? By adding that we often act—and cannot help acting—contrary to our reflectively held values, for reasons we are unaware of, or for no reason at all. In innumerable everyday situations, most people behave alike, and predictably so, thanks to “depersonalized response tendencies” that resist or bypass “intentional direction.”30 Such “moral dissociation” between values and behavior show the limits of practical rationality and challenge the image of the (virtuous) agent as someone who typically knows what he is doing and why. In the next section, I will analyze and evaluate these claims.

III.

MORAL DISSOCIATION: MOODY HELPERS AND UNHELPFUL BYSTANDERS

The critics make their case by focusing on the subliminal influences on our attention that prevent us from acting in other-regarding ways. They describe well-replicated experiments that show the influence of common situational factors on morally significant behavior and the subjects’ lack of introspective access to their influence. One such set of experiments concerns the effect of ambient smells and noises and of good or bad moods.

(i)

Moods and Other Non-Reasons

A number of studies have shown that people are more helpful when their environment is pleasant and less helpful when it is unpleasant.31 What makes their environment pleasant or unpleasant can be as trivial as the smell of freshly baked bread or the noise of a loud (85 dB) lawnmower, respectively. In one experiment, whereas 80% of people helped a man who seemed to be injured pick up his books, only 15% did so in the presence of a lawnmower. Noise levels above 80 dB significantly affect people’s behavior. More seriously, someone in an aggressive mood is likely to be more aggressive if subjected to a loud noise. Again, many studies have found that people are far more helpful when they are in a good mood than in a sad or depressed mood.32 Similarly, happy people are more likely to notice and respond to another’s need,33 a fact noted by philosophers as far apart as Kant

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 41 and Nietzsche. Embarrassment or guilt can also lead an individual to be more helpful. I am in no position to verify these claims by studying all the experiments myself, but they seem plausible enough. My task is simply to evaluate the philosophical arguments made on their basis. The first point to note is the problem of the forgotten minority. The economist William Graham Sumner spoke of the forgotten man, the man in the background whose interests are never considered when some policy is framed to benefit a vocal interest group. The forgotten minority in situationist critiques are those whose actions and attitudes are never or barely considered in framing the critique. These are the individuals who manage to do the helpful or other virtuous action notwithstanding the absence of pleasant fragrances, the presence of a 85dB lawnmower, and so on. Most situationists ignore them as though they are irrelevant to the issue of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics, even though they are the ones most likely to have the (nonglobal) virtues being tested. Be that as it may, since it is possible even for someone who is kind in most important contexts to sometimes fail to act kindly in those very contexts, perhaps these experiments can teach us something about the situational factors and human tendencies responsible for such failures. Situationists argue that the influence of ambient smells and noises and moods on attention and action are problematic because they are morally irrelevant, yet “hugely and secretly influential” in how we think, feel, and act.34 They are secretly influential because when asked why they helped, people are unlikely to cite the smell of baked bread, a good mood, or a bad conscience, showing that they have little introspective access to the actual causes of their actions. They are morally irrelevant because kind behavior is not evidence of kindness if prompted by the smell of freshly baked bread, a good mood, or a bad conscience. Unlike temptations or bad reasons, Mark Alfano argues, these factors give no reason at all, hence they cannot be accommodated by virtue ethicists’ moral psychology.35 Accordingly, they present a bigger challenge to virtue ethics than other situational features. Is it, however, accurate to say that those who help do so because of the pleasant smells, positive moods, or bad conscience, instead of because someone needs help and helping them in that situation is appropriate? Clearly, the smells or positive moods or bad conscience play a causal role in the behavior of most subjects (but remember, again, not all). But why suppose that they supplant rather than supplement the standing reasons that they, like most people, have to help people in need, when helping them would not be a heavy burden or an obstacle to their own legitimate ends? Isn’t it possible that the smells or the good mood merely make it easier to act on these standing reasons? It might be countered that someone who is genuinely kind doesn’t need an extraneous factor to make it easier to act kindly: the reason of kindness is sufficient. But if the reason that pleasant smells or good moods lead to more helping behavior is that they enable people to notice occasions for helping

42 Neera K. Badhwar and open them to new experiences, as many psychologists believe, then they are among the conditions that form the causal background of most people’s perceptions and actions, along with good light, well-functioning senses, and the ability to match means to ends.36 The fact that we were not aware until recently of how much effect they have on us does not change this fact. Suppose, however, that their role in helping behavior is motivational: pleasant smells lead to a good mood, and a good mood causes the desire to help through a sense of optimism and the triggering of positive memories.37 Is it accurate to say, as Christian Miller does, that kindly behavior is just a “causal byproduct” of these cognitive changes?38 This seems like an odd view. If Eidos helps P because P needs help, she helps for the right reason, even if she would not have desired to help had her mood been bad or neutral. The fact that one part of the causal history of Eidos’s desire to help P at time t does not involve P does not vitiate this fact. Indeed, having a stronger-than-usual desire to help when one is in a good mood is evidence of a benevolent outlook on life. It is a common experience that when we feel happy, we want to spread happiness around; we want others to share in our good fortune, for their sake. This reason, unfortunately, is never mentioned by critics. So long as a preexisting good mood is not a sine qua non of Eidos’s kind acts, so long as she is sufficiently helpful for other people’s own sake even when her mood is neutral or bad, her increased desire to help others for their sake when she’s happy is evidence of her kind character. Again, it may be true that sometimes Eidos helps others only because helping them enables her to maintain her good mood.39 But before we conclude that this shows that she doesn’t have the trait of kindness, even partially and imperfectly, we would have to know about her behavior and attitudes not only in other mood experiments, but also at home, in her neighborhood, and in her social life. Indeed, just expanding our horizons enough to take in the bystander experiments changes the picture. For in these, the vast majority of people help strangers when they are alone and the situation is not too dangerous.40 Hence, the mere fact that most people are more likely to act in a kindly fashion when they are in a good mood than in a neutral or unhappy mood (or when they feel guilty than when they don’t), does not show that they have no genuine kindness. The people who have no genuine kindness are those who don’t care a fig about others when they are on top of the world, feeling invulnerable, or those who can maintain a good mood only by ignoring or harming others. A common mistake of those who take these situational and mood studies to show that people have no genuine kindness is that they assume that kindness requires helping every person with a legitimate need whenever the cost of doing so is small.41 What they overlook is that the policy of doing so would result in a heavy cost. Even if we never ventured outside, kindness understood thus would chain us to our desks for hours every day as we responded to worthy appeals for help by mail, e-mail, or telephone—even if each appeal cost only a fleeting minute or five. Kindness does not require

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 43 us to be forever-on-duty soldiers at the service of humanity, as some consequentialist theories would have it. One of the features that makes neoAristotelian virtue ethics psychologically realistic is that it recognizes that we have a right to live our own lives. Although some critics claim to recognize this, they seem to forget it when they infer from the literature just reviewed that most people aren’t genuinely kind. The objection that genuine kindness can’t be prevented from operating by a noisy lawnmower or a depressed mood merits a similar response. Being distracted by the noise of a loud lawnmower and wanting to escape it, instead of noticing who needs help picking up books, doesn’t seem any different from not noticing who needs help when one has a severe headache, or is absorbed in tending to one’s toddler. Nor does any of this seem more momentous than not being able to concentrate on one’s work in the presence of loud noises, severe headaches, or clamorous toddlers. Noisy lawnmowers that prevent kind acts simply prove, once again, that we are physical beings. As for depressed moods, these are unhappy moods in which nothing seems worth doing, either for others or for oneself. Hence, not being helpful when depressed doesn’t seem like a moral failing—unless the depression itself is due to some moral failing, or unless one wallows in it. Even Kant acknowledges the difficulty of acting dutifully when we are unhappy—which is why, he thinks, we have an ‘indirect’ duty to be happy. Situational non-reasons, then, leave virtue ethics unscathed. Once we become aware of them, however, virtue ethics requires us to welcome their positive influence and try to withstand their negative influence.

(ii)

Bystander Effects

Since 1968, when John Darley and Bibb Latané did their first study of the bystander effect, hundreds of experiments, both field and laboratory, have shown that, more often than not, as the number of bystanders in an emergency situation increases, the chances of anyone helping decreases.42 This is especially so when the situation is dangerous or ambiguous.43 Various psychological processes have been proposed as explanations:44 • ‘I’m no more responsible than anyone else,’ or diffusion of responsibility. • ‘What if I make a fool of myself?’ or evaluation apprehension/social influence. • ‘No one else seems to think it’s dangerous, so it isn’t dangerous,’ or pluralistic ignorance/audience inhibition. The more ambiguous the situation, the more often this happens, since each individual relies on the others for cues to disambiguate it, with the result that no one does anything, thus unintentionally signaling to the others that nothing needs doing. To these explanations I add one more of my own: • ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth,’ or I’ll just make things worse. My evidence that this is a common explanation for bystander effects is

44 Neera K. Badhwar that (i) it is a widely and explicitly known reason for not helping in many well-known everyday settings, including, of course, a crowded kitchen; (ii) before I read about the bystander effect, it was a factor in my own non-helping behavior in emergencies when there were other people closer to the event, and thus in a better position to help; and (iii) social psychology has taught me that I’m not unique. Maria Merritt et al. cite the cognitive processes that explain the bystander effect as examples of largely automatic processes to which people have little or no introspective access.45 This claim is based on Latané and Darley’s report that not one of their subjects acknowledged that their failure to help had anything to do with the presence of other people—even after they were shown evidence for the connection.46 This nonacknowledgment is extremely odd because the striking thing about the factors cited above is that they are highly intuitive. Moreover, only two of these factors are embarrassing to the subjects. One is the thought, ‘I’m no more responsible than anyone else,’ if the rest of this thought is, ‘so no one can blame me, and that’s what matters.’ The other is, ‘What if I make a fool of myself?’ Both express the wrong priorities (caring more about being blamed by others, or seen as a fool by them, than about the individual who seems to be in need). In addition, the former shows indifference to the well-being of the individual in need and the latter shows cowardice. Latané and Darley do not tell us what reasons their subjects provided for not helping, but there seems to be no alternative to the list of possible explanations noted above that isn’t (more) unflattering to the subjects. What, after all, could it be? ‘I couldn’t be bothered?’ ‘I had better things to do with my time?’ ‘I didn’t want to get involved?’ ‘I like to see people suffer?’ At any rate, it would be hasty to conclude from the fact that people can’t always tell their reasons for their actions on the spot that they can’t access them, period. Sometimes knowing one’s reasons takes time. How should we evaluate the rational and moral status of the other possible explanations for not helping: thinking that the situation is not dangerous because no one else seems to think it’s dangerous, and the desire to not be the cook who spoils the broth? The striking thing about these explanations is that although they make immediate sense, they stop short of being the logical conclusions to draw from the data. The logical conclusion in each case is: ‘Others might be reasoning the same way and not helping for the same reason, so I better find out if my help is needed.’ But whereas doing nothing to help someone in dire need at only a small cost to oneself because of a mistake in reasoning can’t be kind, it is surely excusable. It would be inexcusable only if it was due to bad motives or traits. These include akrasia (we know we ought to help because we can without great risk to ourselves and are better positioned to help than the other people present, but we’re getting late for that movie), bad principles (thinking that we have no responsibility to strangers), indifference to others’ weal or woe, a generalized malice

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 45 (wanting others to suffer), deceiving ourselves into thinking that it’s too risky (when it isn’t) or ambiguous (when it’s perfectly clear), or some other such rationalizing maneuver to get ourselves off the hook. And no one who already knows about the bystander effect can be an innocent bystander in a situation in which someone is in apparent need of help and there are others around who might or might not help. In the next section, I turn to the most disturbing experiment in social psychology, an experiment that shows that most of us are highly limited in our virtues.

IV.

MORAL DISSOCIATION: OBEDIENCE IN STANLEY MILGRAM’S EXPERIMENTS

Before Milgram conducted his pilot experiment, he described the experiment to 110 people—faculty, students, psychiatrists, and others—and asked them how many would go all the way.47 One in a thousand, said the psychiatrists.48 The results shocked Milgram himself. In Experiments 2, 5, and 8, in which the experimenter is in the same room as the subject and the ‘learner’ (a confederate) can be heard but not seen, 65% of subjects proceed, unwillingly, even agonizingly, to shock a screaming, innocent individual, ostensibly to death, on the orders of the experimenter.49 Milgram provides several explanations for this, including the absence of, and distance from, the learner,50 the physical presence of the experimenter,51 the status of the experimenter, and the loss of a sense of agency and responsibility. In several permutations on Experiment 2, Milgram changed one of the first three factors to test for its importance in explaining the subjects’ obedience (Experiments 3, 4, 7, 14). Each of these conditions reduced obedience, but only in Experiment 14 did every subject stop as soon as the learner shouted at him to stop—for the learner was the experimenter himself, and the one who gave the orders was ostensibly a subject.52 The exalted status of the experimenter outweighed the fact that he was physically absent from the room, whereas the relatively lowly status of the confederate outweighed the fact that he was present in the room. Yet when asked later, none of the subjects thought that the experimenter’s status had anything to do with their behavior.53 In Experiment 16, one experimenter took the role of learner again while another gave the orders. Here, the physical absence of one and the presence of the other broke the tie between their equal status: 65% continued to the end, just like in the baseline experiments.54 What should we conclude from these facts? That the vast majority of people can be led to behave egregiously when ordered to by someone they regard as a trustworthy authority figure, if he’s looking over their shoulder.55 According to Milgram, the presence of the experimenter acts like a physical force on the subject. A great deal of empirical work since Milgram published his studies reportedly supports his view that the experimenter’s physical

46 Neera K. Badhwar presence and status were important factors in obedience.56 Merritt et al. use this work as well as work on empathy and perspective-sharing to argue that subjects’ other-oriented attention is misdirected by these features. An emotional response to someone in pain can lead either to an understanding of his point of view and empathy for him or to a self-focused personal distress and a desire to escape the situation.57 Which it will become—empathy for the target or concern for oneself—depends on whether or not the subject (believes that she) shares the target’s perspective, such as his values, interests, or background.58 The fact that the subjects have volunteered to participate in an experiment makes them partial to the experimenter’s perspective. Further, as the experimenter’s explanation of the procedure repeatedly uses the words “punishment” and “learning,” semantic priming may also be playing an unconscious part in influencing the subjects.59 Consequently, the subjects’ other-oriented attention is directed toward the experimenter instead of the learner. They seek to please the experimenter, who insists that the shocks are not dangerous and that the experiment requires them to continue. Their emotional response to the learner’s screams fails to lead to empathy for him and remains a self-focused personal distress and a desire to escape the situation.60 Hence, although most of the subjects find it unnerving to continue to shock the learner, they cannot stop so long as the individual with authority standing next to them doesn’t “permit” it. Merritt et al. hypothesize that (like priming) perspective-sharing is an automatic mediating cognitive factor that bypasses people’s intentional control and leads to behavior that is incongruous with their reflectively endorsed values.61 Hence, the highly integrated model of deliberation defended by Aristotelian theories must be modified.62 That a trusted authority figure has the power to define the situation for most people and get them to (more-or-less) accept his perspective and do his bidding against their will, without even threatening them with consequences, is an important insight. Once stated, however, we can see its roots in familiar facts of human life. Most of us started life with implicit trust in our parents and teachers, a trust that led us to obey them even when we couldn’t understand why we should obey them. Most of us are also familiar with the fact that some people, especially authority figures, have an imposing presence, a presence that makes it hard to disobey or even contradict them. Also intuitive is the finding that when people feel that they have the same values (or background or interests) as another person, or when they are made to feel like valued participants in an important enterprise, as they are in the Milgram experiments, their sympathies and concerns get directed towards that person. Other factors that every model of deliberation, whether Aristotelian or not, must take into account include our implicit egoistic and in-group biases, our tendency for self-deception, and the factor that Milgram himself regards as crucial in explaining the experimental results: the tendency for people in a subordinate position to see themselves as mere instruments of

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 47 the authority figure instead of as responsible agents.63 (Surprisingly, this and self-deception rarely get discussed in the situationist literature.) But how exactly should we understand the influence of these tendencies or biases on us? Here are two possibilities suggested by Merritt et al.64 (i) These automatic influences on social cognition, emotion, and behavior spell the bed rock of human nature in the sense that no amount of virtue and phronesis, and no amount of self-awareness or self-control, can break through them and thwart their pernicious influence. They are the wild, untamable parts of human nature that can trip us at any time. This claim is easily falsified by pointing to the 35%+ defiant subjects in Experiments 2, 5, and 8. Even more importantly, in Experiments 2 and 8, one subject stopped at 135 volts, before the learner demanded to be released, and nine stopped at 150 volts, when the learner made that demand. In Experiment 5, in which the learner claimed to have a slight heart condition, one subject stopped at 90 volts, and six stopped at 150 volts. These seventeen subjects stopped as soon as they had clear moral reason to stop. Even though the other defiant subjects were taken unawares to some extent, sixteen stopped before or at 300 volts, when the learner screamed that he was not going to answer any more questions.65 Further, many defiant subjects gave the right reason for stopping: they were not going to hurt someone against his will just for the sake of an experiment. Had this value been uppermost in the obedient subjects’ minds during the experiment, and had they trusted their own judgment more, they would not have obeyed either. In light of the behavior and attitudes of the defiant subjects in these experiments, there is no reason to think that everyone in Experiment 14, in which the experimenter becomes the learner, was motivated only or primarily by the status of the learner, or that everyone was ignorant of his own reasons for stopping. (ii) These factors can take us unawares and lead us to misconstrue situations and to act in contrary-to-virtue ways, to a greater or lesser degree. This is consistent with the facts, both experimental and nonexperimental. It has been shown repeatedly that automatic cognitive-affective processes (ACPs) are not entirely involuntary or unconscious, nor controlled processes entirely intended or fully conscious.66 This explains how seventeen subjects could stop at or before 150 volts in Experiments 2, 5, and 8. Although we can’t know for certain that they would have defied a trusted religious or political authority’s seemingly heinous orders, we have excellent reason to think that they would have. To a greater degree than anyone else, they based their decisions on the objective evidence instead of the experimenter’s judgment. Whatever tendencies they had to obey the experimenter, seeing themselves as his instruments, with no responsibility for their actions, whatever

48 Neera K. Badhwar tendencies they had to agree with his perspective thanks to the experimental set-up and the semantic priming in his explanation of the procedure, they managed to do the right thing at the very first opportunity, refusing to be budged by the experimenter’s repeated prods to continue. The ACPs that led most subjects astray in the experiments or that delayed the right response in the other defiant subjects had no influence on these few. Perhaps they were just having a good day because they had run across and taken to heart Chico Marx’s “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” But isn’t it more likely that their actions were due to their (nonglobal) virtues of justice, courage, compassion, independent-mindedness, and integrity? If character can render certain automatic tendencies powerless or weak, it can also render them powerful. In postexperimental interviews with the subjects in Experiment 5, the experimenter asked what level of shock subjects would be willing to accept for themselves.67 Only seven were willing to accept 450 volts. Milgram found similar or worse results in other postexperimental interviews when this question was asked.68 These subjects clearly did not act on the principle that “such as that is for me, so it is for him, nothing less.”69 The ‘learner’ became a mere shadow-figure. Some of the obedient subjects also formed a kind of alliance with the experimenter against the learner, whom they saw as stupid or stubborn. And some asked during the experiment who would be held responsible if something happened to the learner. After being assured that only the experimenter would be held responsible, they continued with the experiment. During interviews after Experiments 1–4, many of the obedient subjects stated that they did what they did only because they were “helpless,” thanks to the experimenter’s commands. When the experimenter asked how much responsibility they assigned to themselves, to the experimenter, and to the learner, the fifty-seven obedient subjects taken as a group assigned only 36% responsibility to themselves, 38% responsibility to the experimenter, and 25% to the learner.70 By contrast, the sixty-one defiant subjects taken as a group accepted the lion’s share of the responsibility. Perhaps the obedient subjects were just having a bad day. But isn’t it possible that the actions of at least some of them were due to akrasia, or pusillanimity71 and a weak sense of justice and compassion? Evidence from other experiments also shows that character makes a difference to the influence of situational factors and the ACPs they trigger. Thus, several experiments have shown that subjects who have the chronically accessible trait concepts, honest and dishonest, are able to reliably distinguish between honest and dishonest behaviors under conditions that do not allow conscious processing of the behaviors.72 In other words, those who take honesty and dishonesty seriously enough to habitually evaluate behaviors in these terms have the discernment to perceive and correctly evaluate behaviors as honest or dishonest—even when their attention is fully absorbed by a different task.73 Other research has shown that people who have internalized norms of fairness and equality have lower levels of

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 49 74

prejudice, both implicit and explicit, and that greater understanding of the target of prejudice, greater awareness of their own implicit prejudice, and more positive emotions towards the target of prejudice can reduce people’s implicit prejudice.75 To a virtue ethicist, all this is welcome confirmation of one of her basic premises: through practice, virtue can become second nature, and to the extent that it does, we can respond appropriately to a variety of situations in the dynamic, complex world in which we live. Human nature in itself is neither good nor bad. Our innate biases and susceptibilities to various situational factors are simply part of the structure of our cognitive and affective machinery. It’s what we—and our upbringing and moral luck—make of them that is good or bad. Thus, our egoism can be manifested primarily in not wanting to be blamed for harming others—or primarily in not wanting to harm others and failing in our own eyes. Our in-group biases can be manifested in denigrating members of out-groups just because they are members of out-groups—or simply in building and maintaining friendships and community with those who share our values. Unusual situations pose subtle and unexpected deliberative and motivational challenges. It is in these situations that, contrary to the advice of some situationists, we most need to remind ourselves of our values. If, for all our care, we think that certain situations will test our limits, phronesis tells us to either avoid those situations in favor of situations more conducive to virtue—or seek help to tie us to the proverbial mast. No amount of care, however, and no theory, can guarantee perfect virtue, because self-knowledge, knowledge of the world, and emotional and deliberative habituation is always imperfect.

NOTES 1. Thanks to Nancy Snow and Franco Trivigno for their comments on an earlier draft. 2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 1100b34–1101a1. All references to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are to the Irwin translation. 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1105a35. 4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100b13–15. 5. See Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Annas, Intelligent Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Daniel C. Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). 6. Shane Drefcinski, “Aristotle’s Fallible Phronimos,” Ancient Philosophy 16 (1996): 139–154. 7. Howard Curzer in “How Good People Do Bad Things: Aristotle on the Misdeeds of the Virtuous,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 28 (2005): 233–256. 8. Maria W. Merritt, John M. Doris, Gilbert Harman, and The Moral Psychology Research Group, “Character,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. John Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group (New York: Oxford

50 Neera K. Badhwar

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

University Press, 2010), 355–401; Mark Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Christian B. Miller, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1145a 1–3. Peter Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 161–162; J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 137; Neera K. Badhwar, “The Limited Unity of Virtue,” Nous 30, no. 3 (1996): 306–329. Badhwar, “Limited Unity.” See, for example, John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Badhwar “The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits,” The Journal of Ethics 13, no. 2/3 (2009): 257–289; Alfano, Moral Fiction, and Miller, Moral Character. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1115a 30–32, 1115b 4–6. Terence H. Irwin, “Disunity in the Aristotelian Virtues,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Supplementary (1988): 62, n. 2. Badhwar, “Limited Unity.” Robert M. Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good; Badhwar, “The Milgram Experiments”; Badhwar, Well-being: Happiness in a Worthwhile Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Doris, however, doesn’t find this solution satisfactory. See Lack of Character, 71–75. Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Russell, Practical Intelligence. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1109b 14–26. Ibid., 1120b 3–4, 1121a 1–4. Ibid., 1121a 15. Ibid., 1125b 1–1126a 3. Ibid., 1110a 25–26. Ibid., 1110a 5–8. Ibid., 1110a 20–25. Ibid., 1134a16–23; see Drefcinski, “Aristotle’s Fallible Phronimos,” 151–153. For example, Alfano, Moral Fiction, 31–32. Badhwar, “The Milgram Experiments,” 263. Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1287a31–32. Merritt et al., “Character,” 370. Merritt et al., “Character,” 358; Alfano, Moral Fiction, 43–46; Miller, Moral Character. Doris, Lack of Character, 30–32; Alfano, Moral Fiction, 46–50; Miller, Moral Character, chapters 3, 4, 6. Alfano, Moral Fiction, 46. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 43–44. Ibid., 44–50; Miller, Moral Character, 69–70. Miller, Moral Character, 69–73. Ibid. Ibid., 68–69. Bibb Latané and Steve A. Nida, “Ten Years of Research on Group Size and Helping,” Psychological Bulletin 89, no. 2 (1981): 308–324.

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 51 41. Doris, Lack of Character, 31–32; Alfano, Character, 36; Miller, Moral Character, 75. 42. Latané and Nida, “Ten Years of Research.” 43. Peter Fischer et al., “The Bystander-Effect: A Meta-Analytic Review on Bystander Intervention in Dangerous and Non-Dangerous Emergencies,” Psychological Bulletin 137, no. 4 (2011): 517–537. 44. Bibb Latané and John Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? (New York: Apple-Century Crofts, 1970): 124; Latané and Nida, “Ten Years of Research.” 45. Merritt et al., “Character.” 46. Latané and Darley, Unresponsive Bystander, 124. 47. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York; Perennial, 2009), 27–31. 48. Ibid., 31. 49. Ibid., 34–35, 55–57, 61–63. 50. Ibid., chap. 4. 51. Ibid., 59–63. 52. Ibid., 95, 99–104. 53. Ibid., 103–104. 54. Ibid., 95, 107–110. 55. Ibid., 59–62. 56. See Merritt et al., “Character,” 382–383. 57. C. Daniel Batson et al., “Influence of Self-Reported Distress and Empathy on Egoistic versus Altruistic Motivation to Help,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 3 (1983): 706–718. Here I follow Batson et al. in distinguishing empathy from personal distress, whereas Merritt et al. distinguish sympathy from personal distress and use ‘empathy’ to cover both. 58. Merritt et al., “Character,” 381. 59. Ibid., 384. 60. Ibid., 384. 61. Ibid., 381–383. 62. Ibid., 379. 63. Milgram, Obedience, 145–147. 64. Merritt et al., “Character,” 356, 371, 388. 65. The number of subjects who stop before or at 150 volts in Experiment 3, in which the learner is present in the same room as the subject, goes up to eleven, and in Experiment 4, in which the subject is required to forcibly place the learner’s hand on the plate starting at 150 volts, to seventeen. I find these numbers to be less significant than the numbers in 2, 5, and 8, because the proximity of the learner to the subject makes obedience viscerally harder without providing the subject with any new reasons. 66. John A. Bargh, “The Ecology of Automaticity: Toward Establishing the Conditions Needed to Produce Automatic Processing Effects,” American Journal of Psychology 105, no. 2 (1992): 182–183. Although Merritt et al. acknowledge this point in the abstract (“Character,” 373–374), they seem to forget it when they warn about the pervasive influence of automatic cognitive processes. 67. Milgram, Obedience, 57. 68. Ibid., 57. 69. Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and of Faith (Chicago: Houghton Mifflin, 1885; Google e-book), 55–59. 70. Milgram, Obedience, 203. 71. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b 10–12ff.

52 Neera K. Badhwar 72. Bargh, “Ecology of Automaticity,” 189. 73. For a related argument, see Nancy E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010), chap. 2. 74. Laurie A. Rudman, Richard D. Ashmore, and Melvin L. Gary, “ ‘Unlearning’ Automatic Biases: The Malleability of Implicit Prejudice and Stereotypes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 5 (2001): 856–868, at 857. 75. Ibid., 861–862, 865–866.

REFERENCES Ackrill, J. L. Aristotle the Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Adams, Robert Merrihew. A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Alfano, Mark. Character as Moral Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. Intelligent Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Aristotle. Politics in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Nicomachean Ethics. Edited by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999. Badhwar, Neera K. “The Limited Unity of Virtue.” Nous 30, no. 3 (1996): 306–329. ———. “The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits.” The Journal of Ethics 13, no. 2/3 (2009): 257–289. ———. Well-being: Happiness in a Worthwhile Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Bargh, John A. “The Ecology of Automaticity: Toward Establishing the Conditions Needed to Produce Automatic Processing Effects.” American Journal of Psychology 105, no. 2 (1992): 181–199. Batson, C. Daniel, Alice Isen, Karen O’Quinn, Jim Fulz, and Mary Vanderplas. “Influence of Self-Reported Distress and Empathy on Egoistic versus Altruistic Motivation to Help.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 3 (1983): 706–718. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.45.3.706. Curzer, Howard. “How Good People Do Bad Things: Aristotle on the Misdeeds of the Virtuous.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 28 (2005): 233–256. Doris, John M. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Drefcinski, Shane. “Aristotle’s Fallible Phronimos.” Ancient Philosophy 16 (1996): 139–154. Fischer, Peter, Joachim I. Krueger, Tobias Greitemeyer, Claudia Vogrincic, Andreas Kastenmüller, Dieter Frey, Moritz Heene, Magdalena Wicher, and Martina Kainbacher. “The Bystander-Effect: A Meta-Analytic Review on Bystander Intervention in Dangerous and Non-Dangerous Emergencies.” Psychological Bulletin 137, no. 4 (2011): 517–537. doi: 10.1037/a0023304. Geach, Peter. The Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Irwin, Terence H. “Disunity in the Aristotelian Virtues.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Supplementary Vol. (1988): 61–78. Latané, Bibb and John Darley. The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? New York: Apple-Century Crofts, 1970. Latané, Bibb and Steve Nida. “Ten Years of Research on Group Size and Helping.” Psychological Bulletin 89, no. 2 (1981): 308–324. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.89. 2.308.

Reasoning about Wrong Reasons 53 Merritt, Maria, John Doris, and Gilbert Harman. “Character.” In The Moral Psychology Handbook. Edited by John Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group, 355–401. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Perennial, 2009. Miller, Christian B. Moral Character: An Empirical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Royce, Josiah. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and of Faith. Chicago: Houghton Mifflin, 1885; Google e-book. Rudman, Laurie A., Richard D. Ashmore, and Melvin L. Gary. “‘Unlearning’ Automatic Biases: The Malleability of Implicit Prejudice and Stereotypes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 5 (2001): 856–868. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.81.5.856. Russell, Daniel C. Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009. Snow, Nancy E. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010. Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

3

Following Kurt Lewin Beyond the Situation—and the Person C. Daniel Batson

I.

INTRODUCTION

A recurrent finding of social psychologists over the past fifty years has been that situational pressure can more powerfully affect behavior than many expect. Research cited to support this claim includes Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience studies,1 the Stanford Prison experiment2 and the Good Samaritan experiment.3 In contrast, at least in the Western world, we seem chronically prone to overestimate the role of personality and character as causes of behavior.4 Despite these findings, and despite occasional assertions that situational factors are more important than personal dispositions, I know of no social psychologist who would claim that the situation alone accounts for behavior, just as no one would claim that the person alone does so. It is not meaningful to say the situation is more important than the person, or vice versa.5 Kurt Lewin, the father of experimental social psychology, early on proposed a widely cited equation: B = F(P,E), behavior is a function of the person and his or her environment.6 Further: In this equation, the person (P) and his environment (E) have to be viewed as variables which are mutually dependent upon each other. In other words, to understand or to predict behavior, the person and his environment have to be considered as one constellation of interdependent factors. We call the totality of these factors the life space (LSp) of that individual.7 The environment in question is not the physical environment; it is the ‘total situation’ as perceived and experienced by the person at the time. Thus, Lewin could write, E = F(P), the environment is a function of the person. But he also wrote, P = F(E), the person is a function of his or her situation. The latter is true not only developmentally and culturally but also more immediately. For example, the person is different after encouragement than after discouragement.8 Person and situation are inextricably entwined. Less well known, Lewin was not content with his general equation, which is little more than a reminder of the obvious.9 Building on Ernst

Following Kurt Lewin 55 Cassirer’s philosophy of science, he sought to formulate an interlocking set of conditional-genetic concepts for psychology that related values, goals, motives, and behavior in one constellation of interdependent factors.10 I believe that emotions can and should be added to this set. After sketching a general model that specifies the relations of these five conditional-genetic concepts, I shall suggest that this later Lewinian framework may be more useful than the person-situation framework for understanding the psychological antecedents of moral behavior.

II.

ARISTOTELIAN AND GALILEIAN SCIENCE

Lewin started with Cassirer’s distinction between Aristotelian and Galileian approaches to science.11 Aristotelian science attempts to explain natural phenomena by beginning with observation of particulars. It proceeds to a conceptual ordering and classification of these particulars into types according to essential attributes. Finally, these attributes are used to explain the behavior of the particulars. (Cassirer’s focus was on Aristotle’s physics, not on his metaphysics or ethics.) In contrast, Galileian science begins with development of an explanatory model of underlying processes thought to account for the natural phenomenon. Then empirical predictions are derived from the model. Finally, these predictions are tested through empirical observation. To illustrate: In Galileian science, the motion of objects is no longer explained in terms of essential attributes—light objects rise, heavy objects fall—but in terms of intangible yet still empirical concepts that focus on underlying processes—velocity and acceleration—whose relation can be clearly specified; velocity is change in location over time (d/t), and acceleration is change in velocity over time (d/t2). Lewin called these intangible concepts that are the heart of Galileian science conditional-genetic or genotypic concepts because they specify the underlying conditions for generating observable, or phenotypic, events.12 In his words: For Aristotle the immediate perceptible appearance, that which presentday biology terms the phenotype, was hardly distinguished from the properties that determine the object’s dynamic relations. The fact, for example, that light objects relatively frequently go upward sufficed for him to ascribe to them an upward tendency. With the differentiation of phenotype from genotype, or more generally, of descriptive from conditional-genetic concepts and the shifting of emphasis to the latter, many old class distinctions lost their significance. The orbits of the planets, the free falling of a stone, the movement of a body on an inclined plane, the oscillation of a pendulum, which if classified according to their phenotypes would fall into quite different, indeed into antithetical classes, prove to be simply various expressions of the same law.13

56 C. Daniel Batson III.

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK CONNECTING VALUES, EMOTIONS, GOALS, MOTIVES, AND BEHAVIOR

To explain human behavior in terms of either situation attributes or person attributes is Aristotelian. Seeking a set of Galileian, conditional-genetic concepts for psychology, Lewin turned his attention to the psychological constructs that underlie behavior—motives, values, and goals.14 Linking motives to values and goals. Lewin conceived of motives as goaldirected forces induced by threats or opportunities related to one’s values.15 Values can be defined most generally as relative preferences; Mary values State A over State B if she would consistently choose State A over State B, other things being equal. For Lewin, values include not only ‘capital-V values,’ such as Freedom, Justice, Loyalty, and Honesty, but also more mundane ones like valuing clean clothes, quiet weekends, and Cabernet. If a negative discrepancy is perceived between a current or anticipated state and a valued state (we’re down to the last bottle), then obtaining or maintaining the valued state is likely to become a goal. A goal-directed force—a motive—impels us toward this end. Some values are relatively stable, capable of producing a motive whenever threatened—for example, the value of air to breathe. Others are less so; an opportunity to obtain or maintain the state elicits a motive only under certain circumstances—for example, the value of wearing a warm coat. More formally, Lewin specified the relation of these constructs as follows: Values have the status of power fields (potential energy or potential desire), which when activated by opportunity or threat produce goals.16 (Another person or a social role can also function as a power field, as occurred in the obedience, prison simulation, and Good Samaritan studies cited earlier.) Goals have the status of force fields (kinetic energy or actual desire). Goaldirected motives are vectors in the force field, reflecting the desire of the person to attain a positively valenced goal or avoid a negatively valenced one. Behavior can be thought of as movement within the present set of force fields—that is, movement within the life space. Distinguishing ultimate goals from instrumental goals and unintended consequences. In this framework, it is important to distinguish ultimate goals from instrumental goals and unintended consequences.17 Ultimate goals are the valued states one seeks to obtain or maintain. ‘Ultimate’ does not here refer to a metaphysical first or final cause, or to evolutionary function, but simply to the state or states a person is seeking at a given time. An ultimate goal defines a motive, and, conversely, each different motive has a unique ultimate goal evoked by a unique value. Instrumental goals are sought because they are stepping-stones to ultimate goals. If an ultimate goal can be reached more efficiently by other means, an instrumental goal is likely to be bypassed. A young boy who acts honestly in order to avoid being punished should feel no compunction about cheating if he can be assured of not being caught.18 The distinction between instrumental and ultimate goals should not be confused with

Following Kurt Lewin 57 Milton Rokeach’s distinction between instrumental and terminal values.19 All of the values named by Rokeach could induce either instrumental or ultimate goals, depending on whether the value—for example, a world at peace—is sought as an end in itself or as a means to some other end—for example, personal safety. More germane is the distinction between intrinsic values and extrinsic values; the former induce ultimate goals, the latter instrumental goals. Pursuit of a goal, whether instrumental or ultimate, may produce effects that are not themselves goals. These are unintended consequences.20 Focus on motives, not behavior. A major implication that Lewin wished to draw from distinguishing ultimate goals, instrumental goals, and unintended consequences is the importance of focusing on goal-directed motives rather than on behavior or consequences, even if one wishes to understand behavior.21 Behavior is highly variable. Its occurrence depends on the strength of the motive or motives that might evoke that behavior as well as on (a) the strength of competing motives, (b) how the behavior relates to each of these motives, and (c) other behavioral options available at the time. The more directly a given behavior promotes an ultimate goal, the more uniquely it does so among the behavioral options available, the more stable and important the underlying value, and the more vulnerable the value is to threat, the more likely the behavior is to occur. Behavior that promotes an instrumental goal can easily change if the association between the instrumental and ultimate goal changes or if a less costly behavioral route to the ultimate goal arises that bypasses the instrumental goal. Unintended consequences can also easily change as the behavioral options change—unless these consequences are a product of some behavior that directly and uniquely promotes the ultimate goal. Motives can cooperate or conflict—and can change. Often, individuals have more than one ultimate goal at a time, and so more than one motive. When this occurs, the different motives can cooperate, conflict, or one can overshadow others. Moreover, a person’s goal-directed motives can change, sometimes quickly. The motives experienced in a given situation are a function of the strength and stability of relevant values and of the opportunities to promote them. Motives as current goal-directed forces, not as dispositions or needs. Goaldirected motives refer to current psychological states, not to enduring personality types or dispositions. In this regard, Lewin’s perspective on motivation differs from the perspective of another pioneer in research on motivation, Henry Murray.22 Murray and his followers treated motives as relatively stable dispositions or needs (e.g., need for achievement; need for affiliation)—similar to values rather than to motives in Lewin’s framework. Lewin made much of the distinction among instrumental goals, ultimate goals, and unintended consequences; Murray gave little attention to it. For Lewin, the list of our potential motives is long—as rich and varied as the states we value. Murray and his followers attempted to identify a relatively small number of primary motives.

58 C. Daniel Batson Inserting emotions. Lewin did not include emotions in his conditionalgenetic framework of values, goals, motives, and behavior.23 I believe they can and should be included. Emotions are typically felt when a person experiences some change in his or her relation to a valued state. Obtaining or losing a valued state produces end-state emotions such as happiness (if the valued state is obtained) and sadness (if it is lost). Awareness of a discrepancy between one’s current or future state and a valued state produces needstate emotions, such as yearning or apprehension (a person can yearn to be happy, but then happiness is a desired valued state, a goal, not what the person is currently feeling). Both end-state and need-state emotions provide information about what we value and where we are in relation to what we value. In addition, the physiological arousal component of need-state emotions amplifies the motivation to obtain or maintain the valued state. These emotions turn potential energy into kinetic energy. Fear of failure will amplify my motivation to do well on an upcoming exam. Thus, needstate emotions can be inserted into Lewin’s sequence after values (power fields) and before the goals (force fields) that produce motives (goal-directed forces within these fields). Need-state emotions heat up the process, taking us beyond awareness of a value discrepancy to a felt desire to address it. More colloquially, they make us care.24

IV.

WHY ACT MORALLY? FOUR DISTINCT MOTIVES

With this framework of values, emotions, goals, motives, and behaviors in mind, consider the range of motives that might lead someone to act morally. For each motive, we need to identify (a) the value(s) that induce it and (b) the need-state emotions that might be aroused by threats to these values. It is also important to know the strengths and weaknesses of each motive as a source of moral action. I believe that at least four general classes of motivation deserve consideration: 1. Egoism. Motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing one’s own welfare. 2. Altruism. Motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare. 3. Collectivism. Motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing a group’s welfare. 4. Principlism. Motivation with the ultimate goal of promoting some moral standard, principle, or ideal (e.g., be fair, care, be honest).25 The first three of these motives can produce moral action either as an instrumental means to reach the specified ultimate goal or as an unintended consequence. For the fourth, being moral is the ultimate goal, so principlism can be considered truly moral motivation.26 Table 3.1 provides

Increase the welfare of one or more other individuals.

Promote some moral standard, principle, or ideal (e.g., fairness, justice, greatest good, do no harm, honesty).

Sources: Adapted from Batson (forthcoming).

Principlism

Collectivism Increase the welfare of a group or collective.

Altruism

Disgust, anger at violation of propriety principles; possibly moral outrage at violation of interpersonal principles.

Focused on promoting moral principle as ultimate goal; often universal and impartial.

Group pride, esprit, loyalty, Powerful; strong patriotism, collective shame, emotional base in collective guilt, etc. group pride, loyalty, patriotism, etc.

Empathic concern, including Powerful; can be sympathy, compassion, easily aroused; strong tenderness, etc. emotional base in empathic concern.

Moral principles can be abstract and varied; often experienced as a motivational ‘ought’ not ‘want’; moral motivation is easily corrupted; often seems to lack a strong emotional base.

Limited to group; acting morally relates to collectivist motivation only as an instrumental means or an unintended consequence.

Empathy-induced altruism is limited to individuals for whom empathy is felt; acting morally relates to altruistic motivation only as an instrumental means or an unintended consequence.

Increase one’s own welfare. Many, including joy, sorrow, Many forms; powerful; Acting morally relates to egoistic motivation only as an instrumental pride, fear, shame, guilt, easily aroused; strong means or an unintended consequence. embarrassment, etc. emotional base in pride, fear, guilt, etc.

Weaknesses

Egoism

Strengths

Ultimate Goal/Valued State

Motive

Need-State Emotions

Four Motives for Acting Morally

Table 3.1

60 C. Daniel Batson an overview of the values, need-state emotions, strengths, and weaknesses related to these four classes of motivation. Let me say a little more about each motive.

1.

Egoism: Concern for One’s Own Welfare

There is little doubt that we value our own welfare. We feel upset and distressed when it is threatened, and we are motivated to increase it when opportunities arise. Egoism, motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing our own welfare, clearly exists.27 And it can be a powerful motive for moral action. A philanthropist may endow a hospital or university to gain recognition and a form of immortality; a capitalist, pushed by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, may create jobs and enhance the standard of living of the community while motivated by relentless pursuit of personal fortune; a student may volunteer at a local nursing home to add community service to her resume.28 The action of each may be judged moral by the actor or by some third party, at least from a consequentialist perspective, and for each, the motive is a form of egoism. Non-tangible egoistic motives for acting morally. Non-tangible self-benefits are particularly important goals of moral action. For example, one may act in accordance with some moral principle, such as the Utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, as a means to avoid social censure and guilt. As John Stuart Mill put it in his defense of Utilitarianism: “Why am I bound to promote the general happiness? If my own happiness lies in something else, why may I not give that the preference?”29 Mill’s answer was that we not only may, but we will give our own happiness preference until we learn the sanctions for doing so. We learn to fear social censure, divine censure, and the pangs of conscience. Freud presented a similar view.30 We also learn there are important non-tangible rewards for doing good. People may act morally in order to get a “warm glow.”31 They may act to see themselves—or be seen by others—as good, thoughtful, responsible people.32 Pursuit of such self-benefits may produce behavior judged moral, and, once again, the underlying motivation is egoistic. When we look beyond immediate gain to consider long-term consequences, self-interest becomes ‘enlightened.’ From an enlightened perspective, we may see that relentless pursuit of self-interest will lead to less long-term personal gain than will doing what is right, and we may act in accordance with principle as an instrumental means to maximize future self-benefit. Appeals to enlightened self-interest are often used by politicians and preachers trying to get us to do the right thing. They warn of the consequences for ourselves and our children of pollution or of underfunded schools. They remind us that an unchecked epidemic may, in time, reach our door, or that if the plight of the poor becomes too severe, we may face revolution. Enlightened selfinterest can motivate cooperation and reciprocity, as well as punishment of free riders.33

Following Kurt Lewin 61 Promise and problems of egoism as a motive for acting morally. Egoistic motivation is potent, is easily aroused, and has a strong emotional base in both positive (e.g., pride) and negative (e.g., shame, guilt) feelings. But as a motive for acting morally, it has a major flaw. Egoism is fickle. If an egoistically motivated individual finds that self-interest can be served as well or better without being moral, then morality be damned. If cheaper labor can be found overseas, the capitalist is likely to shelve the plan to do right by hiring locally. The student whose ultimate goal when volunteering at the local nursing home was to add community service to her resume is not likely to last. Her goal will be reached the first time she enters the building.

2.

Altruism: Concern for the Welfare of One or More Other Individuals

Altruism is motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing the welfare of one or more individuals other than oneself.34 Altruism should not be confused with helping behavior or with moral behavior, either of which may or may not be altruistically motivated. Nor should altruism be confused with self-sacrifice, which concerns cost to self rather than benefit to other. Promise. Research reveals that empathy-induced altruism can be a surprisingly powerful motive for benefiting an individual in need.35 Empathic concern—other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need—provides a strong emotional base. Empathy-induced altruism can lead us to act in accordance with moral principles, especially principles of fairness, justice, and care. Empathy inductions are used in many fund-raising ads, whether for children with disabilities, those needing a Big Brother or Sister, the homeless, or starving refugees. They are also used to encourage protection of endangered species, such as harp seals and gorillas. Problems. But altruism also has problems. In many circumstances, altruism is not easily aroused. Altruism, especially empathy-induced altruism, is directed toward the interest of specific other individuals. We are more likely to feel empathic concern for those for whom we especially care (i.e., whose welfare we value highly) and whose needs are salient. Many of our most vexing moral issues—poverty, population control, global warming, resource over-consumption—may evoke little empathy. It may not be possible to feel for an abstract social category like one’s community, people with AIDS, the elderly, the homeless, or all humanity.36 Even when aroused, empathy-induced altruism is limited in much the same way as egoism. If benefiting the person or persons for whom empathy is felt leads one to act in accord with principle, fine. But altruism and morality can be at odds. I may, for example, show partiality to those for whom I especially care, thereby violating my own standards of fairness and justice. This very real possibility is the basis for nepotism laws.

62 C. Daniel Batson

3.

Collectivism: Concern for the Welfare of a Group

Collectivism, motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing the welfare of a group or collective, is distinct from egoism and altruism. As Robyn Dawes and his colleagues put it, here the issue is “not me or thee but we.”37 The collective may be small or large, from two to over two billion. It may be a marriage or a family; it may be a sports team, a university, a neighborhood, a city, or a nation; it may be all humanity. The collective may be one’s race, religion, sex, political party, or social class. Although collectives we care about are typically those to which we belong, membership is not required. We may, for example, care about the welfare of a disadvantaged or persecuted group without being in the group ourselves—for example, the homeless, gays and lesbians, victims of genocide. If one places intrinsic value on a group’s welfare, and this welfare is threatened or can be enhanced in some way, collectivist motivation should be aroused, promoting action to benefit the group. At times, we have an opportunity to benefit the group as a whole; more often, we can benefit only some members, perhaps only one. Still, if enhancing the group’s welfare is our ultimate goal, then the motive is collectivism. The ultimate goal, not the number of people benefited, determines the nature of the motive. Promise. As a motive for acting morally, collectivism has some virtues that egoism and altruism do not. Egoism and altruism are both directed toward the welfare of individuals—me or thee. Yet moral issues often transcend both self-interest, even enlightened self-interest, and the interest of those individuals for whom we especially care. Further, many contemporary moral challenges—such as recycling, energy and water conservation, support for public TV, contribution to charities, even paying taxes—come in the form of social dilemmas. In a social dilemma, what is best for each individual conflicts with what is best for the group at large. As a result, both egoism and altruism pose threats to the collective good.38 If we rely only on egoistic and altruistic motivation to address social dilemmas, the prognosis looks bleak. Actually, there is considerable evidence that when faced with a social dilemma, whether in a research laboratory or in real life, many people show at least some attention to the welfare of the group.39 The most common explanation for this attention is collectivist motivation. It is assumed that individuals can and do act with an ultimate goal of increasing the welfare of the group.40 It is also assumed that this motive has a strong emotional base in feelings of loyalty, esprit, patriotism, national pride, and team spirit.41 Problems. Collectivist motivation is less effective in addressing moral issues concerning the rights and interests of individuals who are not members of the cared-for group. If acting morally toward nonmembers serves to promote the group’s welfare, fine. If not, forget it. Further, we are most likely to care about collectives of which we are members, an us. But an us implies a them, not us. When AIDS was initially labeled as a gay disease, many outside

Following Kurt Lewin 63 the gay community felt little inclination to help. It was their problem. In such situations, moral obligation may vanish. They may be placed outside the community of those to whom one’s moral principles apply, a perceptual reframing called moral exclusion.42

4.

Principlism: Concern to Promote Some Moral Principle, Standard, or Ideal

Principlism is motivation with the ultimate goal of promoting some moral principle, standard, or ideal—a principle of fairness or justice, the Utilitarian principle of greatest good for the greatest number, ideals of honesty, courage, and so on. To have a fourth ‘ism,’ I call this form of motivation for acting morally ‘principlism.’ Because this motive is, by definition, directly aligned with one’s moral values, I—like others—also call it moral integrity. It is perhaps not surprising that most moral philosophers have argued for the importance of a motive for moral action other than egoism. Many since Immanuel Kant have also had doubts about altruism and collectivism.43 They reject appeals to altruism, especially empathy-induced altruism, because feelings of empathy, sympathy, and compassion are too fickle and circumscribed. Empathic concern is not felt for everyone in need, certainly not to the same degree. They reject appeals to collectivism because group interest is bounded by the limits of the group. Collectivism not only permits but may even encourage harming those outside the group. Recognizing these problems with altruism and collectivism, moral philosophers often call for motivation with a goal of promoting some universal and impartial moral principle or ideal. For example, John Rawls famously argued for a principle of justice based on the allocation of goods to the members of society from an initial position behind the Veil of Ignorance, where no one knows his or her place in society—prince or pauper, laborer or lawyer, male or female, Black or White.44 Allocating from this position eliminates partiality and seduction by special interest. Universalist views of morality have not gone unchallenged. Writers like Lawrence Blum45 and Carol Gilligan46 have called for recognition of forms of morality that allow for special interest in the welfare of certain others or certain relationships. In opposition to an ethic based on fairness and justice, these writers propose an ethic of care. Sometimes, care is proposed as an alternative principle to justice, either as a substitute or in dynamic tension with it. At other times, care seems to be an alternative to principled morality altogether. If care is an alternative principle, then it too may evoke a form of principlism, motivation to promote a principle of care or of doing no harm.47 If, however, care is (a) a special feeling for another individual, (b) for oneself, or (c) for a relationship, then it would seem to be a form of altruism, egoism, or collectivism, respectively.

64 C. Daniel Batson One way to distinguish care based on altruism from care based on principlism is to consider Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative.48 This formulation states that we should never treat any person only as a means but always as an end. To act on altruistic motivation—that is, to act with the other’s welfare as an ultimate rather than an instrumental goal, is to treat the other as an end. If successful, such action accords with the persons-as-ends imperative. But, as Kant argued, such action is not morally motivated because the altruistic goal is to increase the other’s welfare, not to promote some moral principle or ideal. For principlism, it is not enough that one’s action be consistent with principle. ‘Treat others as ends’ must be the ultimate goal, not simply a consequence. Parallel distinctions can be made between principlism and both egoism and collectivism. Consider collectivism. Calls to act for the general welfare often appeal not to the good of society (collectivism) but to principle. We are told that it is our duty to vote, that it is not right to leave litter for someone else to clean up, and that we should give our fair share to the United Way. Although adherence may in each case enhance the common good, these appeals are to principlism. Promise. Unlike egoism, altruism, and collectivism, principlism provides a motive for acting morally that transcends reliance on self-interest and on vested interest in and feeling for the welfare of certain other individuals or groups. Promoting some moral value is the ultimate goal rather than an instrumental goal or unintended consequence, making the value-behavior link more reliable, less fickle. Further, moral standards that are universal and impartial do not play favorites. Problems. Promotion of principle is not, however, problem free as a motive for acting morally. The major problem with principlism is its corruptibility. We can be adept at justifying to ourselves—if not to others—why acting in a way that benefits us or those we care about does not violate our moral principles. Why, for example, the inequalities in the public school systems of rich and poor districts in the US are not really unjust.49 Why we have the right to a disproportionate share of the world’s natural resources. Why storing our nuclear waste in someone else’s backyard is fair. Why watching public TV without contributing, or why foregoing the extra effort to recycle is not wrong. Why attacks by our enemies are atrocities, but attacks by our side are necessities. Moral principles are affirmed, but the motivation to promote these principles seems weak, experienced as an ought not a want. Rather than being upset and stressed by violations of principles held dear, when the violations favor us or those we care about, we rationalize and reframe. The abstractness and multiplicity of moral principles make it easy to convince ourselves that the relevant principles are those that just happen to serve our interests. And, in spite of much recent discussion of moral emotions, violation of even firmly held moral principles often seems to evoke remarkably little emotion.50 The one clear exception is the disgust and anger evoked by

Following Kurt Lewin 65 violations of propriety principles, such as those prohibiting the sale of body organs, eating a family pet, or incest.51 Propriety morality addresses the natural and social order. Cultural mores prescribing this order are likely to be valued intrinsically, and their violation seems capable of producing both strong emotion (disgust, anger) and strong motivation. Propriety principles may be contrasted with interpersonal principles in this regard. Interpersonal principles address the consideration a person should give to the interests of others in situations in which those interests conflict with the person’s own. In Western society, fairness and justice principles, as well as principles proscribing harm, form the core of interpersonal morality. Unless we or those for whom we especially care are affected, violation of interpersonal standards seems to produce little emotion. Take the principle of fairness, or justice, which is the most widely endorsed interpersonal-morality principle in our society. Violation of this principle is said to evoke moral outrage. But is outrage or anger at unfairness really a response to the violation of standards of fairness, or is it a response to the harm done to myself (personal anger), to a member of a group with which I identify (identity-based anger), or to someone for whom I care (empathic anger)? Research to date indicates that unfairness can produce each of the latter three forms of anger, but when the harm is done to someone other than self, a group member, or a cared-for other, unfairness evokes very little anger. This finding suggests that the anger experienced is not really a response to violation of principle but to harm done to someone for whom one cares.52 The same is true for outrage or anger over torture, a practice virtually everyone considers morally wrong.53 From the perspective of the proposed value → emotion → motivation → behavior framework, many of what are commonly called moral emotions may have been mislabeled. Rather than being evoked by threat to some moral standard, principle, or ideal, they may be evoked by the co-occurring threat to (a) one’s own welfare (e.g., shame, guilt), (b) the welfare of a cared-for other (e.g., sympathy, compassion), or (c) the welfare of a cared-for group (e.g., devotion, patriotism). If so, these emotions are related to and promote egoistic, altruistic, or collectivistic goals, respectively. They promote moral goals only indirectly, either as instrumental means or unintended consequences. Lack of a strong emotional base, coupled with our skill in dodging the thrust of the principles we espouse, may explain the weak empirical relation between principled morality and prosocial action.54 We may use our moral principles—at least our interpersonal principles—more to censure or extol others’ actions than to motivate our own. Does principlism exist? Indeed, touching the heart of the matter, does truly moral motivation—acting with an ultimate goal of promoting some moral standard or ideal—even exist? Is principlism within the human motivational repertoire? When Kant briefly shifted his attention from what ought to be to what is,55 he admitted that although our behavior often appears to be motivated by principle, it may actually be prompted by self-love:

66 C. Daniel Batson Sometimes it happens that with the sharpest self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice; yet we cannot from this infer with certainty that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will. We like to flatter ourselves by falsely taking credit for a more noble motive; whereas in fact we can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action. . . . A cool observer, one that does not mistake the wish for good, however lively, for its reality, may sometimes doubt whether true virtue is actually found anywhere in the world, and this especially as years increase and the judgment is partly made wiser by experience and partly, also, more acute in observation.56 Kant was questioning whether intrinsic moral values exist. Conspicuous self-benefits arise from acting morally: One can gain the social and selfrewards of being seen and seeing oneself as a good person. One can avoid the social and self-punishments for failing to do the right thing. Are these unintended consequences, or are they the ultimate goal? Perhaps, as Freud suggested, society inculcates such principles in the young in order to bridle their antisocial impulses by making it in their interest to act morally.57 But even if moral standards are learned in this way, as extrinsic values, they may come to function autonomously.58 They may come to be valued in their own right and not simply as instrumental means to self-serving ends— at least by some people.59 If so, intrinsic moral value does exist. At issue is the nature of the goal. Is promoting a principle of fairness (or some other moral value) an instrumental goal on the way to the ultimate goal of self-benefit? If so, the motive is a subtle and sophisticated form of egoism. Is upholding the principle an ultimate goal, with the ensuing self-benefits unintended consequences? If so, principlism is a distinct form of motivation, independent of egoism, altruism, and collectivism, and it is meaningful to speak of intrinsic moral value—Kant’s “true virtue.”

V.

IMPLICATIONS

Lewin’s conditional-genetic framework shifts our focus from the more Aristotelian concepts of character traits, whether global or local, and situational pressures to a more Galileian analysis based on the relation of values, emotions, goals, motives, and behavior. The notion of character traits or virtues as essential attributes of a person that can—or should—directly produce moral behavior is replaced by values (power fields), which when threatened or violated evoke emotions and induce goals (force fields) and goal-directed motives (forces), which—depending on other motives activated and the options and constraints of the present situation—can in turn lead to behavior.

Following Kurt Lewin 67 This Galileian view can, I think, accommodate Aristotle’s person who wisely pursues the virtuous course of action appropriate to the situation— his doctrine of the mean.60 However, it is mute regarding his metaphysical assumption that pursuit of virtue fulfills the “function of Man” as a species. Further, such a view highlights the question of exactly what value or values lie behind any given moral action, and it offers a strategy for uncovering these values. The strategy involves working one’s way backward through the sequence of conditional-genetic relations, using the pattern of behavior across systematically varying circumstances to infer goals, and, more specifically, to infer whether a given goal is ultimate or only instrumental. This provides the opportunity to address Kant’s question—and ours—of whether morality is ever valued in its own right (principlism) or only as an instrumental means in the service of other values, such as avoiding social and self-censure—Freud’s answer. Pursuing this strategy, it may be possible to move the scientific study of morality beyond the situation and the person to consider the way morality actually functions in individuals’ lives—both its promise and its problems.

NOTES 1. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 371–378. See also Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). 2. Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip G. Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69–97. 3. John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–108. 4. Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). 5. Walter Mischel, “Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality,” Psychological Review 80 (1973): 252–283. 6. Kurt Lewin, A Dynamic Theory of Personality (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935), 73. 7. Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (New York: Harper, 1951), 239– 240. Italics in the original. 8. Ibid., 239. 9. Ibid. 10. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, trans. W. C. Swabey (Chicago: Open Court, 1921). Original work published 1910. 11. Kurt Lewin, “The Conflict Between Aristotelian and Galileian Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology,” Journal of General Psychology 5 (1931): 141–177. 12. Ibid. 13. Lewin, “Conflict,” 149. Italics in the original. 14. Lewin, Field Theory. 15. Ibid.; Kurt Lewin, “The Conceptual Representation and Measurement of Psychological Forces,” Contributions to Psychological Theory 1, no. 4 (1938): 1–247.

68 C. Daniel Batson 16. Lewin, Field Theory. 17. Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley, 1958); Lewin, Field Theory. 18. Hugh Hartshorne and Mark A. May, Studies in the Nature of Character, Volume 1: Studies in Deceit (New York: Macmillan, 1928). 19. Milton Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values (New York: Free Press, 1973). 20. For further discussion of the relations among values, goals, and motives, see C. Daniel Batson, Altruism in Humans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lewin, Field Theory. 21. Lewin, “Conceptual Representation”; Lewin, Field Theory. 22. Henry A. Murray, Explorations in Personality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938). 23. Lewin, Field Theory. 24. For more on the information and amplification functions of emotions, see C. Daniel Batson, Laura L. Shaw, and Kathryn C. Oleson, “Differentiating Affect, Mood, and Emotion: Toward Functionally Based Conceptual Distinctions,” in Review of Personality and Social Psychology: Volume 13: Emotion, ed. Margaret S. Clark (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), 294–326; for an example in the moral domain, see Richard A. Dienstbier and Pamela O. Munter, “Cheating as a Function of the Labeling of Natural Arousal,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 (1971): 208–213. 25. C. Daniel Batson, “Why Act for the Public Good? Four Answers,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20 (1994): 603–610; Batson, Altruism; Christopher Jencks, “Varieties of Altruism,” in Beyond Self Interest, ed. Jane J. Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 53–67. 26. I use ‘being moral’ as shorthand; the ultimate goal of principlism is to be fair, show care, be honest, and so on, not some abstract notion of morality—see M. Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994). 27. Batson, Altruism. 28. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Original work published 1776. 29. John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 299. Original work published 1861. 30. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961). Original work published 1930. 31. William T. Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel R. Burghart, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations,” Science 316 (2007): 1622–1625. 32. Robert H. Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988). 33. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” Nature 415 (2002): 137–140. 34. Batson, Altruism. 35. See Batson, Altruism for an extensive review. 36. Again, see Batson, Altruism for relevant research. 37. Robyn M. Dawes, Alphons J. C. van de Kragt, and John M. Orbell, “Not Me or Thee but We: The Importance of Group Identification in Eliciting Cooperation in Dilemma Situations: Experimental Manipulations,” Acta Psychologica 68 (1988): 83–97.

Following Kurt Lewin 69 38. C. Daniel Batson et al., “Two Threats to the Common Good: Self-Interested Egoism and Empathy-Induced Altruism,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999): 3–16; C. Daniel Batson et al., “Empathy and the Collective Good: Caring for One of the Others in a Social Dilemma,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68 (1995): 619–631. 39. For example, Geraldine Alfano and Gerald Marwell, “Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods by Groups III: Non-divisibility and Free Riding in ‘Real’ Groups,” Social Psychology Quarterly 43 (1980): 300–309; Marilyn B. Brewer and Roderick M. Kramer, “Choice Behavior in Social Dilemmas: Effects of Social Identity, Group Size, and Decision Framing,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986): 543–549. 40. For example, Robin M. Dawes, Alphons J. C. van de Kragt, and John M. Orbell, “Cooperation for the Benefits of Us—Not Me, or My Conscience,” in Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Jane J. Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 97–110. 41. John V. Petrocelli and Eliot R. Smith, “Who am I, Who are We, and Why: Links Between Emotions and Causal Attributions for Self and GroupDiscrepancies,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (2005): 1628–1642. 42. Ervin Staub, “Moral Exclusion, Personal Goal Theory, and Extreme Destructiveness,” Journal of Social Issues 46, no. 1 (1990): 47–64. 43. Immanuel Kant, “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics: Fifth Edition, trans. T. K. Abbott (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898). Original work published 1785. 44. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 45. Lawrence A. Blum, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (London: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1980). 46. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 47. Jonathan Baron, “Do No Harm,” in Codes of Conduct: Behavioral Research into Business Ethics, ed. David M. Messick and Anne E. Tenbrunsel (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), 197–213. 48. Kant, “Fundamental Principles.” 49. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Crown, 1991). 50. For example, Jonathan Haidt, “The Moral Emotions,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. H. Goldsmith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 852–870; Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 51. Haidt, “Moral Emotions”; Paul Rozin, Maureen Markwith, and Caryn Stoess, “Moralization and Becoming a Vegetarian: The Transformation of Preferences into Values and the Recruitment of Disgust,” Psychological Science 8 (1997): 67–73; Philip E. Tetlock, Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Melanie C. Green, and Jennifer S. Lerner, “The Psychology of the Unthinkable: Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 853–870. 52. C. Daniel Batson et al., “Anger at Unfairness: Is it Moral Outrage?” European Journal of Social Psychology 37 (2007): 1272–1285; Erin M. O’Mara, Lydia E. Jackson, C. Daniel Batson, and Lowell Gartner, “Will Moral Outrage Stand Up? Distinguishing Among Emotional Reactions to a Moral Violation,” European Journal of Social Psychology 41 (2011): 173–179.

70 C. Daniel Batson 53. C. Daniel Batson, Mary C. Chao, and Jeffery M. Givens, “Pursuing Moral Outrage: Anger at Torture,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009): 155–160. 54. Augusto Blasi, “Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Psychological Bulletin 88 (1980): 1–45; Nancy Eisenberg, “Meta-Analytic Contributions to the Literature on Prosocial Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 17 (1991): 273–282. 55. Kant, “Fundamental Principles.” 56. Ibid., Section 2, paragraphs 2–3. 57. Freud, Civilization. 58. Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt, 1937). 59. See Anne Colby and William Damon, Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1992) for possible examples. 60. Aristotle, Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson, revised by H. Tredennick (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 1106a.

REFERENCES Alfano, Geraldine and Gerald Marwell. “Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods by Groups III: Non-divisibility and Free Riding in ‘Real’ Groups.” Social Psychology Quarterly 43 (1980): 300–309. Allport, Gordon W. Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. New York: Holt, 1937. Aristotle. Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson, revised by H. Tredennick. London: Penguin Books, 1976. Baron, Jonathan. “Do No Harm.” In Codes of Conduct: Behavioral Research into Business Ethics, edited by David M. Messick and Anne E. Tenbrunsel, 197–213. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996. Batson, C. Daniel. “Why Act for the Public Good? Four Answers.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20 (1994): 603–610. ———. Altruism in Humans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———.What’s Wrong With Morality. Forthcoming. Batson, C. Daniel, Nadia Ahmad, Jodi Yin, Steven J. Bedell, Jennifer W. Johnson, Christie M. Templin, and Aaron Whiteside. “Two Threats to the Common Good: Self-Interested Egoism and Empathy-Induced Altruism.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999): 3–16. Batson, C. Daniel, Judy G. Batson, R. Matthew Todd, Beverly H. Brummett, Laura L. Shaw, and Carlo M. R. Aldeguer. “Empathy and the Collective Good: Caring for One of the Others in a Social Dilemma.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68 (1995): 619–631. Batson, C. Daniel, Mary C. Chao, and Jeffery M. Givens. “Pursuing Moral Outrage: Anger at Torture.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009): 155–160. Batson, C. Daniel, Christopher L. Kennedy, Lesley-Anne Nord, E. L. Stocks, D’Yani A. Fleming, Christian M. Marzette, David A. Lishner, Robin E. Hayes, Leah M. Kolchinsky, and Tricia Zerger. “Anger at Unfairness: Is it Moral Outrage?” European Journal of Social Psychology 37 (2007): 1272–1285. Batson, C. Daniel, Laura L. Shaw, and Kathryn C. Oleson. “Differentiating Affect, Mood, and Emotion: Toward Functionally Based Conceptual Distinctions.” In

Following Kurt Lewin 71 Review of Personality and Social Psychology: Vol. 13. Emotion, edited by Margaret S. Clark, 294–326. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992. Blasi, Augusto. “Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature.” Psychological Bulletin 88 (1980): 1–45. Blum, Lawrence A. Friendship, Altruism, and Morality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Brewer, Marilyn B. and Roderick M. Kramer. “Choice Behavior in Social Dilemmas: Effects of Social Identity, Group Size, and Decision Framing.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986): 543–549. Cassirer, Ernst. Substance and Function. Translated by W. C. Swabey. Chicago: Open Court, 1921. (Original work published 1910). Colby, Anne and William Damon. Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment. New York: Free Press, 1992. Darley, John M. and C. Daniel Batson. “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–108. Dawes, Robin M., Alphons J. C. van de Kragt, and John M. Orbell. “Not Me or Thee but We: The Importance of Group Identity in Eliciting Cooperation in Dilemma Situations: Experimental Manipulations.” Acta Psychologica 68 (1988): 83–97. ———. “Cooperation for the Benefit of Us—Not Me, or My Conscience.” In Beyond Self-Interest, edited by Jane J. Mansbridge, 97–110. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Dienstbier, Richard A. and Pamela O. Munter. “Cheating as a Function of the Labeling of Natural Arousal.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 (1971): 208–213. Eisenberg, Nancy. “Meta-Analytic Contributions to the Literature on Prosocial Behavior.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 17 (1991): 273–282. Fehr, Ernst and Simon Gächter. “Altruistic Punishment in Humans.” Nature 415 (2002): 137–140. Frank, Robert H. Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions. New York: Norton, 1988. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. (Original work published 1930). Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Haidt, Jonathan. “The Moral Emotions.” In Handbook of Affective Sciences, edited by Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. H. Goldsmith, 852–870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Haney, Craig, W. Curtis Banks, and Philip G. Zimbardo. “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison.” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69–97. Harbaugh, William T., Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel R. Burghart. “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations.” Science 316 (2007): 1622–1625. Hartshorne, Hugh and Mark A. May. Studies in the Nature of Character. Vol. 1: Studies in Deceit. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Heider, Fritz. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley, 1958. Jencks, Christopher. “Varieties of Altruism.” In Beyond Self-Interest, edited by Jane J. Mansbridge, 53–67. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Kant, Immanuel. “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals.” In Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics (5th ed.),

72 C. Daniel Batson translated by T. K. Abbott. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898. (Original work published 1785). Kohlberg, Lawrence. “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach.” In Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues, edited by Thomas Lickona, 31–53. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976. Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: Crown, 1991. Lewin, Kurt. “The Conflict Between Aristotelian and Galileian Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology.” Journal of General Psychology 5 (1931): 141–177. ———. A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935. ———. “The Conceptual Representation and Measurement of Psychological Forces.” Contributions to Psychological Theory 1, no. 4 (1938): 1–247. ———. Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper, 1951. Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 371–378. ———. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Mill, John Stuart. “Utilitarianism.” In “Utilitarianism and Other Essays by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham,” 272–338. London: Penguin Books, 1987. (Original work published 1861). Mischel, Walter. “Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality.” Psychological Review 80 (1973): 252–283. Murray, Henry A. Explorations in Personality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. O’Mara, Erin M., Lydia E. Jackson, C. Daniel Batson, and Lowell Gaertner. “Will Moral Outrage Stand Up? Distinguishing Among Emotional Reactions to a Moral Violation.” European Journal of Social Psychology 41 (2011): 173–179. Petrocelli, John V. and Eliot R. Smith. “Who am I, Who are We, and Why: Links Between Emotions and Causal Attributions for Self and Group-Discrepancies.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (2005): 1628–1642. Prinz, Jesse. The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Rokeach, Milton. The Nature of Human Values. New York: Free Press, 1973. Ross, Lee and Richard E. Nisbett. The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991. Rozin, Paul, Maureen Markwith, and Caryn Stoess. “Moralization and Becoming a Vegetarian: The Transformation of Preferences into Values and the Recruitment of Disgust.” Psychological Science 8 (1997): 67–73. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. (Original work published 1776). Smith, M. The Moral Problem. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994. Staub, Ervin. “Moral Exclusion, Personal Goal Theory, and Extreme Destructiveness.” Journal of Social Issues 46, no. 1 (1990): 47–64. Tetlock, Philip E., Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Melanie C. Green, and Jennifer S. Lerner. “The Psychology of the Unthinkable: Taboo Trade-Offs, Forbidden Base Rates, and Heretical Counterfactuals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 853–870.

Part II

The Moral Psychology of Virtue

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4

Automaticity in Virtuous Action Clea F. Rees and Jonathan Webber

Automaticity is rapid and effortless cognition that operates without conscious awareness or deliberative control. It is the subject of much empirical research in contemporary psychology. It has traditionally been emphasized in discussions of ethical virtue. Our focus in this paper is on the relation between automaticity and virtuous action. An action is virtuous to the degree that it meets the requirements of the ethical virtues in the circumstances. What contribution does automaticity make to the ethical virtue of an action? How far is the automaticity discussed by virtue ethicists consonant with, or even supported by, the findings of empirical psychology? We argue that it is a mistake to apply the analogy between virtue and skill here. The automaticity of virtuous action is automaticity not of technique but of motivation. Skilful action can be admirable and can indicate the presence of ethical virtue but does not itself contribute to the ethical virtue of an action. The automatic motivations that do contribute to that virtue are not only those that initiate action. They can also be motivations that modify action that is otherwise initiated, or that initiate and shape practical deliberation. We then argue that both goal psychology and attitude psychology can provide the cognitive architecture of this automatic motivation, although goal psychology is not as advanced as attitude psychology in modeling the habituation traditionally thought to be involved in the acquisition of ethical virtue. Moreover, since goals are essentially directed towards the agent’s own action whereas attitudes are not, we argue that goals might underpin some virtues, whereas attitudes underpin others. We conclude that consideration of the cognitive architecture of ethical virtue ought to engage with both areas of empirical psychology and should be careful to distinguish among ethical virtues.

I.

AUTOMATICITY IN TWO RESCUES

Philippa Foot argues that an individual’s virtue is a matter of “innermost desires” as well as intentions, of “what is wished for as well as what is sought.”1 The example Foot uses to illustrate this point suggests that “innermost desires”

76 C. F. Rees and J. Webber are essential not only to the virtue of an agent but also to the virtue of action. This is the example of a tracker rescuing an injured boy from a river. The tracker hears the distressed boy and immediately responds in the right way to rescue effectively. The automaticity of this rescue is part of the virtue of the action in that it would seem not merely less likely to be effective but also less virtuous had the rescue involved deliberation. The tracker is capable of responding without deliberation as a result of training himself to notice when someone is in danger and to respond accordingly. The automaticity, that is to say, has come about through habituation. It might be argued that for action to be truly virtuous, the dispositions it manifests must have come about through such habituation. Dispositions that have come about by heredity or accident, on such a view, could not be virtuous however good the actions that manifest them might be. We will not consider this issue in this paper. Our concern is restricted to automaticity itself rather than its origins. There are several kinds of automaticity in this case. Which of these are essential to the ethical virtue of the action? To begin to separate out the different kinds of automaticity involved, we can compare this rescue with another described by Bernard Williams. In this case, the rescuer is able to rescue only one of two imperiled people, one of whom is the rescuer’s wife. Williams argues that if the rescuer thinks “that’s my wife, and in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife,” then the rescuer has had “one thought too many,” since it would be better if “the motivating thought, fully spelled out” were “the thought that it was his wife.”2 The thought about permissibility does indeed seem out of place. But being motivated by the thought “that’s my wife” also seems less than virtuous. A more virtuous action would not be motivated by the fact of being married to this imperiled person but would be motivated by a concern for that individual’s welfare sufficiently central to the agent’s outlook to be automatic. This rescuer may need to think about how to rescue the drowning wife. Unlike the tracker, this rescuer may have no experience of dealing with dangerous waterways. But this is distinct from having to think of a reason to rescue her. Moreover, the two rescuers differ not only in their experience of dangerous situations but also in the content of the motivation that is automatically activated. The tracker’s motivation is to ensure safety in dangerous circumstances. The other rescuer’s is to care for this particular individual. Each of these motivations leads to action with the immediate goal to rescue an individual, even though neither motivation specifies that action in its content. A second difference between the two rescuers concerns their skill in rescuing. The tracker displays great skill where the other rescuer might not. Again, this is due to the difference in their background experience. Does this mean that the tracker’s rescue is the more virtuous? It is overall a more excellent action, but it does not follow that it is more ethically virtuous. For it does not seem that the ethical virtues demand that everyone be a skilled

Automaticity in Virtuous Action 77 rescuer. This might be a requirement for people whose lives involve regularly dealing with dangerous waterways, so perhaps such skill is required of the tracker. But assuming our other rescuer lives a very different kind of life, the lack of skill involved in this rescue does not detract from its virtue. This is not to say that fully virtuous action requires only its initiating motivation to be automatic. We will argue that virtuous action can be a matter of the automatic guidance of action, but that this is a matter of modifying motivations rather than skill. In the next three sections, we consider in more detail the automaticity of skilled action, of modifying motivations, and of initiating motivations, before going on to consider the cognitive architecture that can underpin automatic motivation in virtuous action.

II.

SKILL AND ACTION AUTOMATICITY

Recent discussions of the structure of virtue have placed significant emphasis on the idea of skill. There are important analogies between virtues and skills. In particular, both are the product of habituation through rationally guided practice rather than acquirable through propositional learning alone.3 More strongly, it can be argued of either that its content cannot be wholly captured in propositional form. However, there are important differences too. A skill is an ability or capacity, whereas a virtue essentially involves a tendency. Many more people have the ability to behave honestly than possess the virtue of honesty. Likewise, knowing how to respond courageously or understanding what fairness requires are not virtuous in the absence of the motivation to behave accordingly. One cannot become virtuous just by learning any particular ability, since one must also come to have the right motivations. In the absence of the right motivations, any skill can form part of a vice rather than a virtue.4 Moreover, the contrast between the two rescue cases shows that, at least in some instances, virtuous behavior does not require any skill at all. Our two rescues are equally ethically virtuous, though only one of them exhibits skill in rescuing. These cases also indicate that an action is more virtuous if its motivation is automatic rather than deliberative. In the terminology employed by Bill Pollard and Nancy Snow, our rescues are fully ethically virtuous if there is no deliberation about whether to rescue, regardless of whether there is any skill involved and regardless of whether there is deliberation about how to rescue.5 Is this a general point about virtue? Or do some virtues essentially involve skills? The skill present in one rescue case but not the other is not itself a matter of ethical character, of values and commitments, but only of physical ability. Peter Goldie’s example of a dinner party conversation might seem different in this regard. As one of the diners is becoming upset by the conversation, another diner notices this and discreetly changes the subject. Goldie argues that the virtue of this action does not consist solely in the motivation

78 C. F. Rees and J. Webber to save the other diner’s feelings but also in noticing that she is becoming upset and in being sufficiently sensitive to know that changing the subject is the best way to save her feelings.6 Should we understand this noticing and this knowing how best to resolve the problem on the model of skills? Or are they aspects of automatized motivation? There are delicate issues here. Noticing that someone is becoming upset manifests a concern for the feelings of that person. The noticing cannot be understood as automatically initiating that concern, since the noticing occurs only because the concern is already guiding the agent’s cognition. This guidance is a way in which a motivation can automatically modify action. In this case, the motive of concern for the other person’s feelings modifies the action of engaging in a conversation. The motive of concern must have its influence automatically rather than deliberatively if it is to make a feature of the situation salient to behavioral cognition, since deliberation deals only with such features once they are salient. Is knowing how best to save the other person’s feelings a skill, or should it too be understood as automatically manifesting a modifying motivation? In this case, mastery of a technique seems essential. The person who clumsily comforts the other person, thereby drawing attention to their distress, and the person who adroitly changes the subject need not differ in the concern they express or in the automaticity of that concern. The difference seems rather to lie in knowing how best to achieve the aim of saving the other person’s feelings. So this knowhow does seem to fit the model of a skill. However, it is not clear that this skill is essential to the action of being virtuous. The person who changes the subject seems more virtuous than the one who clumsily attempts to comfort. But it does not follow directly from this that this action of changing the subject is more virtuous than the action of comforting. For it might rather be that knowing how to achieve an aim is often indicative of having had experience of trying to achieve that aim. Knowing how to act on a motivation is thus indicative of having habituated that motivation. At least, it is indicative of having habituated that motivation in contexts relevantly similar to the present one. When the motivation has only been habituated in importantly different contexts, one might automatically be motivated in the right way but not know what to do. This is the difference between our two rescue cases. In the dinner party case, the motivation of kindness towards others seems unlikely to have been habituated without having been acted on in situations where other people’s feelings might be hurt. This is because situations in which other people’s feelings might be hurt are pervasive in everyday life for most people, unlike situations in which someone needs to be rescued from a river. So it seems unlikely that anyone could have automatized the motivation of kindness without also developing the relevant social skills through the very same actions. This is not to say that it is impossible to habituate this motivation without developing the relevant skills. It is only to explain why social skills would usually accompany the virtue of kindness even if skill is not itself

Automaticity in Virtuous Action 79 part of virtue. The person who changes the subject to spare their fellow diner’s feelings probably is more virtuous than the person who tries to comfort the fellow diner, but this is due to the difference in the degree to which they have habituated their concern for the feelings of others; it is not a difference in how well the act itself meets the demands of ethical virtue. This suggests that the right automatic motivation might be all that is required for an action to be virtuous. The analogy between virtue and skill, therefore, should not be pressed too far. But we do need to distinguish between motivations that initiate actions and those that modify actions that are otherwise initiated. This is a refinement of the distinction between whether and how to act. It is required to explain how virtuous motivation can be responsible for the agent noticing relevant features of the situation. In the next two sections, we consider modifying and initiating motivations in more detail.

III.

AUTOMATICITY OF MODIFYING MOTIVATIONS

John Bargh and colleagues have performed various experiments to demonstrate that motivations can automatically modify actions. One such experiment is their “fishing game.”7 Participants play this game on a computer, believing themselves to be playing with another participant, but in fact, this is simulated by the computer. In each season, the participant catches fifteen fish and must decide how many to return to the lake. The number of fish returned determines how many new fish appear in the lake before the next season, according to the formula 5n-30. Returning ten fish, for example, would mean that a further twenty appear in the lake. The lake begins with one hundred fish, and if the number of fish in the lake falls below seventy, then both participants will lose all the fish they have caught. One can play this game cooperatively by aiming to maximize fish for all players or play competitively by aiming to collect the most fish. Participants entered this game in one of four conditions, on a two-by-two experimental design. On one dimension, participants were either explicitly instructed to play cooperatively or given no explicit instruction on the spirit in which to play the game. The other dimension concerned a scrambled sentence task that all participants completed before the game and were told was unconnected to the game. Participants had to make four-word sentences from lists of five words. For some participants, one-third of these lists of words contained terms relating to cooperation. For the other participants, there was no such pattern in the word lists. Those whose scrambled sentence task had included words related to cooperation played significantly more cooperatively than did those whose scrambled sentence task did not include words related to cooperation. This was true for those given explicit instruction to cooperate and for those not given this explicit instruction. Similarly, for each scrambled sentence task,

80 C. F. Rees and J. Webber those given explicit instruction to cooperate did so to a significantly greater degree than those not given this explicit instruction. Subtle cues in the scrambled sentence task therefore caused the action of playing the game to be modified by the motivation to cooperate. The explicit instruction to cooperate also had this effect. The most cooperation was found among those participants who had been given both the explicit instruction and the subtle cues. The influence of the explicit instruction is not a case of automaticity. Participants consciously make an explicit decision in response to that instruction. Mostly, they decide to obey it. But the subtle cues operate below the radar of conscious awareness. Participants were unaware of this influence on their behavior. This influence is best understood as a case of priming, which is the causing of a temporary increase in the accessibility of a mental state. The more accessible a mental state is, the more readily and more rapidly it is brought to bear on cognition, so the greater influence it has over that cognition, whether this influence is conscious or unconscious. Each mental state has a chronic degree of accessibility, which is temporarily increased by the state’s being activated either in the course of cognition or as a direct result of some relevant situational cue. In this instance, the motivation to cooperate has been unconsciously activated by the subtle cues in the scrambled sentence task, which has the effect of this motivation having a greater effect on the agent’s cognition during the fishing game than it would have had otherwise.8 Chronic accessibility is itself the product of the mental state having been brought to bear on cognition in the past. The more a mental state has been employed in cognition, the higher its baseline level of chronic accessibility, so the greater its influence on cognition generally. Priming is merely the temporary raising of accessibility above this baseline. Somebody who had repeatedly worked at behaving cooperatively would have habituated their motivation of cooperativeness to a high degree of chronic accessibility and would thereby be likely to behave cooperatively in the fishing game even in the absence of explicit instruction or subtle cues encouraging them to do so.9 Because chronic accessibility is a matter of degree, so too is the modification that a habituated mental state can make to cognition. In the dinner party example, the virtuous person who notices their fellow diner’s growing distress and without a thought changes the subject is someone who has habituated the motivation of kindness to a very high degree of chronic accessibility. This is why the agent not only notices the distress but is sufficiently strongly motivated to alleviate it. The skill involved in alleviating it is not itself a matter of this habituated motivation, which could be equally chronically accessible in an agent who noticed the distress and was strongly motivated to alleviate it but did not know how to do so. An agent who has not yet habituated their motivation of kindness to quite the same degree might notice the impending distress but need to deliberate about whether to intervene to alleviate it or to let the conversation take its

Automaticity in Virtuous Action 81 course. In this case, the motivation is sufficiently highly accessible to bring the agent to notice the distress but not accessible enough to automatically motivate action to alleviate it. An agent who had not habituated the motivation of kindness even to this degree could notice the growing distress only as a result of a deliberative decision to consciously look for signs of distress. Such a decision would be an early step on the road to a more habituated, more highly accessible, more automatic motivation of kindness.

IV.

AUTOMATICITY OF INITIATING MOTIVATIONS

Automatic motivation does not only modify actions entered into as a matter of conscious decision, such as dinner party conversations and experimental fishing games. Actions can also be initiated automatically. Our two rescue cases are clear examples of automatic initiation of complex action. These are virtuous actions partly because the action of rescuing the imperiled person is initiated without deliberation, though there may be deliberation about how to effect the rescue. But there are also other roles that automatic initiation can play in virtuous action. One such role is exemplified by the example of driving a familiar route home without consciously paying attention. This clearly involves skill automaticity. One major part of learning to drive is instilling motor routines concerning turning left, turning right, changing gear, and so forth. Whereas it is indeed unlikely that the initiation of the overall complex action of driving home would ever itself be automatic rather than deliberative, we should not conclude that the skill involved in driving is the only automaticity in this case. For where the route driven is sufficiently familiar, many smaller actions that make up the overall action of driving home will be automatically initiated. Such actions as slowing down when approaching a set of traffic lights or indicating a left turn two minutes after joining a particular road at a particular junction could be automatic not only in the skill employed in their execution but also in their initiation in response to visual cues. Such responses to visual cues should be understood as initiating motivations of actions that comprise driving home rather than as modifying motivations that influence the overall action of driving home, precisely because they are responses to particular situations encountered along the way. They are not analogous to the motivations of kindness or cooperation that can influence the way you engage in a dinner party conversation or play the fishing game. Modifying motivations are active throughout the action they modify. Driving home might be modified in this way by such motivations as being safe and obeying the law. Moreover, such modifying motivations might be causally responsible for the automatic activation on seeing a red light of the motivation to slow down. But it remains that the motivation to slow down is an initiating motivation, one that initiates the

82 C. F. Rees and J. Webber action of slowing down rather than continually modifying the action of driving home. A further kind of automatic initiation is well illustrated by Snow’s example of the compassionate person whose friend has been made unemployed. Such a person, Snow argues, might fully possess the virtue of compassion yet still need to deliberate over whether to respond to this news by offering financial assistance or whether instead to remain quiet to preserve the friend’s pride. Snow takes this case to show that virtuous action need not involve automaticity at all, since the action this person decides upon might be fully virtuous.10 However, Snow has overlooked the question of the motivation for deliberating over whether to respond to the news. The deliberation itself is initiated by compassion for the friend. Is this initiation automatic or deliberative? It could be either, but it would be more virtuous if it were automatic. For this would be an immediate recognition that the situation requires a response that is best for the friend who has suffered the misfortune. This immediate recognition makes the deliberation about whether or not to offer assistance more virtuous than it would be if the agent had first decided through deliberation that they should do what is best for their friend. This is an instance of action being virtuous despite involving deliberation over whether to act at all. But the resulting action might still have been virtuous had the agent just known immediately that this particular friend would not be offended by an offer of help, so had not needed to deliberate to reach the decision to offer help. By contrast, there might be actions that would not be virtuous unless brought about through deliberation. For example, we have argued in another paper that some moral dilemmas are such that no action in response to them can be virtuous unless it involves serious consideration of the problems with each option. Faced with the scenario in which Williams places his character Jim, for example, who must either kill one innocent person or allow twenty innocent people to be killed, the person of integrity will not find the answer easy or obvious, whichever way they decide to go.11 As with the case of deliberating over whether to offer to help the friend, this deliberation over whether to kill one innocent person or allow twenty innocent people to be killed will count as virtuous only if it is initiated by the right motivation. For if it is initiated by the motivation to ensure public approval, for example, or the motivation to act like a comic book hero, then it would not be virtuous. If the motive is to do what is right, then so long as certain other conditions are met, it would be virtuous. Moreover, if this motivation is itself the outcome of deliberation about which ends one should try to serve in this situation, then the action would be less virtuous than if it is automatically initiated by the motivation to do the right thing. An initiating motivation need not initiate action, therefore. We should recognize that virtuous action can arise from deliberation that is itself initiated automatically by a motivation that sets its goal, and indeed that some

Automaticity in Virtuous Action 83 actions would be less virtuous if they did not come about in this way. We should also recognize the possible role of automaticity in initiating actions that are not virtuous in themselves but that constitute a larger action that is virtuous.

V. GOALS AND ATTITUDES AS AUTOMATIC MOTIVATIONS Automaticity in virtuous action concerns initiating and modifying motivations. This distinction has three advantages over the distinction between whether and how to act. First, modifying motivations account for the influence of a habituated virtue over the agent’s perception of situations. Kindness can modify one’s dinner party behavior, making one more likely to notice a fellow diner’s growing distress. Second, there are cases where it is arbitrary to classify the relevant automaticity as concerning whether or how. In the fishing game, there seems no reason to classify the priming as influencing how the participant played rather than whether they cooperated. Likewise, there seems no reason to classify an automatic action that forms part of a larger action, such as slowing down when approaching traffic lights as part of the action of driving home, as cases of whether to do the smaller action rather than how to do the larger one. Third, the automatic initiation of deliberation is neither a case of whether to act nor a case of how to act. Responding to a friend’s bad news by deliberating about whether to offer help is virtuous when that deliberation has the goal of doing what is best for the friend and has this goal set automatically. In the terms of our distinction, a modifying motivation is one that is continually active throughout the action it modifies. This is why it can influence the agent’s perception of the situation their action engages with. The motive of cooperation modifies the playing of the fishing game because it is a continual influence. An initiating motivation need not begin an action, since it might instead initiate deliberation concerning some particular end. When it does begin an action, the action might be part of a larger action. The motive to slow down when approaching traffic lights initiates the slowing down at the relevant point. It is not a modifier of the overall action of driving, even though it might itself be prompted by the modifying motivation of driving safely. The same motivation, moreover, might modify one action and initiate another as a result. The motive of kindness might modify an agent’s dinner party conversation, so that the diner notices the growing distress of another diner, with the result that the same motive of kindness initiates the action of changing the subject. Likewise, a motivation might modify an action that it also initiated. The tracker’s concern for the safety of others might modify the rescue that it initiated. This distinction between initiation and modification, then, is a distinction between psychological roles that a particular motivation can play. It does not rule out a particular motivation playing one role in some cases, the other

84 C. F. Rees and J. Webber in other cases. One individual’s kindness, for example, can initiate some of their deliberations, initiate some of their actions, and modify some of their actions. Indeed, as we have seen, it can modify one action with the result that it initiates another action, which it then modifies. Since these are clearly distinct psychological roles, a motivation can play either role independently of whether it plays the other with respect to the same action. There are no cases, therefore, where it is simply arbitrary whether to describe it in one way or the other. If this account of virtuous motivation is to be psychologically respectable, if there is to be reason to believe that such forms of automaticity are achievable by human agents, then the account needs to be grounded in an empirically supported theory of the nature and development of automatic motivation. Experimental psychology does not provide any such complete theory. But it does contain two areas of research that seem promising. One of these is research into goal automaticity, which Snow recommends as a cognitive architecture of virtuous automaticity.12 Bargh is the leading researcher into goal automaticity. He understands a goal to be a mental state that motivates a specific kind of action and structures experience accordingly. Somebody viewing a house with the goal of burgling it will notice and remember different features than would be noticed and remembered by someone viewing the same house with the goal of buying a home.13 Bargh was originally concerned with a goal’s automatic influence over cognition in response to features of the environment. He argued that such automaticity can result from a goal’s association with an overall situation, such as a dinner party, or the goal’s association with a more abstract social interaction, such as somebody becoming distressed.14 Bargh developed this theory by providing evidence that goals persist and continue to influence cognition even in the absence of any conscious awareness of them or any environmental cues with which they are associated. Once a goal has been made sufficiently accessible, its automatic influence is no longer reliant on situational priming.15 A second candidate empirical grounding for this account of virtuous motivation is provided by attitude psychology. This is a research tradition that is nearly a century old. Its most famous strand is cognitive dissonance theory, which focuses on the changes in an agent’s attitudes in response to their own behavior. But the tradition is by no means limited to this and has included work by many psychologists of varying methodologies and interests. Although this makes it difficult to identify a single detailed theory resulting from the research, there is certainly a core conception of attitude that emerges from it. This is the conception of a cluster of cognitive and affective mental states that together constitute the agent’s overall evaluation of some object.16 An attitude’s object can be at any level of abstraction, so that you can have an attitude towards something as abstract as democracy or as concrete as the British parliamentary electoral system, as abstract as free jazz or as

Automaticity in Virtuous Action 85 concrete as your particular copy of Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity. The attitude’s content is constituted by the contents of the mental states that make it up. An overall positive attitude to democracy, for example, might be made up of such items as a belief that democracy is the best way to keep the peace, a belief that it is the only political system that respects the autonomy of the citizens, a desire that peace be kept, a desire that autonomy be respected, and so on. An attitude is not necessarily a persisting mental state in its own right. It can be constructed from relevant mental states when an overall evaluation of the object is required. It need not subsequently persist in any form other than that set of distinct mental states. For an attitude to persist as a mental state in its own right requires that the constituent mental items are bound together by strong associative connections. This ensures that the attitude as a whole is brought to bear on cognition whenever any of its constituent parts are brought to bear. Such an attitude functions in cognition as a whole rather than as a set of disparate items. In the terminology of attitude psychology, the strengths of the associative connections between the constituents determine the overall strength of the attitude. This degree of influence an attitude has over cognition is determined by the rapidity with which the attitude is brought to bear on cognition, its degree of chronic accessibility, which itself is determined by its strength. One of us has argued that this conception of attitude provides an appropriate cognitive structure for virtue ethics.17 As we have seen, the same has been claimed for the conception of goal that can be drawn from Bargh’s research. Should virtue ethicists prefer either one of these, or should they embrace both?

VI.

GOALS AND ATTITUDES IN ETHICAL VIRTUE

Automaticity is not the only important feature of ethical virtue that needs to be reflected in its cognitive architecture. Ethical virtues are dispositions that are characterized in terms of the behavioral outcome that they incline the agent towards, but this inclination is not usually understood to be restricted to a specifiable set of circumstances. And virtues are traditionally understood to be dispositions that can be gained through habituation, which means that they are both strengthened and refined through reflective practice. We will consider how goals and attitudes can underpin these aspects of ethical virtue before going on to consider the differences between goals and attitudes. That ethical virtues are generally tendencies towards particular kinds of outcome rather than traits that dispose the agent to respond to a particular kind of situation in a particular kind of way has been somewhat overlooked in the recent debate over whether the idea of ethical virtue is consistent with the findings of contemporary psychology. The focus on experiments that measure the behavioral impact of altering features of the situation has

86 C. F. Rees and J. Webber brought with it a focus on the reactive aspect of ethical virtue. Ethical virtue is not simply a matter of one’s reactions to particular circumstances, however, but also guides the kinds of situations one tries to bring about irrespective of the situation one is starting from, determines the kinds and degree of situational detail one takes into account in deliberation, and governs one’s attitudes towards one’s own dispositions and those of others.18 Both goals and attitudes can provide the cognitive architecture of personal dispositions of this kind. The idea of chronic accessibility is central to both goal psychology and attitude psychology. The more accessible a psychological item is, the greater its influence on cognition generally. The item does not need to be directly related to a feature of the situation to exert influence over the cognitive processes going on in that situation. What matters is how accessible that item is to each cognitive process. An item with a high degree of chronic accessibility is one that is continually highly accessible and thus one that influences cognition generally rather than only in response to particular features of situations. This general influence can therefore account for the influence a character trait has over the agent’s cognition that is not simply determined by the features of situations they are in. Moreover, both goals and attitudes increase in chronic accessibility each time they are brought to bear on cognition. A goal or attitude is strengthened whenever it is automatically activated and whenever it is called to mind in deliberation. The stronger it gets, the greater its accessibility. In this respect, both goals and attitudes fit one part of the idea that one becomes virtuous through reflective practice. By acting on a motivation and by employing it in deliberation, one increases the influence of that motivation over subsequent cognition and hence behavior. Habituation involves more than just strengthening the influence of a particular motivation, however. Aristotle emphasizes the role of reflective practice in refining the content of a motivation. The sensitivity to situational detail characteristic of ethical virtue requires that it is developed through engaging with those details rather than simply learned as a rule to follow. Attitude psychology fits this aspect of habituation very well. Since an attitude is a cluster of other mental states, it is continually refined as it is considered and applied in new situations. New beliefs and desires are brought into the cluster that determines the precise content of the attitude.19 Goal psychology is less clear on this aspect of habituation. There is much suggestive material in Bargh’s papers concerning the relations between goals and situations and concerning the relations between goals and behavioral plans. But this has not yet been developed, by Bargh himself or by other goal psychologists, into an account of the cognitive architecture of goals. In the absence of such an architecture, we cannot say with confidence whether goal psychology could underpin the role of habituation in refining the content of a virtue. It might seem that this limitation of goal research provides good grounds for virtue ethicists to draw exclusively on attitude psychology for the cognitive

Automaticity in Virtuous Action 87 architecture of ethical virtue. However, this would overlook an important difference between attitudes and goals. Attitudes are overall evaluations of their objects. Any implications they have for behavior are the result of their influence over behavioral cognition. They do not themselves specify that the agent should try to achieve anything in particular. Goals, on the other hand, are centrally concerned with the agent’s own actions. An individual’s positive attitude towards democracy, for example, does not have as its object that individual doing anything in particular, even if it does explain why he or she regularly votes in elections. It can be satisfied by other people bringing about or upholding democracy. An agent’s goal of being a good parent, on the other hand, is itself directed at behavior of his own, however abstractly specified. It cannot be satisfied by someone else being a good parent. This reflects a difference among ethical virtues. To possess the virtue of compassion, for example, one must be strongly averse to other people suffering and in favor of such suffering being alleviated when it occurs. If one’s concern for this is sufficiently strong, relative to one’s other concerns, then one will regularly act on it. But if one is not concerned simply with the prevention or alleviation of other people’s suffering but is rather concerned that it be oneself who prevents or alleviates that suffering, such that one would not be satisfied by someone else alleviating suffering that one could have alleviated oneself, then one’s outlook seems not to be virtuous. Indeed, this would be a kind of narcissism. The proper object of compassion is the wellbeing of other people, not the role of oneself in that well-being. On the other hand, one’s own action does seem central to some other virtues. Integrity, for example, is a strong concern with getting one’s own actions right. A positive attitude towards people generally behaving well is not a form of integrity. Thus, it seems that neither attitudes nor goals alone could provide the cognitive architecture of ethical virtue. It seems rather that attitudes could provide the architecture of those virtues that are centrally concerned with states of the world irrespective of who brought those states about, and goals could provide the architecture of those virtues centrally concerned with one’s own action. If this is right, virtue ethicists should look to both attitude psychology and goal psychology for the cognitive architecture of ethical virtue.

VII.

COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE AND ETHICAL VIRTUES

Our examples of automaticity have all been ones where the motivation might have been an attitude or might have been a goal. Rescues can be motivated by attitudes of concern for others or for a particular person, or by such a chronic goal as being a hero or being a good partner. Cooperative play in the fishing game could be motivated by a general attitude in favor of cooperation for mutual benefit or could be motivated by the goal of being cooperative. Noticing a fellow diner’s growing distress and changing the subject could be motivated by an attitude of kindness or a goal of behaving

88 C. F. Rees and J. Webber kindly. Slowing down when approaching traffic lights could be motivated by a positive attitude towards safety or the goal of driving safely. Deliberating about whether to offer to help a friend could be motivated by a concern for that friend’s well-being or a goal of being a good friend. The virtue of each of these actions might depend not only on whether the motivation was automatically initiated but also on which kind of motivation it is. For some cases might be analogous to compassion, where a positive attitude towards the well-being of others is essential to the virtue, whereas similar behavior motivated by the goal of being the person who offers help seems narcissistic. Other cases might be analogous to integrity, where it is essential to the virtue that one is concerned about one’s own behavior rather than about states of the world itself. For this reason, virtue ethicists interested in the cognitive architecture of virtue should be concerned with the psychology of both attitudes and goals. It might be argued that attitudes and goals are not really very different. Why not think of goals simply as those attitudes whose objects are, or include, one’s own behavior? But it is not clear what would be gained by this. We would gain a collective term that ranges over the two kinds of motivation but at the cost of losing the term that uniquely picks out one of these two kinds. Moreover, an important question would be obscured by this terminological shift. Attitude psychology has converged on a particular understanding of the structure of attitudes, as clusters of mental states held together by associative connections of varying strengths. Goal psychology has not yet formulated a clear structure of goals. Perhaps these will turn out to be structured in basically the same way as attitudes. Or perhaps they will not. Only further research will decide this, research that will include philosophical analysis as well as experimental work. An alternative outcome might be that goals include attitudes as constituents. We have argued here that a cognitive architecture based on goal psychology might well fit the virtue of integrity, since this virtue seems essentially concerned with one’s own behavior. In another paper, we have argued that the virtue of integrity can be understood as a specific collection of attitudes.20 These two claims are compatible. It may be that the goal at the heart of integrity is itself constituted by that set of attitudes. If this were to be true of that goal, then it would not follow that all goals consist in sets of attitudes. But it would provide a model of the structure of at least some goals that might have been obscured by thinking of goals as a variety of attitudes. The right understanding of the role of automaticity in virtuous action will rest in part on the outcomes of such empirical and philosophical investigation into cognitive psychology. But it will also rest on more careful consideration of the differences between the virtues, which the discussion of their relation to experimental psychology has tended to assume are uniform in this regard. The focus of this work ought to be on the automaticity of initiating and modifying motivation. It is not clear that skill has any defining role in the ethical virtue of action.21

Automaticity in Virtuous Action 89 NOTES 1. Philippa Foot, “Virtues and Vices,” in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 5. 2. Bernard Williams, “Persons, Character and Morality,” in The Identities of Persons, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 214–215. 3. Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16–32. 4. Gilbert Ryle, “Can Virtue Be Taught?” in Education and the Development of Reason, ed. Robert F. Dearden, Paul Heywood Hirst, and Richard Stanley Peters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 438–441. 5. Our rescue cases thus conform to Pollard’s principle that to be fully virtuous an action cannot involve deliberation about whether to act but may involve deliberation about how to act. See Bill Pollard, “Can Virtuous Actions be Both Habitual and Rational?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2003): 416–417. Snow raises important objections to this as a general principle but retains the distinction between whether and how to act in Nancy E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010), 48–49. In this paper, we argue that this distinction between whether and how to act should be replaced with a distinction between initiating and modifying motivations. 6. Peter Goldie, On Personality (London: Routledge, 2004), 44. 7. John A. Bargh et al. “The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1017–1019. 8. Some psychologists, including Bargh, use the term ‘priming’ more narrowly than we do, to mean a temporary increase in accessibility that occurs without the agent consciously noticing. Because there is no equivalent term for temporarily increasing accessibility in a way the agent does consciously notice, we use the term ‘priming’ more broadly to encompass any temporary increase in a mental state’s accessibility. 9. Some writers use the term ‘chronically accessible’ as though it were binary rather than scalar. This is an unfortunate byproduct of the tendency to contrast a state that has a very high degree of chronic accessibility with one that has a very low degree of chronic accessibility by referring to the former as the ‘chronically accessible’ one. All mental states are chronically accessible. They differ in their degree of chronic accessibility. 10. Snow, Virtue, 48–49. 11. Clea Rees and Jonathan Webber, “Integrity as the Goal of Character Education.” 12. Snow, Virtue, chap. 2. 13. John A. Bargh, “Auto-Motives: Preconscious Determinants of Social Interaction,” in Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, vol. 2, ed. Richard M. Sorrentino and E. Tory Higgins (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 97. 14. Ibid., 114. 15. Bargh et al., “Automated Will,” 1019–1021, 1023–1024. 16. For overviews of attitude psychology, see John Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory (London: Sage, 2007); Russell H. Fazio and Michael A. Olson, “Attitudes: Foundations, Functions, and Consequences,” in The Sage Handbook of Social Psychology: Student Edition, ed. Michael A. Hogg and Joel Cooper (London: Sage, 2007); Gregory Maio and Geoffrey

90 C. F. Rees and J. Webber

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Haddock, The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change (London: Sage, 2010). Jonathan Webber, “Character, Attitude and Disposition,” European Journal of Philosophy, doi: 10.1111/ejop.12028, 2013. See Ibid., § 2. Ibid., § 4. Clea Rees and Jonathan Webber, “Constancy, Fidelity, and Integrity,” in The Handbook of Virtue Ethics, ed. Stan van Hooft (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2013), 399–408. We would like to thank Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno for very helpful comments on the first draft of this paper.

REFERENCES Annas, Julia. Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Bargh, John A. “Auto-Motives: Preconscious Determinants of Social Interaction.” In Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, vol. 2, edited by Richard M. Sorrentino and E. Tory Higgins, 93–130. New York: Guilford Press, 1990. Bargh, John A., Peter M. Gollwitzer, Annette Lee-Chai, Kimberley Barndollar, and Roman Trötschel. “The Automated Will: Nonconscious Activation and Pursuit of Behavioral Goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1014–1027. Cooper, Joel. Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory. London: Sage, 2007. Fazio, Russell H. and Michael A. Olson. “Attitudes: Foundations, Functions, and Consequences.” In The Sage Handbook of Social Psychology: Student Edition, edited by Michael A. Hogg and Joel Cooper, 123–145. London: Sage, 2007. Foot, Philippa. “Virtues and Vices.” In Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, 1–18. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Goldie, Peter. On Personality. London: Routledge, 2004. Maio, Gregory and Geoffrey Haddock. The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change. London: Sage, 2010. Pollard, Bill. “Can Virtuous Actions be Both Habitual and Rational?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2003): 411–425. Rees, Clea and Jonathan Webber. “Constancy, Fidelity, and Integrity.” In The Handbook of Virtue Ethics, edited by Stan van Hooft, 399–408. Durham, UK: Acumen, 2013. ———. “Integrity as the Goal of Character Education”. [paper under review]. Ryle, Gilbert. “Can Virtue Be Taught?” In Education and the Development of Reason, edited by Robert F. Dearden, Paul Heywood Hirst, and Richard Stanley Peters, 434–447. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Snow, Nancy E. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010. Webber, Jonathan. “Character, Attitude and Disposition.” European Journal of Philosophy. doi: 10.1111/ejop.12028, 2013. Williams, Bernard. “Persons, Character and Morality.” In The Identities of Persons, edited by A. O. Rorty, 197–216. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

5

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue Erik J. Wielenberg

I.

INTRODUCTION

Scientific investigation of human moral cognition has yielded new evidence for the old idea that our emotions often influence our moral judgments. One worry about this idea is that such influence precludes moral knowledge. Some allege that if our moral beliefs are products of emotion rather than reason, then they are not “perceptions of external truths” but merely “projections of internal attitudes.”1 Philosophers who investigate character typically hold that an important component of ethically virtuous character is moral knowledge. Thus, any threat to the existence of moral knowledge is also a threat to the existence of virtue. I shall examine this worry in connection with the emotion of disgust. After centuries of neglect, disgust has relatively recently begun to receive substantial attention from scientists and philosophers alike. Disgust is particularly troubling for those worried about the influence of emotion on moral judgment. According to Marc Hauser, “[d]isgust wins the award as the single most irresponsible emotion.”2 In this chapter, I develop an empirically grounded and philosophically plausible model of moral knowledge. I then combine that model with some of Aristotle’s views on virtue to explain how moral cognition can be influenced by emotion (including disgust) and still yield moral knowledge.

II.

SYSTEM 1 AND SYSTEM 2 EPISTEMOLOGY

Psychologists recognize the importance of “mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior”—what Timothy Wilson calls “the adaptive unconscious.”3 The operations of the adaptive unconscious (or System 1) are fast, automatic, and effortless, whereas the operations of the conscious mind (or System 2) are slow and effortful.4 Daniel Kahneman suggests that the phenomenon of forming beliefs by way of cognitive processes to which we lack direct

92 Erik J. Wielenberg conscious access—which he calls “knowing without knowing how”—is quite common: We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, “without knowing how he knows.” However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter. . . . [T]he mystery of knowing without knowing . . . is the norm of mental life.5 The System 1/System 2 distinction in psychology is related to the philosophical debate over the nature of epistemic justification between access internalists and externalists. Access internalists hold that when S’s belief B is justified, the factors that justify B can be identified by S via conscious reflection so that believers are always at least potentially aware of the factors that justify their beliefs.6 Externalists hold instead that beliefs can be justified by factors to which believers lack such access. Access internalism seems sensible if we focus our attention on System 2 thinking, but it seems to imply that System 1 cognition cannot justify beliefs because such cognition is not accessible in the relevant sense. According to Wilson, “there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no matter how hard we try.”7 If, as Kahneman claims, “the mystery of knowing without knowing . . . is the norm of mental life,” then access internalism seems to imply that we know much less than we typically think we know.8 This line of argument is continuous with the objection to access internalism that alleges that it mistakenly implies that animals and small children lack knowledge.9 An externalist approach to justification fits much better with the view that System 1 cognition can justify belief. Consider a simple version of reliabilism according to which a belief is justified just in case it is produced by a cognitive process that is reliable in the sense that it tends to generate more true beliefs than false ones. On this view, System 1 cognition can justify beliefs so long as the relevant cognitive processes tend to get things right; whether the believer has direct conscious access to the underlying processes or inputs is irrelevant. One worry about this simple form of reliabilism is that reliability is not necessary for epistemic justification.10 Perhaps what Shafer-Landau calls a “hybrid theory”11 is the way to go.12 In particular, perhaps there are multiple distinct conditions, each of which is sufficient yet none of which is necessary for epistemic justification. And perhaps System 1 beliefs can satisfy one of these sufficient conditions, whereas System 2 beliefs can satisfy another of these sufficient conditions. The key point here is that even if reliability is not necessary for epistemic justification, the implausibility of the view that System 1 cognition cannot justify beliefs suggests that there is some externalist sufficient condition for epistemic justification.

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 93 Reliabilism also faces the generality problem. Most belief-producing process-tokens fall into many process-types. These types may vary dramatically in their reliability; which is the process-type whose degree of reliability determines whether beliefs produced by the process-token are justified?13 In the case of System 1 cognitive processing, there is a natural way of specifying the relevant process-type. One of the main ways that System 1 generates beliefs is by applying heuristics to its inputs. It turns out that these heuristics are something of a mixed bag; some are pretty reliable, others less so.14 Accordingly, as a first pass at a reliabilist sufficient condition for epistemic justification tailored to System 1 cognition, we can say that a belief is justified if it is produced by System 1 cognition applying a reliable heuristic to an accurate set of inputs. We can make this first pass more precise. There is compelling evidence that System 1 has an important role to play in generating our conscious moral beliefs. Many contemporary moral psychologists maintain that in order to generate such judgments, System 1 classifies the entity being judged in some way or other. As Jesse Prinz puts it: “One cannot make a moral judgment about an event without first categorizing that event.”15 When System 1 classifies entities in this way, I will say that it produces a nonconscious classification of x as N. At least some such nonconscious classifications generated by System 1 in one way or another trigger conscious moral beliefs. Accordingly, we can flesh out the first pass above this way: Reliabilism (R): S’s belief that x is M is epistemically justified if: (i) S’s System 1 produces in an ordinary way a correct nonconscious classification of x as N, (ii) S’s nonconscious classification of x as N causes S’s belief that x is M, and (iii) the process-type being caused to believe that x is M by one’s nonconscious classification of X as N is reliable when x is N. Some brief explanation and defense of R is in order. First, my aim is not to provide a fully general theory of epistemic justification. Accordingly, clause (i) of R specifies that S’s System 1 produces a nonconscious classification “in an ordinary way.” I offer no analysis of that locution; the idea is simply that there are typical and usual ways for System 1 cognition to produce nonconscious classifications, and clause (i) requires that such is the case. For example, if an evil demon is fiddling with your System 1 and causing it to produce nonconscious classifications, then any beliefs resulting from such a process will not satisfy R. One very ordinary way in which System 1 can generate nonconscious classifications is by processing information from perception. Clause (ii) specifies that there is a causal connection from the nonconscious classification to the resulting belief. This clause is aimed at ensuring that the right sort of relation holds between the classification and the relevant belief. It may be that System 1 generates various nonconscious classifications but

94 Erik J. Wielenberg not all of them causally contribute to the production of a given belief. R only pays attention to classifications that causally contribute to the formation of the belief in question. Note, however, that clause (ii) is compatible with the presence of intermediate events between the nonconscious classification and the resulting moral judgment. Finally, clause (iii) is the reliabilist component. To avoid the generality problem, clause (iii) specifies the type of process that must be reliable for epistemic justification to accrue to the resulting belief. The central idea of R, then, can be summed up this way: a belief that x is M is epistemically justified if System 1 cognition accurately and in an ordinary way classifies x as N, that classification produces the belief that x is M, and there is a sufficiently reliable connection between entities being N and their being M. Some further tweaks may be called for here. For example, there may be cases in which multiple nonconscious classifications are involved in the causal process that generates beliefs. And we may also need to add a nodefeaters condition. Incorporating these tweaks into R yields: System 1 Reliabilism (S1-R): S’s belief that x is M is epistemically justified if: (i) System 1 produces in the ordinary way one or more correct nonconscious classifications of x as N1, N2, etc., (ii) those nonconscious classifications cause S’s belief that x is M, (iii) the process type being caused to believe that x is M by such nonconscious classifications is reliable when x is N1, N2, etc., and (iv) S has no undefeated defeaters for the belief that x is M.16 S1-R is an important philosophical component of my model of moral knowledge. That model also has some important empirical components. Accordingly, I turn now to the ongoing debate in psychology over the nature of moral cognition.17

III.

THE HIDDEN PRINCIPLES CLAIM

Consider two opposing views. The first view, associated with Kohlberg and Piaget, has it that moral judgments are typically generated by reasoning that is conscious and controlled—System 2 thinking. An opposing view has it that moral judgments typically take the form of moral intuitions, which Jonathan Haidt has recently characterized as “the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgments and decisions that we all make every day.”18 According to the ‘social intuitionist model’ (SIM), whereas moral judgments are products of cognition (i.e., information processing), they are typically not products of conscious reasoning. According to this view, System 1 is the primary engine of moral cognition.

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 95 Proponents of SIM do not deny that conscious moral reasoning occurs; they allow that System 2 has a limited role to play in moral cognition. However, they suggest that such reasoning typically (but not always) serves not to generate moral judgments but rather is “usually engaged in after a moral judgment is made” and consists of a search “for arguments that will support an already-made judgment.”19 One important phenomenon that proponents of SIM offer as evidence for their view is “moral dumbfounding,” which occurs when people arrive at moral judgments quickly but then have trouble providing reasons to support such judgments.20 The thought is that if people generally arrived at their moral judgments via conscious reasoning, they would be able easily to access the principles that allegedly support their judgments and hence would not be dumbfounded. In this way, the widespread existence of moral dumbfounding tells against the view that people’s moral judgments are typically generated by conscious reasoning. Despite the difficulty people often have in consciously identifying general moral principles that would justify their intuitive moral judgments about particular cases, most people do not experience their moral emotions and beliefs as a set of disjointed, disconnected, willy-nilly thoughts and feelings.21 Accordingly, many researchers emphasize that our conscious moral judgments often conform to general moral principles that we do not consciously reflect on or represent as part of the process of arriving at particular moral judgments. The judger may lack direct conscious access to the relevant general moral principles altogether, though that is not always the case.22 System 1 ‘knows’ the moral principles, but we often do not: hence, dumbfounding.23 Thus, there is wide agreement among contemporary moral psychologists about the following principle, which I accordingly adopt as part of my model of moral knowledge: The Hidden Principles Claim: Our conscious moral judgments typically conform to general moral principles; such principles are often but not always hidden from us in that we cannot become consciously aware of the conformance of our conscious moral judgments to such principles in any direct way. This phenomenon is a consequence of the heavy involvement of System 1 cognition in the production of our conscious moral judgments. Horgan and Timmons’s concept of possessing a moral principle morphologically is useful for getting a better understanding of what it means for our conscious moral judgments to conform to a general moral principle that is hidden in the relevant sense: For an individual to possess a moral principle (its content) morphologically is for the individual to be disposed to undergo transitions in cognition, from certain input to moral judgments as output, such that

96 Erik J. Wielenberg (1) these transitions systematically and non-accidentally conform with the moral principle, (2) this systematic conformity results from the person’s persisting psychological structure . . . and (3) those cognitive transitions typically result from this persisting structure without the mediation of a tokened representation of the principle. . . . One may think of this sort of possession as a matter of know how—a skill that is or has become part of the individual’s repertoire for negotiating her social world.24 For example, if I morphologically possess (hereafter ‘m-possess’) the moral principle that torture is morally wrong, I will be disposed to form conscious beliefs, of particular acts of torture, that they are wrong, though I may never consciously form the belief that torture in general is morally wrong. It is condition (3) above that makes the m-possessed principle hidden in the relevant way. Because the judger does not internally represent the general principle to which her moral judgments conform, she cannot simply ‘look inward’ and discover that her judgments conform to that principle. However, it is important to realize that this leaves open the possibility that the judger can infer that her judgments conform to the m-possessed principle (hidden does not mean unknowable). That is not merely a theoretical possibility; there is empirical evidence that it actually sometimes occurs. For example, Cushman and Young claim that people are sometimes able to use their capacity for “post hoc rationalization” to uncover the distinctions that are actually driving their moral judgments.25 In the next section, I draw on S1-R and the Hidden Principles Claim to develop the core of my model of moral knowledge. In light of the centrality of morphological principles and reliabilism to the model, I call it the Morphological Reliabilism Model (MoRM). My focus on System 1 moral cognition does not imply that I think that System 2 has no important contribution to make to moral knowledge. Rather, I focus on System 1 moral cognition because it is typically taken to be the more epistemically suspect sort of moral cognition.

IV.

A MODEL OF MORAL KNOWLEDGE

Consider a simple case of perceptual knowledge: I look around my office and have the visual experience of a yellow notebook resting on my desk. I form the belief that there is a yellow notebook on my desk. But it’s not the case that I consciously reason this way: ‘I have the visual experience of a yellow notebook; therefore, there probably is a yellow notebook in front of me.’ Instead, when my perceptual faculties are functioning normally, the visual experience automatically triggers the belief about the notebook. Assuming that I have no defeaters for my belief that there is a yellow notebook on my desk, that belief constitutes knowledge.

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 97 Before turning to an example of moral knowledge, we must consider the following question: What is the role of emotion in moral cognition? Hauser suggests that in many cases, emotional responses are effects rather than causes of moral judgments about particular cases, whereas others hold that when emotions are present in moral cognition, they typically function as causes rather than effects of moral judgments.26 Some claim that the emotions are so closely linked with moral judgment that we can’t make genuinely moral judgments without the emotions being somehow involved.27 Furthermore, among those who think that emotions typically function as causes of moral judgment, there are differing views about just how various sorts of emotions impact moral judgment.28 In the next section, I examine the role of the emotion of disgust in moral judgment in some detail. However, for present purposes, the key point is that even when emotions are the proximate causes of moral judgment, it can also be the case that such emotional responses (and the resulting moral judgments) conform to general moral principles.29 To get a sense of how this might work, consider one moral principle that has been the subject of much research in moral psychology: The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE): It is impermissible to use a harm as the means to achieving a greater good, but permissible to cause a harm as a side-effect of achieving a greater good.30 Cushman, Young, and Greene claim that “there is research suggesting that the DDE characterizes patterns of moral intuition.”31 People’s intuitive moral judgments about particular cases often conform to the DDE—though they are often unaware of that fact. Cushman, Young, and Greene further propose that “contemplating harm used as the means to an end trigger[s] an affective response that in turn generates moral judgments consistent with the DDE.”32 That is, part of the explanation for the fact that people’s conscious moral judgments tend to conform to the DDE is that cases that involve using harm as the means to achieve a greater good trigger a negative emotional response that in turn triggers a judgment of moral wrongness.33 By contrast, cases in which the harm is merely a side-effect do not set off emotional ‘alarm signals’ and hence are not judged to be morally wrong.34 Keeping in mind the lesson that moral judgments can conform to broad moral principles even if their immediate causes are emotions, let us consider Gilbert Harman’s much-discussed example: “[Y]ou round a corner and see a group of young hoodlums pour gasoline on a cat and ignite it.” Harman suggests that in this case, “you do not need to conclude that what they are doing is wrong; you do not need to figure anything out; you can see that it is wrong.”35 There are various plausible ways of fleshing out this simple example that are compatible with the Hidden Principles Claim. Here is one: You round the corner and perceive the hoodlums and their actions. The particular actions of the hoodlums fall into many action-types. Because “[t]he brain cannot possibly represent all of the types” instantiated by the

98 Erik J. Wielenberg hoodlums’ actions, “there is presumably some set of heuristics that the brain uses to map act tokens onto act types” so that “perceiving an act token activates neural representations of some types that the token instantiates, but not representations of all types that it instantiates.”36 In short, the brain produces various nonconscious classifications of the perceived act; in this case, let us suppose that one of these classifications is torturing a cat just for fun. This classification is produced by System 1; you do not consciously form the belief: ‘those hoodlums are torturing a cat just for fun!’ Suppose further that the nonconscious classification of the act as a case of torturing a cat just for fun triggers feelings of disgust and outrage in you, and those feelings in turn produce the conscious belief that what the hoodlums are doing is wrong. Your belief that what the hoodlums are doing is wrong is not the result of a process of conscious, controlled reasoning. Instead, just as in the visual perception example described above there is a smooth, automatic transition from having the visual experience of the notebook to believing that the notebook is on the desk, in the moral case, there is a smooth, automatic transition from perceiving the hoodlums’ actions to nonconsciously classifying the act as a case of cat-torture-for-fun to forming the conscious belief that their actions are wrong—a transition that is accomplished by a flurry of behind-the-scenes System 1 activity. An important difference between the two cases is that as I have described the cat-torture case, the emotion of disgust is an important part of the causal chain, whereas emotion plays no important role in the perceptual case. In light of the ongoing controversy over the role of emotion in moral cognition, I do not claim that the presence of disgust is an essential ingredient in this example. Perhaps in at least some cases the relevant nonconscious classifications directly produce moral judgments; even when emotional responses are present as well, it may be that the moral judgments and emotional responses are common effects of the nonconscious classifications. However, I wish to focus on a version of the scenario in which emotion is present in the causal chain in order to make the point that the presence of emotions in such a role does not preclude the existence of moral knowledge. In the case at hand, then, is the resulting moral belief justified? Your nonconscious classification of the act as cat-torture-for-fun was produced in the ordinary way (via perception) and correctly classifies the hoodlums’ act. That classification causes a feeling of disgust, which in turn causes your belief that what the hoodlums are doing is wrong. Assuming that torturing cats just for fun is at least usually morally wrong and your belief is undefeated, S1-R implies that your belief that what the hoodlums are doing is morally wrong is epistemically justified. When the nonmoral properties our System 1 cognition attends to in nonconsciously classifying things are reliably correlated with moral properties, moral beliefs can be epistemically justified. The most straightforward way this happens occurs when (i) System 1 cognition correctly nonconsciously classifies an entity as having nonmoral properties N1, N2, and so forth and that classification triggers the conscious moral belief that the entity has moral

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 99 property M (with emotion perhaps serving as an intermediate link in the causal chain), and (ii) having properties N1, N2, and so forth entails having M. However, that is not the only way for epistemic justification to arise. Notice that to have justified moral beliefs on this model it is not necessary that one internally represent all the nonmoral properties that make the relevant moral property be instantiated. In many cases, the full superveniencebase will be quite complex. Fortunately, it’s enough for epistemic justification if the nonmoral properties represented by the relevant nonconscious classifications are generally correlated with the moral property in question. Suppose you see me hit a young child very hard and quickly form the conscious belief that what I did was wrong.37 There are possible cases in which you are mistaken; for example, a case in which “there is a lethal insect on the child’s arm.”38 But since such cases are rare, the process-type being caused to believe that x is morally wrong by a nonconscious classification of x as a case of hitting a young child very hard will be sufficiently reliable to confer epistemic justification. It’s instructive to consider the case of visual knowledge here: As long as visual hallucinations are sufficiently rare, the processes connecting our visual experiences with our visual beliefs will be sufficiently reliable to bestow justification on such beliefs.39 At this point, I take it that we have in hand the core elements of an at least initially plausible model of moral knowledge, MoRM. With this account in hand, it is time to consider disgust’s role in moral cognition.

V. DISGUST AND MORAL COGNITION Disgust is a basic emotion along with anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.40 There is a broad consensus that disgust originally evolved to play a role that had no direct connection with morality. According to Rozin and colleagues’ “body-to-soul preadaptation theory,” “food and body products are the core disgust elicitors, the elicitors for which the brain was most directly shaped by natural selection, probably in order to avoid biological pathogens.”41 Daniel Kelley advances the “Entanglement Thesis,” according to which disgust is part of “two distinguishable mechanisms, each with its own distinct origin and function: one that has to do with diet and the avoidance of toxic foods, and another that has to do with avoiding pathogens, parasites, and the reliable indicators of their presence.”42 Most disgust researchers also believe that disgust has been co-opted or extended beyond its original evolutionary function: It has come to play an important role in human morality.43 The available empirical evidence suggests that disgust can be involved in moral cognition in the following ways: A. Disgust sometimes causally influences conscious moral beliefs. Wheatley and Haidt found that subjects hypnotized to experience disgust upon encountering an arbitrary word tended to make harsher moral judgments

100 Erik J. Wielenberg when they encountered the relevant word than when they did not.44 They suggest that “participants used their feelings of disgust . . . as information about the wrongness of the act” and that “gut feelings can indeed influence moral judgments.”45 More recently, Kendall Eskine, Natalie Kacinik, and Jesse Prinz found that subjects tended to make harsher moral judgments when experiencing a disgusting taste than when experiencing a sweet or neutral taste.46 Still more recently, Inbar, Bloom, and Pizarro found that “inducing disgust by manipulating the odor in a room caused participants to evaluate gay men more negatively.”47 However, the transition from experiencing disgust to forming a conscious negative moral judgment is not inevitable. It turns out that some individuals are more sensitive to their own bodily sensations than others, and as Schnall and colleagues found, disgust only influences explicit moral judgment in those with a high degree of sensitivity to their own bodily sensations.48 B. Disgust is sometimes an effect of conscious moral belief. Consider moral vegetarianism—the practice of refraining from eating meat for moral reasons. There is strong evidence that moral vegetarians tend to find meat more disgusting than those who refrain from eating meat for nonmoral reasons (e.g., health reasons).49 That by itself does not reveal whether being particularly disposed to experience disgust (having a high degree of ‘disgust sensitivity’) is a cause or effect of believing that eating meat is morally wrong. Fessler et al. note that if disgust sensitivity comes first, then those who are more prone to experience disgust should tend to eat less meat. On the other hand, if the belief that meat-eating is wrong comes first, there is no reason to expect any such correlation.50 They found “a small positive correlation between total meat consumption and disgust sensitivity.”51 They conclude that “at least in this case, disgust is a consequence of, rather than causal of, the adoption of a moral position.”52 C. Disgust is linked with politically conservative moral beliefs. A number of studies have revealed a correlation between disgust sensitivity and certain moral views associated with social conservatism—for example, the belief that homosexuality is immoral.53 Terrizzi, Shook, and Ventis found that disgust sensitivity is “predictive of socially conservative political beliefs such as immigration, abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, medical marijuana, and homosexual marriage.”54 In another study, Inbar and colleagues found that higher levels of disgust sensitivity were associated with voting for John McCain rather than Barack Obama in the 2008 US Presidential Election.55 D. Disgust is malleable. As the case of moral vegetarianism shows, changes in our conscious moral beliefs can modify what disgusts us.56 Thus, conscious moral reasoning and reflection can significantly impact our conscious moral judgments even when the proximate causes of such judgments are emotional responses like disgust.57 Additional evidence for the malleability of disgust comes from Haidt, who notes that “in the past fifty years people in many Western societies

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 101 have . . . come to feel disgust in response to many fewer kinds of sexual activity.”58 Cross-cultural studies of moral psychology also support disgust’s plasticity. Haidt observes that different cultures emphasize the “big three” elements of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity) to varying degrees. Such cultural emphasis in turn shapes the emotional dispositions of people raised within each culture: A child is born prepared to develop moral intuitions in all three ethics, but her local cultural environment generally stresses only one or two of the ethics. Intuitions within culturally supported ethics become sharper and more chronically accessible . . . whereas intuitions within unsupported ethics become weaker and less accessible.59 For example, Shweder and colleagues observe that “in direct contrast to the secular society in the United States, the discourse of autonomy and individualism is backgrounded in Hindu society, whereas the discourses of community and divinity are foregrounded.”60 According to Haidt, disgust is most closely associated with divinity. Thus, disgust would play a larger role in the moral cognition of members of cultures in which divinity is emphasized than it would in the moral cognition of members of other kinds of cultures. This proposal helps to explain a fact that Inbar et al. puzzle over. Noting the correlation between disgust-sensitivity and social conservatism, they also suggest that “a resident of Utah is far more likely to be conservative than a resident of Massachusetts, but it seems unlikely that Utah residents are dramatically more disgust-sensitive than Massachusetts residents.”61 The theories of Haidt and Schweder suggest that greater disgust sensitivity and political conservatism may be effects of a common cause—namely, having been raised in a cultural milieu that foregrounds divinity. That hypothesis may account for the greater disgust sensitivity of Utah residents when compared with Massachusetts residents. Those two states are part of the same nation, but there are important cultural differences between them. In the next section, I draw on the empirical evidence discussed above together with some ideas from Aristotle to explain how, according to MoRM, disgust-related moral cognition can generate moral knowledge.

VI.

ARISTOTLE, DISGUST, AND MORAL KNOWLEDGE

Aristotle holds that a fully virtuous person exhibits coherence between her moral judgments and her emotional dispositions. Neither reason nor passion is a slave to the other; instead, reason and emotion work together to generate virtuous action. As Aristotle puts it, in a virtuous person, “everything is in harmony with the voice of reason.”62 Aristotle recognizes that this harmony is not a state we are born in, nor does it come easily. Accordingly, an important part of the task of becoming

102 Erik J. Wielenberg virtuous is the training or habituation of one’s emotional dispositions: To become just, we must repeatedly perform just actions; to become courageous, we must repeatedly perform courageous actions, and so on.63 Aristotle seems to recognize that some emotions may be harder to whip into shape than others; he expresses particular concern about pleasure.64 He also recognizes that some individuals will be more naturally inclined toward virtue than others; some people possess “natural virtue,” which can be transformed into genuine virtue when combined with practical wisdom.65 Such Aristotelian ideas mesh nicely with MoRM. In terms of that model, we can say that an important element of Aristotelian moral development is shaping our psychology so that we m-possess the right moral principles. Combining this Aristotelian framework with contemporary empirical research on disgust suggests the following picture. Disgust is a basic, innate human emotion that comes prepared with a suite of typical triggers. However, disgust has a certain degree of flexibility and hence it can, at least to some extent, be domesticated. Such domestication involves modifying our psychological dispositions so that disgust is triggered by the right sorts of nonconscious classifications. Recall Harman’s cat example. If feelings of disgust in moral cognition tend to produce judgments of moral wrongness and my psychology can be shaped so that a nonconscious classification of an act as a case of torturing a cat just for fun triggers disgust in me, then disgust can help to secure the right sort of connection between that nonconscious classification and the moral judgment that what the hoodlums are doing is wrong. Aristotle writes: [A]s regards men, there is considerable variation. The same things give delight to some and pain to others, are painful and hateful to some and pleasant and agreeable to others. We find this also true of sweetness: the same things do not seem sweet to a man in fever and to a healthy person. Nor is the same thing hot to an invalid and to a man in good condition.66 Aristotle does not mention disgust here, but his point clearly applies: Different people can be disgusted by different things. In the case of pleasure, Aristotle says that “what seem [to a virtuous person] to be pleasures are pleasures and what he enjoys is pleasant.”67 Aristotle’s view is that when one’s emotional dispositions have been properly calibrated with moral reality, anger, pleasure, and the like will be reliable indicators of moral truth; the same is true of disgust. Whether that is the case depends heavily upon one’s upbringing and cultural background. When it comes to the issue of whether our disgust-related moral cognition generates knowledge, upbringing “makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference.”68 Thus, disgust’s nonmoral origins do not imply that it is always a distorting influence in moral cognition.

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 103 There is another worry about disgust’s role in moral cognition that is worth considering. Russell and Giner-Sorolla advance the unreasoning disgust hypothesis: [C]ompared to anger, the related moral emotion of disgust is less likely to be justified using elaborated reasons: that is, references to the causes and consequences of the moral violation. By contrast, disgust [is] . . . more likely to be justified with unelaborated reasons, which are references to disgust itself, or to general evaluations of the moral violation.69 The worry here is that disgust stands out from other emotions involved in moral cognition in being much less responsive to reasons or evidence. As explained above, MoRM is compatible with (though it does not require) the existence of causal connections from nonconscious classifications to emotional responses and from those emotional responses to particular moral judgments. Disgust’s unreasoning nature suggests the worry that in the case of disgust, the relevant nonconscious classifications are too crude to produce reliable moral judgments. To support their unreasoning disgust hypothesis, Russell and GinerSorolla investigated the kinds of reasons people give to justify their anger and the kinds of reasons they give to justify their feelings of bodily disgust, which is disgust toward the violation of bodily moral norms (e.g., norms against cannibalism or incest).70 Their research confirmed that in the case of anger, subjects tended to give “elaborated reasons” (e.g., “they make me feel angry because they abuse the power they have been given”), whereas in the case of bodily disgust, subjects tended to give unelaborated reasons (e.g., “they are disgusting because they are gross”).71 By this point, we should be very wary of the inference from (a) people are clueless when it comes to justifying their moral judgments in terms of consciously accessible principles to (b) such people’s judgments are not suitably responsive to morally relevant considerations. A central theme of this chapter is that a significant amount of hidden System 1 cognition typically underlies our conscious moral judgments and that such cognition typically conforms to moral principles to which we lack direct conscious access. And, indeed, Russell and Giner-Sorolla’s research suggests that this is so in the case of disgust as well. They found evidence for the availability hypothesis—the hypothesis “that if plausible elaborated reasons for disgust were made available to people, they would be used to justify feelings of disgust.”72 They found that when elaborated reasons relevant to bodily disgust were made available to subjects, “this eliminated the asymmetry in reasoning between anger and disgust that had been found for bodily moral violations.”73 Additionally, “[p]articipants were not indiscriminately picking elaborated reasons; instead, they selected impurity/abnormality reasons more often to explain

104 Erik J. Wielenberg their disgust at a bodily violation than disgust at a nonbodily violation or anger at any violation.”74 By bringing impurity/abnormality norms to the attention of their subjects, Russell and Giner-Sorolla may have helped those subjects to understand better the cognitive processes behind their judgments. As I pointed out in Section 3 above, people sometimes successfully use “post hoc rationalization” to discover the hidden principles to which their moral judgments conform. Perhaps such was the case with Russell and Giner-Sorolla’s subjects. Consider a final worry about disgust’s role in moral cognition. The worry starts with the premise that disgust is invariably tied up with politically conservative ‘purity norms.’75 Consequently, when disgust is involved in moral cognition, it is a sure sign that the m-possessed principles to which such cognition conforms are false and consequently disgust-related moral cognition is unreliable and yields unjustified moral beliefs.76 To make this argument go through, the case against conservative purity norms must be made. It is far from clear that all such norms stand or fall together (compare, for example, norms condemning incest and cannibalism with norms condemning homosexual sex). But the main weakness of the objection is that its central empirical premise—that the presence of disgust in moral cognition is a sure sign of the involvement of purity norms—is false. The objection underestimates the flexibility of disgust; recall the case of moral vegetarianism. Moral vegetarianism is a liberal rather than conservative moral position, yet disgust is often involved in the moral cognition of moral vegetarians on the morality of eating meat. Additionally, H. A. Chapman et al. found evidence of a link between feelings of disgust and moral cognition related to fairness and unfairness. Specifically, they found that participants in the Ultimatum Game “showed both subjective (self-report) and objective (facial motor) signs of disgust that were proportional to the degree of unfairness they experienced.”77 While sadness and anger also coincided with unfairness, “unfair offers evoked disgust to a greater degree than both anger . . . and sadness.”78 Thus, disgust’s involvement in moral cognition extends far beyond cognition that conforms to conservative purity norms. The ‘purity norms’ objection can be met.

VII.

CONCLUSION

I conclude that we have been given no good reason to doubt that moral judgments can qualify as knowledge when their proximate causes are emotions—even an ‘irresponsible’ emotion like disgust.79 Even if our emotions often influence our moral judgments, it does not follow that those moral judgments are merely ‘projections of internal attitudes.’ By employing the right sorts of nonconscious classifications, affect-laden System 1 moral cognition can produce conscious moral judgments that conform to correct moral principles and are epistemically justified.

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 105 I have considered three kinds of arguments for the view that disgust is inevitably a distorting influence in moral cognition. The first argument has it that disgust’s nonmoral origins make its influence on moral cognition suspect. I addressed that argument by combining Aristotle’s ideas about moral development with empirical evidence for disgust’s malleability to suggest that despite its nonmoral origins, disgust can be domesticated and put into the service of generating moral knowledge. The second argument was that disgust is a particularly crude or ‘unreasoning’ emotion and for that reason is likely to play only a distorting role in moral cognition. As explained above, that worry can be put aside on empirical grounds. Finally, I considered the argument that disgust’s close ties with dubious ‘purity norms’ make it an invariably distorting influence on moral cognition. That argument is incomplete without some reason to reject all purity norms; more importantly, there is empirical evidence indicating that it is not the case that disgust is always tied to such purity norms. As our understanding of human moral cognition grows, we should not be too quick to abandon old-fashioned notions like moral knowledge and virtue. I offer this chapter in hopes of contributing to caution in that regard.80 NOTES 1. Joshua Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 848. 2. Marc Hauser, Moral Minds (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 199. 3. Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23. 4. See Wilson, Strangers, 49; and Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 19–105. Stanovich and Toplak emphasize that the System 1/System 2 distinction does not imply that these two kinds of cognition “map explicitly to two distinct brain systems”; see K. E. Stanovich and M. E. Toplak, “Defining Features Versus Incidental Correlates of Type 1 and Type 2 Processing,” Mind and Society 11 (2012): 4. Accordingly, while I sometimes refer to System 1 and System 2 as entities, strictly speaking, the distinction is between two types of cognition. 5. Kahneman, Thinking, 237. 6. Matthias Steup, “Epistemology,” ed. Edward N. Zalta, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2012/entries/epistemology/, section 2.3; Michael Bergmann, Justification without Awareness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9–11. 7. Wilson, Strangers, 16. 8. Kahneman, Thinking, 237. 9. See Steup, “Epistemology,” section 2.5. Indeed, it’s plausible that many animals and perhaps even sufficiently young children are all System 1 and no System 2; see Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 10. See Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 285.

106 Erik J. Wielenberg 11. Ibid., 278. 12. No doubt access internalists and externalists of all kinds would have much to say about the considerations I have offered here. My aim is not to establish decisively that a hybrid theory is the way to go but rather to make the case that such an approach deserves a serious hearing. 13. Richard Feldman, Epistemology (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 96–99. 14. Kahneman, Thinking. 15. Jesse Prinz, “Resisting the Linguistic Analogy: A Commentary on Hauser, Young, and Cushman,” in Moral Psychology Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 161. 16. I think that S1-R is immune to the worries for reliabilism raised by BonJour’s case of Norman. See Laurence Bonjour, “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, no. 1 (1980): 62. Very briefly, Norman is an inexplicably reliable clairvoyant; the case is supposed to demonstrate that reliability is not sufficient for epistemic justification. While the case may be effective against the simple version of reliabilism that BonJour targets, S1-R does not generate the problematic conclusion that Norman’s clairvoyance beliefs are epistemically justified. 17. In developing the ideas about epistemic justification and related matters in this section, I benefited greatly from Juan Comesana’s discussions of evidentialist reliabilism; see Juan Comesana, “A Well-Founded Solution to the Generality Problem,” Philosophical Studies 129, no. 1 (2006): 27–47 and Juan Comesana, “Evidentialist Reliablism,” Nous 44, no. 4 (2010): 571–600. That is not to say, of course, that Comesana would agree with what I’ve said here. 18. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 45; for an earlier characterization of intuitions as feelings, see Jonathan Haidt and Fredrik Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology,” in Moral Psychology Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 188. 19. Haidt and Bjorklund, “Social Intuitionists,” 189. 20. Ibid., 197. 21. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, “Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (2007): 289–294. 22. See Hauser, Moral Minds; Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Marc Hauser, “The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment: Testing Three Principles of Harm,” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (December 2006): 1082–1089; Horgan and Timmons, “Morphological Rationalism”; Ron Mallon and Shaun Nichols, “Rules,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. John M. Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 302–304; John Mikhail, Elements of Moral Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Fiery Cushman and Liane Young, “Patterns of Moral Judgment Derive From Nonmoral Psychological Representations,” Cognitive Science 35 (2011): 1052–1075. 23. Hauser, Moral Minds, 124–131; Mallon and Nichols, “Rules,” 304; and Mikhail, Elements, 84–85. 24. Horgan and Timmons, “Morphological Rationalism,” 285–286 (italics in original); see also Marc D. Hauser, Liang Young, and Fiery Cushman, “Reviving Rawls’s Linguistic Analogy: Operative Principles and the Causal

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 107

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

Structure of Moral Actions,” in Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group, The Moral Psychology Handbook, 109; and Mikhail, Elements, 19–20. Cushman and Young, “Patterns,” 1070. It should be noted, however, that even when people can state the principles to which their conscious moral judgments conform, that does not necessarily mean that the cognitive processes that actually generate their moral judgments involve the conscious application of such principles to the cases at hand; see Cushman and Young, “Patterns.” Hauser, Moral Minds, 44–54. Shaun Nichols, Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Prinz, “Resisting.” For helpful overviews of this debate, see Giuseppe Ugazio, Claus Lamm, and Tania Singer, “The Role of Emotions for Moral Judgments Depends on the Type of Emotion and Moral Scenario,” Emotion 12, no. 3 (2012): 579–590; and Liane Young, “Moral Thinking,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology, ed. D. Reisberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See David Morrow, “Moral Psychology and the ‘Mencian Creature,’ ” Philosophical Psychology 22, no. 3 (2009): 281–304; and Hauser, Young, and Cushman, “Reviving Rawls.” Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Joshua Greene, “Our Multi-System Moral Psychology: Towards a Consensus View,” in Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group, The Moral Psychology Handbook, 55; for some of the empirical research relating to this principle, see Hauser, Moral Minds, 124–131; Cushman, Young, and Hauser, “The Role of Conscious”; Hauser et al., “Reviving Rawls”; and Cushman and Young, “Patterns.” Cushman, Young, and Green, “Multi-System,” 58. Ibid. This proposal is based largely on the finding that when experimental subjects contemplate actions that involve using harm as a means to achieve a greater good, there is increased activity in areas of their brains associated with emotion. Cushman, Young, and Greene concede that there is “room for multiple interpretations” of this evidence (Ibid.). The present discussion requires only that Cushman, Young, and Greene’s proposal is among the plausible options. Joshua Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” in Moral Psychology Volume 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 64. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4. Italics in original. Morrow, “Moral psychology,” 298. Italics in original. For this example and the point that the relevant evidence need not entail the associated moral judgment, see Kieran Setiya, Knowing Right from Wrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 50–52. Ibid., 51. See Michael Huemer, “Revisionary Intuitionism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 25, no. 1 (2008): 371. Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark McCauley, “Disgust: The Body and Soul Emotion of the 21st Century,” in Disgust and its Disorders, ed. D. McKay and O. Olatunji (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2008), 10. Ibid., 12. Daniel Kelley, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 4.

108 Erik J. Wielenberg 43. See Rozin et al., “Disgust,” 5; Rozin et al., “The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping Between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes (Community, Autonomy, Divinity),” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 4 (2008): 575; and Kelley, Yuck!, 6–7. 44. Thalia Wheatley and Jonathan Haidt, “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe,” Psychological Science 16, no. 10 (2005): 780–784; see also Simone Schnall, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald L. Clore, and Alexander H. Jordan, “Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1096–1109. 45. Wheatley and Haidt, “Hypnotic Disgust,” 781. 46. Kendall J. Eskine, Natalie A. Kacinik, and Jesse J. Prinz, “A Bad Taste in the Mouth: Gustatory Disgust Influences Moral Judgment,” Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (2011): 295–299. 47. Yoel Inbar, David A. Pizarro, and Paul Bloom, “Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men,” Emotion 12, no. 1 (2012): 25. 48. Schnall et al., “Disgust.” 49. Paul Rozin, Maureen Markwith, and Caryn Stoess, “Moralization and Becoming a Vegetarian: The Transformation of Preference Into Values and the Recruitment of Disgust,” Psychological Science 8, no. 2 (1997): 67–73. 50. Daniel M. T. Fessler, Alexander P. Arguello, Jeanette M. Mekdara, and Ramon Macias, “Disgust Sensitivity and Meat Consumption: A Test of an Emotivist Account of Moral Vegetarianism,” Appetite 41 (2003): 33. 51. Ibid., 35. Italics in original. 52. Ibid., 38. A second example involves the ‘moralization’ of cigarette smoking; see Paul Rozin and Leher Singh, “The Moralization of Cigarette Smoking in the United States,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 8, no. 3 (1999): 321–337. 53. See Yoel Inbar, David A. Pizarro, and Paul Bloom, “Conservatives Are More Easily Disgusted than Liberals,” Cognition and Emotion 23, no. 4 (2009): 714–725; Yoel Inbar, Joshua Knobe, David A. Pizarro, and Paul Bloom, “Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Intuitive Disapproval of Gays,” Emotion 9, no. 3 (2009): 435–439; John A. Terrizzi Jr., Natalie J. Shook, and W. Larry Ventis, “Disgust: A Predictor of Social Conservatism and Prejudicial Attitudes toward Homosexuals,” Personality and Individual Differences 49 (2010): 587–592; Inbar et al., “Disgusting Smells”; and Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer, and Jonathan Haidt, “Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 3, no. 5 (2012): 537–544. 54. Terrizzi, Shook, and Ventis, “Disgust,” 591. 55. Inbar et al., “Disgust Sensitivity,” 540–541. 56. See also Kelley, Yuck!, 34, 61–99. 57. See Jeanette Kennett and Cordelia Fine, “Will the Real Moral Judgment Please Stand Up? The Implications of Social Intuitionist Models of Cognition for Meta-ethics and Moral Psychology,” Ethical Theory and Practice 12 (2009): 85. 58. Haidt, Righteous, 124. 59. Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 827. 60. Richard A. Shweder, Nancy C. Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park, “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, and Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering,” in Morality and Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. A. M. Brandt and P. Rozin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 141.

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 109 61. Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom, “Conservatives,” 723. 62. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999): 1102b25–30. 63. Ibid., 2.1–4. 64. Ibid., 6.13. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 1176a10–15. 67. Ibid., 1176a15–20. 68. Ibid., 1103b20–25. 69. Pascale Sophie Russell and Roger Giner-Sorolla, “Social Justifications for Moral Emotions: When Reasons for Disgust are Less Elaborated than for Anger,” Emotion 11, no. 3 (June 2011): 637. 70. Ibid., 638. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 641. 73. Ibid., 643. 74. Ibid. 75. See Rozin et al., “The CAD Triad”; and E. J. Horberg, C. Oveis, D. Keltner, and A. Cohen, “Disgust and the Moralization of Purity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 6 (2009): 963–976. 76. See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 74. 77. H. A. Chapman, D. A. Kim, J. M. Suskind, and A. K. Anderson, “In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust,” Science 323 (February 2009): 1224. 78. Ibid. 79. See also Alexandra Plakias, “The Good and the Gross,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16, no. 2 (2013): 261–278. 80. Some of the ideas in this chapter were presented at the meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder June 21–23, 2012. I thank the audience and my commentator on that occasion, Nina Strohminger, for their helpful feedback. Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno read an earlier version of this chapter; I thank them for their insightful comments.

REFERENCES Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostwald. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999. Bergmann, Michael. Justification without Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bonjour, Laurence. “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, no. 1 (1980): 53–73. Chapman, H. A., D. A. Kim, J. M. Suskind, and A. K. Anderson. “In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust.” Science 323 (February 2009): 1222–1226. Comesana, Juan. “A Well-Founded Solution to the Generality Problem.” Philosophical Studies 129, no. 1 (2006): 27–47. Comesana, Juan. “Evidentialist Reliablism.” Nous 44, no. 4 (2010): 571–600. Cushman, Fiery and Liane Young. “Patterns of Moral Judgment Derive From Nonmoral Psychological Representations.” Cognitive Science 35 (2011): 1052–1075. Cushman, Fiery, Liane Young, and Joshua Greene. “Our Multi-System Moral Psychology: Towards a Consensus View.” In The Moral Psychology Handbook,

110 Erik J. Wielenberg edited by John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group, 47–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cushman, Fiery, Liane Young, and Marc Hauser. “The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment: Testing Three Principles of Harm.” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (December 2006): 1082–1089. Dennett, Daniel. Kinds of Minds. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Eskine, Kendall J., Natalie A. Kacinik, and Jesse J. Prinz. “A Bad Taste in the Mouth: Gustatory Disgust Influences Moral Judgment.” Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (2011): 295–299. Feldman, Richard. Epistemology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Fessler, Daniel M. T., Alexander P. Arguello, Jeanette M. Mekdara, and Ramon Macias. “Disgust Sensitivity and Meat Consumption: A Test of an Emotivist Account of Moral Vegetarianism.” Appetite 41 (2003): 31–41. Greene, Joshua. “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 846–849. ———. “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul.” In Moral Psychology Volume 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development, edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 35–79. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814–834. ———. The Righteous Mind. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. Haidt, Jonathan and Fredrik Bjorklund. “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology.” In Moral Psychology Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 181–217. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Harman, Gilbert. The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hauser, Marc. Moral Minds. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Hauser, Marc, Liane Young, and Fiery Cushman. “Reviving Rawls’s Linguistic Analogy: Operative Principles and the Causal Structure of Moral Actions.” In The Moral Psychology Handbook, edited by John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group, 107–143. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Helzer, Erik and David Pizarro. “Dirty Liberals!: Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes.” Psychological Science 22, no. 4 (2011): 517–522. Horberg, E. J., C. Oveis, D. Keltner, and A. Cohen. “Disgust and the Moralization of Purity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 6 (2009): 963–976. Horgan, Terry and Mark Timmons. “Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (2007): 279–295. Huemer, Michael. “Revisionary Intuitionism.” Social Philosophy and Policy 25, no. 1 (2008): 368– 392. Inbar, Yoel, Joshua Knobe, David A. Pizarro, and Paul Bloom. “Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Intuitive Disapproval of Gays.” Emotion 9, no. 3 (2009): 435–439. Inbar, Yoel, David A. Pizarro, and Paul Bloom. “Conservatives are More Easily Disgusted than Liberals.” Cognition and Emotion 23, no. 4 (2009): 714–725. ———. “Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men.” Emotion 12, no. 1 (2012): 23–27. Inbar, Yoel, David A. Pizarro, Ravi Iyer, and Jonathan Haidt. “Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 3, no. 5 (2012): 537–544. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Disgust, Moral Knowledge, and Virtue 111 Kelley, Daniel. Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Kennett, Jeanette and Cordelia Fine. “Will the Real Moral Judgment Please Stand Up? The Implications of Social Intuitionist Models of Cognition for Meta-ethics and Moral Psychology.” Ethical Theory and Practice 12 (2009): 77–96. Mallon, Ron and Shaun Nichols. “Rules.” In The Moral Psychology Handbook, edited by John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group, 297–320. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Mikhail, John. Elements of Moral Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Morrow, David. “Moral Psychology and the ‘Mencian Creature,’” Philosophical Psychology 22, no. 3 (2009): 281–304. Nichols, Shaun. Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Nussbaum, Martha. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Plakias, Alexandra. “The Good and the Gross.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16, no. 2 (2013): 261–278. Prinz, Jesse. “Resisting the Linguistic Analogy: A Commentary on Hauser, Young, and Cushman.” In Moral Psychology Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 157–170. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark McCauley. “Disgust: The Body and Soul Emotion of the 21st Century.” In Disgust and its Disorders, edited by D. McKay and O. Olatunji, 9–29. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2008. Rozin, Paul, Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada, and Jonathan Haidt. “The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping Between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes (Community, Autonomy, Divinity).” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 4 (2008): 574–586. Rozin, Paul, Maureen Markwith, and Caryn Stoess. “Moralization and Becoming a Vegetarian: The Transformation of Preference into Values and the Recruitment of Disgust.” Psychological Science 8, no. 2 (1997): 67–73. Rozin, Paul and Leher Singh. “The Moralization of Cigarette Smoking in the United States,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 8, no. 3 (1999): 321–337. Russell, Pascale Sophie and Roger Giner-Sorolla. “Social Justifications for Moral Emotions: When Reasons for Disgust are Less Elaborated than for Anger.” Emotion 11, no. 3 (June 2011): 637–646. Schnall, Simone, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald L. Clore, and Alexander H. Jordan. “Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1096–1109. Shweder, Richard A., Nancy C. Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park. “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, and Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering.” In Morality and Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by A. M. Brandt and P. Rozin, 119–169. New York: Routledge, 1997. Setiya, Kieran. Knowing Right from Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Shafer-Landau, Russ. Moral Realism: A Defence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Stanovich, K. E. and M. E. Toplak. “Defining Features versus Incidental Correlates of Type 1 and Type 2 Processing.” Mind and Society 11 (2012): 3–13. Steup, Matthias. “Epistemology.” Edited by Edward N. Zalta. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/ entries/epistemology/.

112 Erik J. Wielenberg Terrizzi Jr., John A., Natalie J. Shook, and Larry W. Ventis. “Disgust: A Predictor of Social Conservatism and Prejudicial Attitudes toward Homosexuals.” Personality and Individual Differences 49 (2010): 587–592. Ugazio, Giuseppe, Claus Lamm, and Tania Singer. “The Role of Emotions for Moral Judgments Depends on the Type of Emotion and Moral Scenario.” Emotion 12, no. 3 (2012): 579–590. Wheatley, Thalia and Jonathan Haidt. “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe.” Psychological Science 16, no. 10 (2005): 780–784. Wilson, Timothy. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Young, Liane. “Moral Thinking.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology, edited by D. Reisberg, 753–768. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

6

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue Franco V. Trivigno

My aim in this paper is to place the research on empathic concern within a distinctively neo-Aristotelian virtue ethical framework in order to show how empathic concern contributes to virtue.1 On the Aristotelian view, virtue is necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia; in addition to virtue, we need certain other objective goods, especially social goods like friendship and community, in order to flourish. The thesis of this paper is that one form of empathy, empathic concern, significantly contributes to virtue, which is constitutive of eudaimonia, and that empathic concern can provide some of the causal and explanatory structure underlying the moral psychology of virtue. I begin by briefly surveying the different kinds of empathy that have been discussed in the philosophical and psychological literature in order to motivate my focus on Daniel Batson’s notion of empathic concern. Then, I provide an account of empathic concern, its relation to helping behavior, altruistic motivation, and the web of psychological mechanisms it involves, and I briefly survey some of the relevant empirical research.2 With this account in hand, I turn to the role of empathic concern in contributing to virtue. Here, I argue that empathic concern seems to be important for causing some virtuous action and may be plausibly considered necessary to the development of certain other-regarding virtues. Then, I briefly explore how, given my account, one would train one’s empathic concern in order to develop the relevant other-regarding virtues.

I.

VARIETIES OF EMPATHY

Empathy is a highly vexed concept in that there are a number of competing notions in the literature meant to explain highly disparate phenomena. Getting clear on which notion of empathy is relevant is thus crucial to the success of any argument about empathy. The goal of this section is neither to provide an exhaustive account of the different types of empathy nor to impose order by providing an argument for which of these notions is the ‘real’ empathy3 nor by constructing a broader notion of empathy that encompasses the variety of types.4 My ambitions are rather more modest: I will provide some

114 Franco V. Trivigno broad characterizations of the different kinds of empathy in order to specify which notion of empathy my argument concerns and, equally important, which not. This is particularly important because, as will become apparent, I will be working with a notion of empathy that is not the one typically favored by philosophers.5 Batson provides a useful survey of the different types of empathy in his most recent book.6 In addition to his own notion of empathic concern, which he defines as “other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need,” he distinguishes seven similar but distinct uses of the terms: (1) knowing another’s internal state, (2) adopting another’s posture (motor mimicry) or matching another’s neural response, (3) coming to feel as the other feels, (4) projecting oneself into the situation of a person, animal, or object for artistic purposes, (5) adopting an imagine-other perspective—that is, imagining what the other’s situation is like for the other, (6) adopting an imagine-self perspective—that is, imagining oneself in another’s situation, and (7) feeling vicarious personal distress.7 Leaving aside (2), which is a prominent phenomenon in the developmental literature, whereby infants come to imitate gestures and facial expressions of their caregivers, and (4), which is primarily aesthetic, the kinds of empathy may be divided into three broad categories: the cognitive, imaginative, and the emotional. (a) The cognitive type of empathy is picked out by the first item on Batson’s list, and the relevant phenomenon of so-called mind-reading has received a lot of attention from both psychologists and philosophers. This kind of empathy does not figure prominently in discussions of the ethical import of empathy, since it does not necessarily involve any emotional or imaginative component. Rather, the interest and focus of this phenomenon lies in the mind’s interpersonal information gathering and processing abilities. So, I set it aside here. (b) I label a second group of types of empathy imaginative to signal that they make fundamental to empathy some complex imaginative process whereby one imaginatively inhabits another’s situation. It is important to note that these are also emotional in that the imaginative process is causally implicated in the agent coming to feel a certain way as a result. However, unlike the next group, these make the imaginative act the locus of empathy. Batson’s fifth and sixth type are picked out by this category, but it is important to see that, despite the similarities, the two kinds of imagination are fundamentally different. The imagine-self type of empathy, sometimes called projective empathy, picks out the phenomenon of imagining what it would be like for oneself in another’s situation. So, for example, Jim and Linda are good friends. Jim is going through a difficult and painful divorce in which custody of the children is a major issue. Linda, also married with children, imagines what it would be like for her to go through a divorce. As a result of these thoughts,

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 115 she may come to feel pain similar to that felt by Jim. It should be clear this involves a fairly complex and diverse set of psychic resources: Linda must believe that Jim is in the relevant situation, must imagine what it would be like for her to be in that situation, and have some affective response to that imaginative situation. Such imagining is thought to cause vicarious, and ultimately self-directed, personal distress, the seventh item on Batson’s list. However, the affective response may deviate from that of the empathic target in cases where the one taking the imagine-self perspective does not share the target’s attitudes towards the situation: For example, perhaps Linda wants desperately out of her marriage and is envious of Jim.8 Most consider this form of empathy to be self-centered or self-oriented, in that one continues to inhabit one’s own perspective (as opposed to that of the imaginative target), and thus not to be a genuine form of empathy.9 However, taking the imagine-self perspective may sometimes serve as a stepping stone to the next kind of imaginative empathy, the imagine-other type. The imagine-other form of empathy, called “empathy proper” by Miller and the “real empathy” by Coplan, is very similar to the imagine-self type, but with a crucial difference—namely, that taking the imagine-other perspective involves imagining what it is like for the other in the other’s situation.10 Coplan defines this “complex imaginative process” as one in which “an observer simulates another’s situated psychological states, while maintaining clear self-other differentiation. . . . [This] can provide experiential understanding of another from the inside.”11 To return to the previous example, Linda would imagine not what it would be like for her to go through a divorce but what it is like for Jim to be going through a divorce. One upshot of this is that the feelings have identical objects, Jim’s getting a divorce, and thus it keeps the affective responses closer to one another: It does not matter if Linda wants out of her marriage when taking up the imagine-other perspective. By empathizing with Jim in this sense, she inhabits his perspective and comes to feel as he does. This form of empathy is also complex, involving belief, imagination, and affect and the relevant causal connections. Further, many experiments have shown that when people are asked to imagine what the other is going through, they are significantly more likely to help them (see my discussion below).12 (c) I call the last group emotional in that they make feelings or emotions central to empathy. There are two quite different groups of views in this category: One concerns the phenomenon of emotional contagion, whereby one automatically or subconsciously adopts the mood or emotion or others; the second view makes the emotional concern for the other, sometimes called sympathy, the central component of empathy.13 Emotional contagion involves the idea that emotions or moods are contagious and that bystanders can ‘catch’ these emotions. For example, Theresa

116 Franco V. Trivigno arrives at a party in which people are eagerly and happily talking and is immediately infected by the mood in the room. Soon she too is engaged in conversation and feeling good. Unlike the imaginative kinds of empathy, emotional contagion requires neither complex imaginative acts nor discrete beliefs, and these effects have been observed in children and infants. Further, the effects typically happen without the person being aware that it is happening. You might notice that the party is great and you are in a good mood, but you don’t quite understand the connection between the two. The emotional concern view is best exemplified by the work of Batson. He identifies empathy with the other-oriented emotional concern one experiences as a result of perceiving someone else in need. Returning to the example, Linda’s empathizing with Jim consists in her feeling sorry for Jim because of the painful situation in which he finds himself. This emotional response is empathy, whether or not Linda has performed any imaginative acts. I will give a fuller account of Batson’s view in the next section, but for now, I want to draw a few comparisons and contrasts with the other views. First, like the imaginative types of empathy, empathic concern involves a complex of psychic resources, including belief, perception, and feeling. Empathic concern is something that, unlike emotional contagion, usually occurs with the conscious awareness of the agent. Further, it is causally related not only to helping behavior but to altruistic motivation (see below). Last, Batson thinks that cognitive empathy and both forms of imaginative empathy are “precursors to and facilitators of empathic concern.”14 However, while recognizing the usefulness of imaginative projecting in causing empathic concern, he denies that any imaginative acts are necessary to empathic concern.15 In trying to formulate the contribution of empathy to eudaimonia, this paper will be working with Batson’s notion of empathy as empathic concern for four reasons: First, Batson’s extensive, decades-long research program into empathic concern makes his view one of the most prominent and empirically grounded views of empathy in psychology. It thus deserves the scrutiny of philosophers looking for an empirically grounded account of empathy. Second, despite Batson’s prominence, contemporary philosophers, following the lead of Hume and Smith, have tended to favor imaginative versions of empathy, especially the imagine-other version above.16 If for no other reason than to provide an alternative to such views, it is worthwhile exploring Batson’s view in this context. Third, there seems to be good reason to want an alternative, since the imaginative task necessary to empathy seems complex and difficult enough to make empathy a very rare achievement, since the standards for fully taking up the other’s perspective seem high.17 Batson’s view makes empathy a more everyday occurrence, and this seems prima facie more plausible. Fourth, Batson’s view of the causal psychological mechanisms involved in empathic concern make it a good fit for explaining the moral psychology of virtue and for placing empathy within a eudaemonist perspective.

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 117 II.

BATSON’S NOTION OF EMPATHIC CONCERN

In Altruism in Humans, Batson defines empathy, or empathic concern, as an “other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need.”18 Empathic concern is “not a single discrete emotion but includes a whole constellation . . . [including] feelings of sympathy . . . softheartedness, tenderness, sorrow, sadness, upset, distress, concern and grief.”19 Note that the affect involved tends to be experienced as unpleasant or have a negative valence.20 The empathic emotion is other-oriented “in the sense that it involves feeling for the other”—this is important to underline in order to distinguish such feelings from self-oriented distress.21 Further, unlike imagine-other empathy, which essentially involves identifying with the other, empathic concern essentially involves feeling for the other (as I mention above, some philosophers would call empathic concern ‘sympathy’). According to Batson’s famous empathy-altruism hypothesis, empathic concern produces altruistic motivation—that is, “a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare.”22 This thesis does not imply that empathic concern is the only source of other-oriented motivation, but it does hold that “all motivation produced by empathic concern is altruistic.”23 In short, empathic concern is sufficient but not necessary for altruistic motivation. On Batson’s account, whereas altruistic motivation does lead to helping or prosocial behavior, there may be certain defeating conditions or overriding concerns also present.24 Batson and his colleagues have conducted numerous experiments over the course of several decades to test the relationship among empathic concern, altruistic motivation, and helping behavior. Many of these experiments proceed by comparing responses to requests for help of two sets of participants in which one set has been given instructions that make it more likely for them to feel empathic concern, whereas the other set has been given neutral instructions.25 This may be understood as a case of ‘priming,’ or temporarily raising the accessibility of a mental state, often without the subject’s awareness, such that it is more quickly and easily brought to mind.26 To give one example, Miho Toi and Batson had volunteers from a psychology class listen to a recording in which a student from the class, Carol (unbeknownst to the class not really a student), describes how she was in an accident and was worried about passing the course.27 “To manipulate empathy, some subjects were instructed to attend carefully to the information presented on the tape (observe-set condition); others were instructed to imagine how the person interviewed felt about what had happened (imagine-set condition).”28 Some students were told that Carol would be returning to class (the “difficult escape condition” in which students would have to face the consequences of their action or inaction), whereas others were told that she would not be (the “easy escape condition” in which there would be no such facing of consequences). After filling out a survey about how they felt when listening to the tape, the students were given the option to help. The results were just

118 Franco V. Trivigno as Toi and Batson predicted: Subjects in the imagine-set reported far more empathic emotion, and they displayed a pattern of helping that suggested altruistic motivation. In the easy escape condition, whereas only 33% in the observe-set offered assistance, 71% of those in the imagine-set did. Thus, having been primed for empathic concern, the latter set was more willing to engage in helping behavior. However, in the difficult escape condition, 76% of the observe-set and 81% of the imagine-set offered to help. This disparity indicates that those in the observe-set were motivated by egoistic considerations and that the motivation to help in the imagine-set was altruistic.29 Further, and most importantly, those reporting relatively high feelings of empathy helped at a much higher rate than those who reported relatively low levels, thus indicating that it is not the imaginative exercise itself but the empathic feeling it generated that led to helping.30 One can prime experiment participants for empathic concern by affecting what Batson calls the two antecedents of empathic concern: (1) perceiving the other as in need and (2) valuing the other’s welfare.31 That is, one can put another in a position where she becomes more or less likely to perceive the other in need and more or less likely to value the other’s welfare. According to Batson, “some level of each antecedent is necessary and, beyond the threshold level, the magnitude of empathic concern is a product of the strength of each.”32 The first antecedent, perceiving the other as in need involves noticing a discrepancy between the actual and desirable state of that person across some dimension of welfare; it involves a focus on the person in need (and not oneself). The second antecedent, valuing the other’s welfare, involves a positive (as opposed to objective or negative) attitude to the other. Both of these antecedents can be strengthened or facilitated by various strategies. What I am calling facilitators should be distinguished from antecedents in the following way: Whereas the antecedents are causally necessary to the generation of empathic concern, the facilitators play some causal role in generating the antecedents but are themselves neither necessary nor sufficient. For example, as we saw from Toi and Batson’s experiment, imagining what the other is feeling facilitates empathic concern—on this model, it does so by increasing one’s valuing of the other’s welfare. In another experiment, Batson and his colleagues manipulated the level of a subject’s empathy via perceived levels of similarity to the victim.33 In short, the more similar the participant perceived the victim to be, the more likely s/he was to value the other and thus feel empathic concern. The perception of the other in need may be facilitated by believing that the person is innocent—that is, not morally responsible for the situation.34 In addition, it may also involve and be facilitated by recognizing the other as a distinct animate being and as a sentient intentional agent. The overall picture can be represented with the schema depicted in Figure 6.1, with the different kinds of arrow representing different causal relations: The dashed arrows with blocked ends indicate facilitation or influence, the solid arrows indicate causal necessity, and the dotted arrows indicate

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 119 Other as agent Perceiving the other as in need

Other innocent

X Imagine other

Empathic concern

Altruistic motivation

Valuing the other’s welfare

Similar to other

Figure 6.1

Causal Model of Empathic Concern

causal sufficiency.35 On this picture, perceiving the other as in need is facilitated by recognizing the other as an agent and believing that the person is innocent; valuing the other’s welfare is facilitated by adopting the other’s perspective and perceived similarity to the victim. However, it should be noted that these relationships are illustrative: Given certain conditions, each of the facilitators could affect either of the antecedents, and the ones I mention here are not the only facilitators of the antecedents. Further, one might already independently value the other (because she is a friend, for example), and so there may be no need for facilitation. Note that the imagine-other perspective is, on this account, a facilitator of empathic concern, which means that it is not necessary for empathic concern.36 Further, there is evidence that one’s capacities for empathic concern, what I will call dispositional empathy, can be strengthened or weakened—that is, one can become more or less prone to empathizing.37 I conceive of dispositional empathy in terms of the relative level of chronic accessibility of the mental state of empathic concern—that is, the degree to which empathic concern is readily available to cognition.38 Whereas priming works to temporarily raise the level of a mental state’s accessibility, one can train oneself and raise the overall baseline for the state’s accessibility. At the limit, a total lack of empathic capacities, in which empathic concern is never available to cognition, is considered pathological and typical of psychopaths.39

III.

EMPATHIC CONCERN AND VIRTUE

In this section, I turn to the role of empathic concern in causing or facilitating virtue and eudaimonia. Whereas previous sections of this paper have focused on empirical research, the next two sections will be more conceptual

120 Franco V. Trivigno in nature, trying to connect the psychological and philosophical perspectives. For the purposes of this paper, I will be assuming, rather than arguing for, my account of virtue, though I do not think that my account is particularly controversial. Since the definition of empathic concern I am working with is decidedly other-oriented, it seems clear that empathic concern will have no role in self-regarding virtues; however, as I will argue, empathic concern is necessary, though not sufficient, for some other-regarding virtues, and empathic concern can provide some of the causal and explanatory structure underlying the moral psychology of virtue. My argument in this section will proceed as follows: First, I will compare the causal structure of virtue and empathic concern. Both virtue and empathic concern present causal models of action, which tie together perception, emotion, and motive. Because of this structural isomorphism, empathic concern is a plausible candidate for providing the causal and explanatory psychological structure underlying the moral psychological connections within virtue among perception, emotion, and motive. Second, I argue that, whereas empathic concern is not sufficient for virtue, since it may go wrong in various ways, and virtue involves getting it right, empathic concern is nonetheless necessary for the development of some other-regarding virtuous dispositions. In short, appropriate empathic concern may be the relevant emotional component of some other-regarding virtuous action or feeling and/or causally necessary to the development of the relevant virtuous disposition. In order to make my case, I will be using two examples of other-regarding virtues: compassion and justice. The larger causal structure of empathic concern (including its antecedents) ties together perception, emotion, motive, and action: It is necessary to perceive the other as in need, empathic concern itself is an emotional state with an affective dimension, and that state produces an altruistic motivation, which stands in a causal relationship to taking action to help (see Figure 6.1 above). Virtuous dispositions may be understood as states of success along four axes: perception, emotion, motive, and action; for example, the virtue of compassion requires accurate moral perception—that is, the agent must correctly perceive the suffering of others in order to respond appropriately to it. Virtue requires both acting and feeling “at the right times, about the right things, toward the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, [which] is the intermediate and best condition, and . . . proper to virtue.”40 In cases involving other people, virtue will involve an other-regarding

Value-laden Perception

Figure 6.2

Causal Model of Virtue

Virtuous Emotion

Altruistic Motivation

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 121 motive; that is to say that an other-regarding motive is built into the otherregarding virtues. Further, it seems that not only are all these components involved, but they are interrelated in ways that map onto the causal structure of empathic concern as well. As in empathic concern, both perception and evaluation are preconditions of virtuous response: Aristotle claims the experienced and virtuous among us “see correctly because experience has given them an eye to see properly.”41 This correct seeing is both epistemic and evaluative—that is, the prudent person experiences the perception as already involving evaluative content. Thus, empathic concern is a plausible candidate for providing the causal and explanatory psychological structure underlying the moral psychological connections within virtue among perception, emotion, and motive. Since there are nonemotional paths to altruistic motivation—not all otherregarding virtues will necessarily involve emotion—virtuous emotion will be sufficient, but not necessary, for altruistic motivation. When it comes to action, neither model makes action necessarily follow automatically from altruistic motivation, since all manner of other factors may need to be taken into account in order to perform the appropriate action;42 thus, both models build in a space for a deliberative aspect. Of course, on the Aristotelian model, for the virtuous agent faced with a relatively straightforward case, the move from emotion to motivation to action may well be automatic and not involve much, if any, deliberation. Despite these structural similarities, empathic concern is not sufficient for virtue for several reasons. First, it is not necessarily based on accurate perception of the other’s need. One might go wrong in any number of ways. For example, one might perceive suffering where there is actually none—the target might be pretending or might be enjoying herself; alternatively, one might misplace the source or cause of the suffering—one might think that another is crying in pain from bumping into a low table, when he is really mourning the loss of a dear friend. Second, the emotional state is ‘congruent’ to the other’s perceived welfare only in the minimal sense of having the same ‘valence’;43 what this means is that a negative valence experience produces a negative valence emotion. This rules out, for example, sadistic enjoyment of another’s suffering, but it leaves open the possibility of severe over- or underreaction. Third, nothing in the account suggests that empathic concern necessarily produces the appropriate action (or a motivational state that produces that appropriate action). For these reasons, empathic concern could not be sufficient for compassion or any other virtue. However, there are good reasons to think that empathic concern puts us on the right track: Batson claims that one of the benefits of empathy-induced altruism is that it produces helping behavior that is “more sensitive” than helping out of selfish or egoistic motives.44 Though it is not sufficient, empathic concern is necessary for some otherregarding virtuous dispositions, though it is not necessary to every single other-regarding virtuous action. Take the virtue of compassion—let it be

122 Franco V. Trivigno roughly defined as a disposition to feel appropriate sadness for another’s suffering accompanied by the desire to provide solace to the other for the other’s sake.45 To be clear, the virtue of compassion is not the same as the emotional state of compassion; indeed, my task here is to show that the latter, necessary to the former, is an instance of empathic concern. In short, is the emotion of compassion, as experienced by the virtuous agent, an “otheroriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need” (Batson’s definition)? It seems uncontroversial to say that the virtue of compassion involves an essential emotional component. Faced with a fellow human being in tremendous pain, the compassionate person will feel appropriate sadness for the plight of this individual, she will develop an immediate desire to help him, and she will take the appropriate steps to do so. Notice how this perfectly natural way to describe the virtuous person’s reaction maps onto the structure of empathic concern: Perceiving another in need and valuing their welfare causes the agent to experience empathic concern, and this in turn causes altruistic motivation, which leads to helping behavior. If empathic concern is just an other-oriented emotion that is caused by perceptual and evaluative antecedents and results in an altruistic motivational state, then it seems clear that the compassion felt by the compassionate person for some suffering individual is just empathic concern. If empathic concern is the emotional component of compassion, then empathic concern is necessary for it. However, empathic concern is not necessary for appropriately responding to every situation that contains suffering, nor is it necessary for every compassionate action. First, it is not necessary that the compassionate person will feel empathic concern every time she is faced with a suffering individual because it may be that the situation does not call for compassion. It may be that the suffering is deserved, or that it stands in a relation to some other larger good, such that empathic concern would be inappropriate. Second, some compassionate actions do not require empathic concern. For example, virtue ethicists commonly distinguish between learners and experts in the following way: Learners perform virtuous actions with an initial, uncritical grasp of what they are doing, whereas the expert has a fully developed understanding.46 Thus, compassionate learners may perform compassionate actions without feeling the appropriate emotions or having the fully developed understanding. In short, they may act in a compassionate way by imitating compassionate examples or following some rules for compassion without empathic concern. This possibility does not, however, seem open to the fully virtuous person; according to Aristotle’s three conditions for virtuous action, the agent must know what she is doing, choose it for its own sake, and do it from a firm and unchanging disposition. In other words, if the emotion of compassion is a component of a compassionate person’s state, and this emotional state is empathic concern, empathic concern seems necessary for a fully virtuous person’s compassionate actions.

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 123 The case of justice may seem different in many respects and more difficult to connect to empathic concern. Indeed, it will be difficult enough to settle on even a rough definition of the virtue of justice: Let me start with the clarification that I will be dealing with particular justice, and not general justice, which, for both Aristotle and Mill, has much wider application. Second, I will be focusing on character of persons, and not of institutions, laws, or states. Further, I will be considering a definition of distributive justice, drawn from Aristotle, and one of punitive justice, drawn from Mill.47 Let the Aristotle-inspired virtue of distributive justice be defined as the disposition to provide or otherwise effect the proportionate distribution of goods, as determined by the worth, or desert, of those receiving them. Aristotle himself makes no mention of the just agent’s emotional response in Book V, and one might easily get the impression that no emotional response is necessary to the virtue of justice. Indeed, it would seem that a fair distribution of goods might require impartiality and that impartiality might be compromised by emotion. However, this line of thought only considers what happens when the just agent is primarily in control of a distribution to be made in the future. How would the just agent respond to an unjust distribution in the past? At least in the Rhetoric, Aristotle suggests that the appropriate response would be emotional: Pity, or “pain at undeserved bad fortune,” and indignation, “pain at undeserved good fortune,” are not only indicators of the virtue of justice, they are the appropriate responses of just individuals to distributions that violate the worth of recipients.48 If pity and indignation are necessary for just responses to unjust distribution of goods, then they would seem also to be necessary to the virtue of justice.49 Whereas indignation does not seem to be a candidate for empathic concern since it targets those who prosper, pity would seem to be a primary instance of it. If this is right, then whereas empathic concern will not be necessary to every just action, it will be necessary to an important set of just responses, and thus necessary to the disposition of justice. Turning now to Mill, let us define punitive justice as the disposition that consists in the “desire to punish a person who has done some harm, and the knowledge or belief that there is some definite individual or individuals to whom harm has been done.”50 As Mill understands it, justice is an emotion, or sentiment, that involves both a cognitive and conative component. However, it does not seem to be the sort of emotion that is captured by empathic concern, since, on this account, justice is fundamentally directed at the agent of harm and not the victim of harm, whereas empathic concern is primarily a response to the victim of harm. If this line of reasoning is correct, then despite defining justice as an emotion, we should deny that empathic concern has any role in it. However, Mill himself makes the sentiment of justice causally and psychologically dependent on the sentiment of sympathy: “The sentiment of justice appears to me to be the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself, or to those with whom one sympathizes, widened so as to include all persons, by the human capacity of enlarged sympathy

124 Franco V. Trivigno and the human conception of intelligent self-interest.”51 If feeling sympathy, for Mill, can plausibly be understood to be, or essentially to involve, having an other-oriented emotional response to others’ perceived welfare, then it is an instance of empathic concern.52 Therefore, if sympathy, understood to be empathic concern, is causally necessary to the development of the sentiment of justice, then it is causally necessary to the virtue of justice. On both accounts, there will be just acts that do not involve emotional response at all, and so empathic concern will not be necessary for them. But it is equally the case that, on both accounts, emotional reactions subserve and are causally necessary to the generation of the disposition, even if it turns out that some just agents will infrequently feel empathic concern as constitutive of their just actions and reactions. In sum, it seems that empathic concern is necessary for certain other-regarding virtues in two ways: First, for virtues like compassion, empathic concern is necessary by being a constitutive element in the virtuous response or action; second, for virtues like justice, it is causally necessary to the agent’s development of the disposition. This argument for the necessity of empathic concern can gain some indirect support from the example of psychopaths, who do not have the ability to feel empathic concern, and thus are blocked from having the virtue of compassion and other-regarding virtues.

IV.

TRAINING EMPATHIC CONCERN

Assuming my account of the necessity of empathic concern for some otherregarding virtues is correct, then one might wonder how exactly one would go about training one’s empathic concern such that one develops the relevant virtues. If some other-regarding virtues may be understood as requiring a developed and refined capacity for empathic concern, then it will be by properly habituating one’s capacities for empathic concern that one develops the relevant other-regarding virtue. This means that one should both promote one’s capacities for empathic concern, or one’s dispositional empathy, and refine them. Taking up again the example of compassion, one develops the virtue of compassion only after a period of habitually training oneself to perceive suffering correctly, to feel pain proportionately, and to act prudently to alleviate the suffering. The promotion part of habituation may be understood in terms of chronic accessibility: A mental state’s chronic accessibility refers to the degree to which that state is accessible to cognition, and one raises the baseline level of chronic accessibility for a mental state each time one experiences it. Thus, each person will have a baseline level of empathic concern that can be raised through repeated experience of empathic concern. These experiences will alter the threshold for future experiences of empathic concern such that it will become more chronically accessible—that is, more quickly and readily activated by perceptions of suffering and other relevant stimuli.

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 125 The habituated agent will be more likely to experience empathic concern when faced with the appropriate stimulus and less likely to be distracted or deterred by irrelevant factors. In short, one can promote empathic concern by raising its relative level of chronic accessibility—that is, the degree to which empathic concern is readily available to cognition. This process of promotion need not be conceived of as merely passive but rather subject to rational evaluation and adjustment, or, in a word, refinement. After each experience of empathic concern, I may, through reflection on the appropriateness of my experience and of the relevant action, work to hone my future actions and reactions.53 Through this habituation process, I may come to see that I sometimes overreact to the suffering of others and thus make it worse for them. For example, a toddler who falls may be induced to cry by a parent’s rushing to console her, whereas she might be induced to laugh if the parent treats the fall as comedic. In short, the parent’s reaction guides the extent to which the child actually suffers, and a consoling reaction communicates to the child that pain behavior is appropriate. If one is reflective about one’s compassion and observes how and when it misfires, one can work towards becoming a better, more compassionate person. It may be useful to distinguish the vices relevant to compassion: Let indifference be the deficiency in feeling sadness for another’s suffering and anguish be the excess.54 The vice of anguish involves extreme sensitivity to others’ suffering. The anguished person may excessively value others, perhaps to his own detriment, and may be overly eager or ready to perceive the suffering of others; given that, on Batson’s model, the strength of one’s empathic concern is a function of strength of the two antecedents, such a person will experience a very high level of empathic concern. This will produce other-regarding motives and impulses to help that are unlikely to be modulated by considerations of self. Such a person may be swamped or overwhelmed by others’ suffering: “one finds a self so immersed in the boundless pain of others—and so exhausted with the efforts of ameliorating the pain—that no piece of the self is left free to experience joy or to flourish.”55 The indifferent person is at the other extreme—valuing others all too little and not really open to perceiving the others’ suffering; such a person may hardly experience empathic concern at all, or if she experiences it, only to a fairly low degree. Or she may perceive the suffering but only at a distance, as a curiosity perhaps, not something to be alleviated. This person will rarely experience other-regarding motives, and even when the desire to help is there, it may be easily defeated by the most trivial of self-regarding concerns. One might be inclined to object at this point: On the one hand, I seem to suggest that empathic concern is good and that, therefore, we should promote it; on the other, I claim that there could be an excess of empathic concern, which might constitute a vice. Surely, I cannot have it both ways. The reasons to promote one’s empathic capacities are pragmatic and do not rely on the claim that empathic concern is always and everywhere good.

126 Franco V. Trivigno First, empathic concern is a vital component of some other-regarding virtuous dispositions and actions, so when it is closer to cognition, those otherregarding virtuous dispositions and actions will also be closer to cognition. Beyond that, I have not yet said anything more specific about how particular individuals with different character variables should train empathic concern in order to yield virtue. That said, if I am right, for example, regarding compassion, that we are more prone to the vice of indifference than to the vice of anguish, then we need empathy promotion to help us get to the intermediate state. This is, of course, a contingent matter; had we been constituted otherwise, perhaps it would have been important to dampen our empathic concern. Thus, the normative force of ‘promote and refine’ capacities for empathic concern should not be taken to mean that one should maximize them. Indeed, this would be to ignore the task of refining and honing empathic concern. It should be noted that there are many difficulties and obstacles to training empathic concern properly: We are motivated to avoid empathy-inducing situations, especially if we think the cost of helping is high; empathic feelings can be partial and mediated by group-membership; and empathic feeling can lead to favoritism and/or violations of procedural justice.56 The road is surely difficult, but as Aristotle says, virtue is hard. V.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, I hope to have made some headway in placing the research on empathic concern within a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethical framework. As I admit above, my accounts of both empathic concern and virtue are stipulated, so there is obviously more work to be done. However, assuming that these are defensible, I hope that I have made a convincing case regarding the contribution of empathic concern to virtue. Two promising directions for future research present themselves. First, while this paper has shown that empathic concern contributes to eudaimonia by contributing to virtue, there is empirical evidence that it correlates with other components of eudaimonia: friendship and sociality and pleasure or subjective well-being.57 Thus, it seems like one could present a fuller picture of the contribution of empathic concern to eudaimonia. Second, given the importance of empathic concern for virtue, there are good grounds for taking care to avoid empathydisabling conditions—that is, situations in which the operation of empathic concern is undermined. Repeated exposure to empathy-disabling conditions may risk long-term effects on one’s capacities for empathic concern, and therefore for one’s prospects for virtue and eudaimonia. Military training would seem to be one arena in which empathy is disabled as part of what enables soldiers to kill.58 More broadly, some philosophers and psychologists have seen the conditions of modern, particularly capitalist, society as being antithetical to the cultivation of empathy.59

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 127 NOTES 1. My thanks and gratitude go to an anonymous reviewer at Routledge, Theresa Tobin, Nancy Snow, and C. Daniel Batson for their valuable feedback on this chapter. 2. C. Daniel Batson and Jay Coke, “Empathy: A Source of Altruistic Motivation for Helping?” in Altruism and Helping Behavior: Social, Personality, and Developmental Perspectives, ed. J. P. Rushton and R. M. Sorrentino (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1981), 167–187; M. Toi and C. Daniel Batson, “More Evidence that Empathy is a Source of Altruistic Motivation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43 (1982): 281–292; C. Daniel Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1991); Laura L. Shaw, C. Daniel Batson, and R. Matthew Todd, “Empathy Avoidance: Forestalling Feeling for Another in Order to Escape the Motivational Consequences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 879–887; C. Daniel Batson, Altruism in Humans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3. See, for example, Amy Coplan, “Will the Real Empathy Please Stand Up? A Case for Narrow Conceptualization,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011): 40–65. 4. See, for example, Frans M. de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Harmony Books, 2009). 5. See, for example, Stephen Darwall, “Empathy, Sympathy, Care,” Philosophical Studies 89 (1998): 261–82; Elliott Sober and David Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Nancy E. Snow, “Empathy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (2000): 65–78; Christian Miller, Moral Character: And Empirical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Christian Miller, “Empathy, Social Psychology and Global Helping Traits,” Philosophical Studies 142 (2009): 247–275; Miller, Moral Character, is an interesting case, since he does work explicitly with Batson’s notion while simultaneously holding to the typical philosophical definition. At several points in Miller, Moral Character, he notes that the differences are merely terminological. I am not so certain, especially since Batson denies that what Miller calls empathy is even necessary for empathic concern. 6. Batson, Altruism, 12–20. 7. Batson, Altruism, 11, 20. 8. See Batson, Altruism, 17–19; Miller, Moral Character, 104. 9. See Coplan, “Real Empathy,” 53–57. 10. Miller, Moral Character, 104; Coplan, “Real Empathy.” 11. Coplan, “Real Empathy,” 58. 12. Much of the philosophical debate concerns this kind of imagine-other empathy: for example, Snow, “Empathy”; and Jesse J. Prinz, “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011a), 211–229 argue that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality; Jesse J. Prinz, “Against Empathy,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011b): 214–233 argues that empathy could not ground morality; Heather Battaly, “Is Empathy a Virtue?” in Coplan and Goldie, Empathy, 277–301 argues that empathy is not a virtue. None of these arguments affect the notion of empathic concern that the paper focuses on: Indeed, Prinz admits that Batson’s notion of empathic concern may be necessary for morality (“Is Empathy Necessary,” 229, note 1), and he thinks that “concern” escapes

128 Franco V. Trivigno

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

some of the criticisms that make empathy a poor fit for grounding moral sentiments (“Against Empathy,” 230–231). See Miller, Moral Character, 106. Batson, Altruism, 20. Miller, Moral Character, tries to adapt Batson to an imagination-centered view. Batson’s previous view (The Altruism Question) did make it necessary, but it is not on his considered view (Batson, Altruism). As I note above, Miller, Moral Character, is an exception of sorts, since he accepts an imaginative definition, and despite several terminological (and potentially substantive disagreements), he makes extensive use of Batson in order to explain it. The task will be especially difficult when the empathic target is of a different gender, race, and/or socioeconomic status. Batson, Altruism, 11. Ibid., 11. Batson’s list includes compassion, but since I use that as an example of a virtue in this paper, I leave it off his list to avoid confusion. On my view, empathic concern is not itself a virtue. Batson leaves open the possibility of empathic joy, but, since his concern is altruistic motivation, and empathic concern only produces this when it warrants a change in the situation, he leaves it aside (Batson, Altruism, 11). Batson, Altruism, 11. Italics in original. Ibid., 20. I understand ‘welfare’ both in the definition of empathic concern and in that of altruistic motivation to be broad; it is not to be identified with a consequentialist theory of value. Batson, Altruism, 29. My aim here is not to engage in the metaethical debate about psychological egoism, and so I will be taking for granted that there really is other-oriented motivation. I will only say two things about it here: First, Sober and Wilson, Unto Others, helpfully distinguish between what they call ‘evolutionary altruism’ and ‘psychological altruism’ and point out that there is no necessary connection between them—since my focus is on the moral psychology of virtue and other-directed action, nothing in this paper implies anything about evolution or evolutionary altruism. Second, the concept pair, egoism-altruism, sits awkwardly with a eudaemonist perspective, since the latter assumes a framework that challenges the hard line between the two kinds of motives (see, e.g., Batson’s denial that any motive can be both altruistic and egoistic) (Batson, Altruism, 22). Though I cannot pursue this point here, I think the problem ultimately is with the concept pair and not with eudaemonist ethics. See Julia Annas, Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 225–226; Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism,” in Morality and Self-Interest, ed. Paul Bloomfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 205–221. Miller, Moral Character, 59–60. Nancy Eisenberg and Paul A. Miller, “The Relation of Empathy to Prosocial and Related Behaviors,” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987): 106–110. As is usual in the literature on empathy, Toi and Batson, “More Evidence,” talk of empathy induction instead of priming. In personal correspondence, Batson insisted that induction is more directly causal than priming, creating (not priming for) the relevant mental state, though he did concede that some psychologists would likely consider the experimental manipulation to be a case of priming. Toi and Batson, “More Evidence.” Toi and Batson, “More Evidence,” 283. Recall that Batson thinks that the imagine-other condition, what the philosophers identify as empathy, is a facilitator of empathic concern.

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 129 29. Toi and Batson, “More Evidence,” 290. 30. Ibid., 291. According to Batson (e-mail correspondence); Jay Coke, Daniel Batson, and Katherine McDavis, “Empathic Mediation of Helping: A Two-stage Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 752–766 provides the best evidence that it is not the imaginative exercise but the empathic emotion it generates that leads to helping. 31. Batson, Altruism, 33ff. 32. Batson, Altruism, 33, emphasis mine. 33. Batson, Altruism, 98ff. 34. Batson, Altruism, 34–35; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 35. Adapted from Figures 1.1 and 2.1 in Batson, Altruism. 36. Miller, Moral Character, calls empathy an “enhancer for helping” (130), and he seems to have in mind his imaginative notion. 37. Batson himself takes no stand on the question of dispositional empathy, except to call into question the cogency of the models that are currently on offer (Batson, Altruism, 55–57). He does not deny that there is such a thing, but he does not think that psychologists have developed the proper models for testing and measuring it (Batson, Altruism, 56). 38. See the discussion of chronic accessibility in Clea F. Rees and Jonathan Webber’s contribution to this volume. 39. See Deborah R. Richardson, Georgina S. Hammock, Stephen M. Smith, Wendi Gardner, and Manuel Signo, “Empathy as a Cognitive Inhibitor of Interpersonal Aggression,” Aggressive Behavior 20 (1994): 275–289; Shaw et al., “Empathy Avoidance”; R. James Blair, “Empathic Dysfunction in Psychopathic Individuals,” in Empathy in Mental Illness, ed. Tom Farrow and Peter Woodruff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–16. 40. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), 1106b21–3. 41. Ibid., 1143a35–b5. This involves sensitivity to the particulars of a situation, and this sensitivity is the provenance of perception (see also 1113a1–5, 143a35–b5). 42. Batson’s model builds in space for a cost-benefit analysis here (Batson, Altruism, 59–61); on the Aristotelian model, the appropriate action will also be mediated by other factors resulting in an all-things-considered best action. This may, of course, involve some self-regarding considerations, but these need not be conceived of as non- or immoral. 43. Batson, Altruism, 11. 44. Ibid., 163–164. 45. Cf. Nussbaum’s definition of compassion: “a painful emotion occasioned by the awareness of another person’s undeserved misfortune” (Upheavals of Thought, 301). 46. See, for example, Julia Annas, “Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2004): 61–75. 47. The Aristotelian definition comes from Book V of Nicomachean Ethics, and there are many scholarly controversies about Aristotle’s position that I will not be dealing with here. The definition drawn from Mill is from John S. Mill, Utilitarianism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1987), Book V, and I use his description of a sentiment to generate an account of a disposition. In short, I make no claim to interpretive fidelity in either case. I understand distributive justice to be concerned with the distribution of goods and punitive justice to be concerned with the response to harm.

130 Franco V. Trivigno 48. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. R. Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, vol. 2, 2152–2269 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1386b9–11. Nussbaum argues that we should understand the Greek term for pity, eleos, as being more or less equivalent to “compassion,” and she denies that it would have the overtones of superiority to the sufferer that we currently attribute to it (Upheavals of Thought, 301–302). 49. I bracket circumstances in which the actual distribution of goods is always perfect. 50. Mill, Utilitarianism, 68. 51. Mill, Utilitarianism, 70. 52. Mill’s notion of sympathy may be thought to be broader, including emotional responses to positive experiences; even so, recall that Batson’s view leaves the possibility of empathic joy open (Batson, Altruism, 11). 53. Dual process psychology, premised on the idea that there are two kinds of processes in the brain, automatic and controlled, may be used to explain how this is possible. On the view in general, see, for example, John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand, “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 462–479; Shelly Chaiken and Trope Yaacov, eds., Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); on the geniality of dual-process theory for virtue ethics, see Peter Railton, “Two Cheers for Virtue: Or, Might Virtue Be Habit Forming?” in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, vol. 1, ed. Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 311–312. 54. Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 55. Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 85. 56. See Batson, Altruism, 188–206; Miller, Moral Character, 123–130. 57. Eisenberg and Miller, “The Relation of Empathy,” 111–113; Jeffrey A. Joireman, Tami L. Needham, and Amy-Lynn Cummings, “Relationships Between Dimensions of Attachment and Empathy,” North American Journal of Psychology 4 (2002): 63–80; Mario Mikulincer, Phillip R. Shaver, Omri Gillath, and Rachel A. Nitzberg, “Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting attachment security increases compassion and helping,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (2005): 817–839; and Meifen Wei, Kelly Yu-Hsin Liao, Tsun-Yao Ku, and Phillip A. Shaffer, “Attachment, SelfCompassion, Empathy, and Subjective Well-Being among College Students and Community Adults,” Journal of Personality 79 (2011): 191–221. 58. David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1995); Franco Trivigno, “The Virtue Ethical Case for Pacifism,” in Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics, ed. Michael Austin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 86–101. 59. See, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. D. Cress, in The Basic Political Writings, ed. D. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 25–82; E. Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper and Row, 1956); G. Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain (New York: Springer, 2013).

REFERENCES Annas, Julia. Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. “Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2004): 61–75.

Empathic Concern and the Pursuit of Virtue 131 ———. “Virtue Ethics and the Charge of Egoism.” In Morality and Self-Interest, edited by Paul Bloomfield, 205–221. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by W. R. Roberts. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2152–2269. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999. Bargh, John A. and Tanya L. Chartrand. “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 462–479. Bargh, John A. and Kimberly Barndollar. “Automaticity in Action: The Unconscious as Repository of Chronic Goals and Motives.” In The Psychology of Action: Linking Cognition and Motivation to Behavior, edited by Peter Gollwitzer and John Bargh, 457–481. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Batson, C. Daniel. The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1991. ———. Altruism in Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Batson, C. Daniel and Jay Coke. “Empathy: A Source of Altruistic Motivation for Helping?” In Altruism and Helping Behavior: Social, Personality, and Developmental Perspectives, edited by J. Philippe Rushton and Richard M. Sorrentino, 167–187. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1981. Battaly, Heather. “Is Empathy a Virtue?” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 277–301. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Blair, R. James. “Empathic Dysfunction in Psychopathic Individuals.” In Empathy in Mental Illness, edited by Tom Farrow and Peter Woodruff, 3–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Coplan, Amy. “Will the Real Empathy Please Stand Up? A Case for Narrow Conceptualization.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011): 40–65. Chaiken Shelly and Yaacov Trope, editors. Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Chartrand, Tanya L. and John A. Bargh. “Automatic Activation of Impression Formation and Memorization Goals: Nonconscious Goal Priming Reproduces Effects of Explicit Task Instructions.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (1996): 464–478. Coke, Jay, Daniel Batson, and Katherine McDavis. “Empathic Mediation of Helping: A Two- stage Model.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 752–766. Darwall, Stephen. “Empathy, Sympathy, Care.” Philosophical Studies 89 (1998): 261–282. de Waal, Frans M. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Harmony Books, 2009. Diener, Edward, John Dineen, Karen Endresen, Arthur L. Beaman, and Scott C. Fraser. “Effects of Altered Responsibility, Cognitive Set, and Modeling on Physical Aggression and Deindividuation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31 (1975): 328–337. Eisenberg, Nancy and Paul A. Miller. “The Relation of Empathy to Prosocial and Related Behaviors.” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987): 91–119. Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper and Row, 1956. Grossman, David. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1995. Joireman, Jeffrey A., Tami L. Needham, and Amy-Lynn Cummings. “Relationships between Dimensions of Attachment and Empathy.” North American Journal of Psychology 4 (2002): 63–80.

132 Franco V. Trivigno Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Mikulincer, Mario, Phillip R. Shaver, Omri Gillath, and Rachel A. Nitzberg. “Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (2005): 817–839. Mill, John S. Utilitarianism. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1987. Miller, Christian. “Empathy, Social Psychology and Global Helping Traits.” Philosophical Studies 142 (2009): 247–275. ———. Moral Character: And Empirical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Olson, Gary. Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain. New York: Springer, 2013. Prinz, Jesse J. “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 211–229. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011a. ———. “Against Empathy.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011b): 214–233. Railton, Peter. “Two Cheers for Virtue: Or, Might Virtue Be Habit Forming?” In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, vol. 1, edited by Mark Timmons, 295–329. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Richardson, Deborah R., Georgina S. Hammock, Stephen M. Smith, Wendi Gardner, and Manuel Signo. “Empathy as a Cognitive Inhibitor of Interpersonal Aggression.” Aggressive Behavior 20 (1994): 275–289. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Translated by Donald Cress. In The Basic Political Writings, edited by Donald Cress, 25–82. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987. Shaw, Laura L., C. Daniel Batson, and R. Matthew Todd. “Empathy Avoidance: Forestalling Feeling for Another in Order to Escape the Motivational Consequences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 879–887. Snow, Nancy E. “Empathy.” American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (2000): 65–78. ———. “Habitual Virtuous Actions and Automaticity.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (2006): 545–561. ———. “Virtue and Flourishing.” Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (2008): 225–245. ———. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge Press, 2010. Sober, Elliott and David Wilson. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Slote, Michael. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. New York: Routledge, 2007. Tessman, Lisa. Burdened Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Toi, Miho and C. Daniel Batson. “More Evidence that Empathy is a Source of Altruistic Motivation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43 (1982): 281–292. Trivigno, Franco V. “The Virtue Ethical Case for Pacifism.” In Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics, edited by Michael Austin, 86–101. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ———. “Guns and Virtue: The Virtue Ethical Case against Gun Carrying.” Public Affairs Quarterly (Forthcoming). Wei, Meifen, Kelly Yu-Hsin Liao, Tsun-Yao Ku, and Phillip A. Shaffer. “Attachment, Self-Compassion, Empathy, and Subjective Well-Being among College Students and Community Adults.” Journal of Personality 79 (2011): 191–221.

7

The Having, Doing, and Being of Moral Personality Daniel Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez

The language of moral virtue comes easily to most of us. When we think about the moral, what comes to mind are certain dispositions to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. We have in mind the possession of certain traits that conduce to living the life that is good for one to live. To be honest, generous, fair-minded, compassionate, resolute in the service of justice—these and other virtues are the ambition that we have for ourselves and for our children. Indeed, how to raise children of good moral character is a pressing concern of parents and educators alike. We hope children come to exhibit traits of character that are praiseworthy and reflect credibly on their formation as a person. Indeed, we would be disappointed if our children developed only a glancing acquaintance with the virtues.

I.

TRAITS AND PARADIGMS

Yet, it is by no means clear how virtues are to be understood as psychological constructs or how to understand their causal role in behavior. To say that virtues are traits that produce enduring dispositions to act in certain ways is to say something controversial, although this might come as a surprise to the lay reader. Indeed, for many decades the language of traits, virtues, and character got little traction within academic psychology, although for somewhat different reasons. The behaviorist paradigm was suspicious of the unobserved mentalist entities that traits seemed to imply and drew attention instead to the reinforcing contingencies of environments as best explanations of behavior.1 Hence, the behaviorist paradigm gave priority of explanation to salient features of situations. The cognitive-developmental tradition, particularly in the form of Lawrence Kohlberg’s moral stage theory,2 also doubted the empirical reality of traits as predictors of behavior and worried that the language of traits might give comfort to ethical relativists insofar as the valuation of traits could depend upon community or cultural standards.3 Traits also seemed to run afoul of the ‘moral law folk theory’4 that has dominated Western reflection on moral matters since the Enlightenment and is assumed by many of the major theories of moral psychology, including

134 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez Kantian ethics.5 This is the view that we are essentially dualistic in our nature, consisting of body and mind, the physical and spiritual that are in conflict, a belief that comes easily to many of us. According to Kantian ethics, reason formulates general laws about how to act, about what to do, and what not to do. The will can act freely with respect to these general laws. When the will acts against the dictates of reason, a person is ‘immoral.’ When the will acts from reason, a person is ‘moral.’ Consequently, rationality is at the center of the moral life. Rationality is what sets humans apart in creation. Rationality represents the essence of humanity. Morality is considered a deeply rational affair. Passion, on the other hand, is to be resisted or checked. Passion (and the ‘body’) is the source of error and temptation. Passion is irrational. Passion leads us astray. It is our ‘lower nature,’ what is unworthy of us. Part of our folk tradition, then, is the view that our moral life is a relentless struggle between two kinds of forces, the force of reason and the force of passion, slugging it out for control of the will. As a result, we “come to experience our moral lives as an ongoing struggle to develop and preserve purity of reason and strength of will in the face of constant pressures that arise from our embodiment in the world.”6 Insofar as moral stage theory partakes of moral law folk theory (by its embrace of Kantian ethics) it should now be clear why personological factors like traits have been viewed with suspicion. Traits seem more deeply rooted in our biological natures, in our embodiment and passions, and hence are just the sort of influence the rational moral point of view is supposed to surmount. The rational moral point of view is indifferent to social particularity, including the characteristics of particular agents, in order to satisfy the demands of impartiality (and universality). Because impartiality demands that one abstract from all that is particular and self-defining, and because moral rules must be applicable to all rational moral agents, little concern is evinced for claims regarding particular moral agents and the unique qualities of their personality or character (other than their capacity for rationality), since these factors are the source of heteronomous influence. Hence, armed with Kantian notions of moral rationality, moral stage theory disdains any concern with virtues or with traits of character—that is, with the characteristics of particular agents. Who could be interested in the personological dispositions of particular agents if moral rationality requires us to view such things as a source of error and bias? Who could be interested in personal dispositions if moral rationality requires that the particularities of individual character be transcended? Who could be interested in the needs of particular agents and their life projects, desires, and purposes when these things issue in maxims that are only hypothetical and contingent (and are hence ‘nonmoral’)? On this Kantian account, then, self and personality cannot be trusted to render impartial and objectively fair moral decisions. Only reasoning from

Having, Doing, and Being 135 the ‘perspective of eternity’ has any chance. One must adopt a perspective that stands apart not only from the self but from the contamination of context, society, and culture in order to motivate an impartial, nonrelative moral judgment. But this distrust of both traits and situations puts moral stage theory in the curious and impossible position of embracing a view of moral reasoning without a person and without a situation.7 Moral reasoning is both disembodied and context-free. It is reasoning unattached to personality in situations that do not matter. Hence, moral stage theory takes a particular stance on the relative influence of person and situation. The only person variable of interest is reasoning, but it is reasoning without personality. It is reasoning without situations. In many ways, the history of moral development research in the latter decades of the twentieth century is the history of discerning where best to locate the force that drives moral behavior: Does it reside within the person as a trait, an unconscious motivation, or structure of reason, or does it reside external to the person in the situation, environment, or context? If the nature-nurture debate is one of the great antinomies around which a century of research has been organized across a wide swath of psychology, then the person-situation debate is another that is not far behind in its extension and influence.8 Understanding of humans and their behavior in terms of dynamic systems clarifies that in both cases the two aspects are hopelessly intertwined and in constant interaction.9

II.

VIRTUES AND PERSONALITY

Of course, the terms of reference for this debate have changed. Few fields of inquiry put up for very long with antimony that presents only eitheror options. In this chapter, we review the person-situation debate as it has played out in recent approaches to moral personality. We argue that if virtues are the moral dimensions of personality, then our account of virtue must be compatible with well-attested models of personality. But personality science appears to divide on how best to conceptualize the basic units of personality.10 One option appeals to broadband dispositional traits, whereas a second appeals to social-cognitive units.11 Which are virtues most like? The answer has implications for where to locate moral agency or how to understand it and implications as well for how best to bridge the personsituation divide. In the remainder of this chapter, we align our approach to virtues and moral personality with the social-cognitive option. After reviewing claims against global traits of personality, we take the alternative that emphasizes social-cognitive constructs as the units proper to moral personality and sketch a possible developmental trajectory. Along the way, we note that the

136 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez distinction between traits and social-cognitive constructs as units basic to personality is itself an either-or option that invites attempt at integration. We will conclude with some comments in this regard, particularly as recent integrative work bears upon the person-situation debate.

III.

DOUBTS ABOUT GLOBAL TRAITS

The person-situation debate has had a lively history in social and personality psychology. According to Cantor, the trait approach illustrates the ‘having’ side of personality theory (as opposed to the ‘doing’ side, represented by social-cognitive models of personality).12 That is, personality is understood to be the sum of traits that one has, and there are individual differences in the distribution of these traits. Presumably, a person of good moral character is one who is in possession of certain traits that are deemed ‘virtues,’ whereas a person of poor moral character is in possession of other kinds of traits not considered virtues. Moreover, the traits that one has are assumed to be inherent aspects of one’s personality, on display across disparate contextual settings. The traditional view of personologists and clinicians was that traits are something adhesive and sticky. They are constitutional aspects of persons that produce a subjective sense of self-same unity that is carried across situations and settings, producing uniformity and consistency of behavior.13 On this account, the lure of situations is trumped by the generalized causal power of personality. The typical empirical question was to find out whether this was true or not. First, identify a trait of interest, say, honesty, or aggressiveness, and then try to predict behavior across various contexts on the basis of the trait. But the cross-situational consistency of global traits was not readily observed. The moral domain was perhaps the first to cast doubt on this understanding of traits as a result of the Hartshorne and May studies on ‘character’ conducted many decades ago.14 These researchers were interested in demonstrating the trait-like stability of certain character virtues, such as honesty, altruism, and caring. With the traditional understanding of ‘trait’ in mind, these researchers fully expected to find a bimodal distribution of children—there would be some children who were ‘honest’ and another group of children who were ‘dishonest.’ When given the opportunity to cheat on an exam, the honest children would resist temptation; the dishonest children would cave in and cheat. But this was not what was found. Whether children cheated or not depended on a host of situational factors (e.g., whether cheating was easy, whether adults were supervising, whether the test was crucial or important, whether the risk of detection was high or low). Children who resisted cheating in one situation often gave in to temptation in other situations. The authors concluded, with much disappointment, that honesty (for example) was not a stable, trait-like disposition in children. The expectation that

Having, Doing, and Being 137 trait-like dispositions would show high degrees of cross-situational consistency was not borne out by these early studies. Yet, the full assault on global traits did not emerge until Mischel’s magisterial review that cast doubt on the reality of global traits of personality, or at least their usefulness for scientific explanation of behavior.15 This monograph took dead aim against the classical view that dispositions generate consistencies in behavior and concluded just the opposite: Knowledge of global personality traits were not useful in predicting behavior across a range of dissimilar situations. Cross-situational consistency of behavior is often very poor. He famously concluded: Individuals show far less cross-situational consistency in their behavior than has been assumed by trait-state theories. The more dissimilar the evoking situations, the less likely they are to produce similar or consistent responses from the same individual.16 Doubts were also cast on the usefulness of clinical judgments about personality—that is, doubts about the validity of clinical diagnoses that were reached on the basis of a few indirect symptoms, doubts about the adequacy of planning specific treatment plans based on the knowledge of global dispositions, and doubts about social change programs that attempt to predict how individuals would react in particular situations.17 Mischel was also skeptical of the recourse to the genotype-phenotype distinction to explain how seemingly diverse manifestations of behavior can nonetheless be thought to represent the same underlying trait organization of behavior.18 This gambit allowed one to assert a deep underlying motivational system (‘genotype’) while giving allowance for variability across situations (‘phenotype’). What seems like cross-situational inconsistency, then, is only apparent. Instead, the same trait disposition is being manifested in different ways over time and in different situations. Clinical judgments are notoriously unreliable.19 Clinical judgments of genotypic dispositions based on the detection of indirect symptoms or signs are often no better at predicting behavior than are more direct measures, such as the patient’s own self-report, the patient’s past record of mental illness and maladjustment, or, in some cases, seemingly irrelevant measures, like the judgment of the clinician’s secretary or the weight of the patient’s file folder.20 Moreover, our judgments about others are often distorted by systematic biases, or ‘cognitive economics,’ that permit us to simplify information processing and to make social inferences more efficiently, albeit erroneously, and experts are just as prone to these biases as are laypersons.21 Westerners (the subjects of most psychological research) have a tendency, for example, to seek causal explanations of behavior in terms of underlying dispositions and to minimize the influence of particular settings or circumstances, especially when it comes to explaining the behavior of others rather than our own behavior (the so called fundamental attribution error).

138 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez This criticism against the classical notion of traits has sometimes been interpreted as a claim that there are no stable dispositions in people at all, no individual differences, or no behavioral consistencies; or that our behavior is solely determined by situational factors. This view has found its way into recent philosophical rejection of character.22 But this is not Mischel’s view. Stable dispositions, individual differences, and behavioral consistencies are apparent if one considers the person-by-situation as the unit of analysis. Moreover, even though it does not fit the person-by-situation analysis, Mischel does not agree with the critics that ‘trait talk’ should be completely abandoned in the study of personality. Instead, he acknowledges the importance of trait language in our lay understanding of persons. He has shown that we tend to prefer and to use trait information in order to predict another person’s behavior in a particular situation, especially when we lack information about how that person has behaved in similar situations in the past.23 Many Westerners tend to attribute the cause of another’s behavior to traits whenever the other’s behavior is distinctive, singular, unusual, or contrary to behavioral norms.24 Many commit the ‘fundamental attribution error,’ as noted above. Most Westerners construe another’s behavior in terms of global character traits whenever they think they will have to talk about that person, or whenever they wish to form an impression of the person or predict his or her future behavior.25 It is clear, then, that the use of trait categories for organizing understanding of persons is a common feature of human information processing, at least in the West, and is clearly a legitimate focus of inquiry.26 Moreover, Mischel is not opposed to the notion of individual differences, or of behavioral consistencies, nor does he believe that individuals are held hostage by situational variables. We are not reactive automatons who merely respond in a crude stimulus-response fashion to the exigencies found in particular situations. Rather, what he opposes is the reduction of the complexity of human functioning to a few global trait indicators. What he opposes is our tendency “to infer, generalize and predict too much while observing too little.”27 He has called for a reconceptualization of personality, one that shifts the emphasis from the notion that social behavior can be adequately predicted with knowledge of a few global dispositional constructs and minimal specification at all of situational factors (other than to treat them as ‘error,’ ‘noise,’ or ‘bias’), towards a dynamic interactional view that emphasizes the transaction between certain ‘person variables’ and highly specific contextual settings for the prediction of social behavior.28

IV.

THE SOCIAL-COGNITIVE VIEW

The reconceptualization of personality requires specification of new sets of dispositional constructs but conceptualized in a way that acknowledges the fact that persons and situations interact in complex ways. Dispositional

Having, Doing, and Being 139 constructs, according to Mischel, are conditional ‘if-then’ propositions that specify the relationship between certain kinds of situations, contexts, or eliciting conditions (‘if’) and corresponding tendencies towards certain kinds of behavior (‘then’). The social-cognitive approach understands the structure of personality in terms of intra-individual, cognitive-affective mechanisms, and attempts to account for individual differences from the ‘bottom-up’—that is, in terms of specific, within-person psychological systems that are in dynamic interaction with changing situational contexts.29 Scripts, schemas, episodes, plans, prototypes, and similar constructs are the units of analysis for social-cognitive approaches to personality. In contrast, the traits approach accounts for personality structure by classifying between-person variability using latent (implicit) variable patterns identified by factor analysis, of which the Big Five (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, opennessto-experience) is a prominent example.30 If the trait approach illustrates the ‘having’ side of personality, the introduction of social-cognitive person variables into the discussion of personality coherence illustrates the ‘doing’ side of personality.31 The cognitive approach to personality emphasizes action—what people do when they construe their social landscape, how they transform and interpret it, in accordance with social-cognitive mechanisms. The cognitive substrate of personality consists of three elements, according to Cantor: schemas, tasks, and strategies.32 Schemas are organized knowledge structures that “channel” and filter social perceptions and memory. They are the “cognitive carriers of dispositions” that guide our appraisal of social situations, our memory for events, and our affective reactions.33 They are organized around particular aspects of our life experience. Tasks are the culturally prescribed demands of social life that we transform or construe as personal goals. “Life tasks, like schemas, not only provide a cognitive representation for dispositional strivings but also serve to selectively maintain and foster dispositionally relevant behavior.”34 Strategies, in turn, are utilized to bring life tasks to fruition. As such, they are “an intricate organization of feelings, thoughts, effort-arousal and actions” forming a “collection of goal-directed behavior unfolding over time in relation to a self-construed task.”35 Personality Coherence. These elements are implicated in a social-cognitive account of personality coherence advocated by Cervone and Shoda.36 They argue that a model of personality coherence must address three interrelated phenomena. First, it must account for the fact that there is an organization to personality functioning. That is, personality processes do not function independently but are instead organized into coherent, integrated systems that impose constraints on the range of possible configurations. This implies that personality is a unified cognitive-affective system, and that it is illegitimate, therefore, to segregate cognition and affect into separate domains of influence. Second, it must account for the coherence evident between behavior and social-contextual expectations. What we do across different

140 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez settings, and over time, are often interconnected and consistent. As Cervone and Shoda put it, individuals “create stable patterns of personal experience by selecting and shaping the circumstances that make up their day-to-day lives.”37 Third, it must account for the phenomenological sense of selfcoherence that orders our goals, preferences, and values, and gives meaning to personal striving and motivated behavior. The dynamic interaction among these features of personality coherence is grounded in social information-processing, how an individual perceives, interprets, and reacts to social events. That is, the cross-situational coherence and variability of personality, the dynamic interaction among organized knowledge structures, affect and social context, is understood not by appealing to broad-band traits but to the analysis of the causal mechanisms, structures, and processes of social information-processing.38 Moreover, the model assumes that the activation of mental representations is a critical feature of coherent personality functioning. These representations “include knowledge of social situations, representations of self, others and prospective events, personal goals, beliefs and expectations, and knowledge of behavioral alternatives and task strategies,”39 and are variously conceptualized as schemas, scripts, prototypes, episodes, competencies, and similar constructs.40 So, for example, when an adult attends a funeral, she is more likely to be subdued rather than show the exuberance she might display at a spectator sport. It is the distinctive organization of social-cognitive units (schemas, tasks, strategies) and their mutual influence and dynamic interaction that give rise to various configurations of personality, although the range of possible configurations is not infinite, given the “system of mutual constraint” that one part of the system imposes on other parts.41 Still, patterns of individual differences arise because people have stable goal systems (Cantor’s “life tasks”) that structure the organization of the cognitive-affective system and influence the perception, selection, and interpretation of various contextual settings. Moreover, people have different interpersonal and social expectations that foster “distinctive, contextualized patterns of response” and also different recurring experiences that provide the “affordances” (perceived action possibilities) that give rise to stable configurations of the cognitive-affective system.42 More generally, then, the interrelationship among these elements of the social-cognitive personality system: yields cognitive-affective configurations that “make sense,” cohere and thus are more stable. These stable configurations form the basis of an individual’s unique personality. They contribute to the individual’s recurrent style of planning, interpreting and responding to events.43 For example, a person who interprets social situations with lots of acquaintances (e.g., parties at work) as threatening may use self-protective strategies

Having, Doing, and Being 141 in order to keep her distance from others, such as washing dishes during the party. But at family parties, where she feel close to all participants, she may not feel threatened and instead interact in lively and playful ways.

V.

MORAL PERSONALITY

We use a social-cognitive view of personality to understand what it means to be a moral person, to have a moral character, or to possess the virtues. In our view, the moral personality is to be understood in terms of the accessibility of moral schemas for social information-processing. A moral person, a person who has a moral character or identity, is one for whom moral constructs are chronically accessible (habitually invoked), where construct accessibility and availability are dimensions of individual differences. Put differently, moral character, or what it means to be virtuous (or vicious), is better conceptualized not in terms of the ‘having’ side of personality, not in terms of trait-possession, but in terms of the ‘doing’ side—that is, in terms of the social-cognitive schemas, the knowledge structures, and cognitive-affective mechanisms that are chronically accessible for social information-processing and action and that underwrite the discriminative facility in our selection of situationally appropriate behavior. From this perspective, schemas (rather than traits) carry our dispositions.44 Schemas “demarcate regions of social life and domains of personal experience to which the person is especially tuned and about which he or she is likely to become a virtual ‘expert.’”45 Schemas that are frequently activated should, over time, become chronically accessible. Moreover, there should be individual differences in the accessibility of constructs just because of each person’s unique social developmental history.46 Hence, schema accessibility shows interindividual variability but also sustains patterns of individual differences over time and is properly considered a personality variable.47 For example, if schemas are chronically accessible, then attention is directed selectively to certain features of experience at the expense of others. Schema accessibility (based on experience) disposes one to select schema-relevant life tasks, goals, or settings that, in turn, canalize and maintain dispositional tendencies (which illustrate the reciprocal relationship between persons and contexts). It encourages one to develop highly practiced behavioral routines in those areas demarcated by chronically accessible schemas, which provide “a ready, sometimes automatically available plan of action in such life contexts.”48 Three additional points are relevant. First, chronically accessible constructs are at a higher state of activation than are inaccessible constructs and are produced so efficiently as to approach automaticity. Second, constructs can be made accessible by contextual (situational) priming, as well

142 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez as by chronicity, and these two sources of influence combine in an additive fashion to influence social information-processing and action. Third, the accessibility of a construct is assumed to emerge from a developmental history of frequent and consistent experience with a specific domain of social behavior, so that it becomes more likely than other constructs to be evoked for the interpretation of interpersonal experience. Consequently, individual differences in construct accessibility emerge because of each person’s unique social developmental history. Thus, for example, a young child who is immersed in positive, mutually responsive social interaction with parents will develop procedural knowledge that includes joyful, playful interaction, which becomes an automatic set of behaviors with loved ones. On the other hand, when a stranger approaches, the child may first test whether this strange person is a reliable communication partner, withdrawing when the stranger proves incommunicative. Five advantages of a social-cognitive model of moral personality. A socialcognitive model of moral personality (SCM) has several attractive features. First, it retains the central importance of cognition, although cognition is viewed as a broader set of mental representations, processes, and mechanisms than was postulated by the Kohlbergian moral development tradition. Schemas, and the conditions of schema activation, underwrite our discriminative facility in noticing key features of our moral environment. Schemas are fundamental to our very ability to notice dilemmas as we appraise the moral landscape.49 Some individuals never seem to notice the dilemmatic aspects of their experience, never encountering morally significant moments. The moral status of their character, what they want for themselves, their second-order desires, are not quite in the front of their consciousness. Their moral compass is not easily retrieved, nor quite accessible even if available. But, for others, the claims of morality are easily elicited, readily primed, and accessible to the point of automaticity. Indeed, as we note below, the social-cognitive approach does not assume that all relevant cognitive processing is controlled, deliberate, and explicit. There is now increasing evidence that much of our lives are governed by cognitive processes that are tacit, implicit, and automatic. Although this notion may appear to be new to the moral domain, it is not, as Piaget was well aware of how understanding develops first implicitly before it reaches explicit awareness and verbalization.50 Still, the intersection of the morality of everyday life and the automaticity of everyday life must be large and extensive, and social-cognitive theory provides resources for coming to grips with it in ways that the cognitive developmental tradition cannot.51 Second, not to exclude emotion, the social-cognitive approach emphasizes the affective elements of personality. Indeed, personality is considered a ‘cognitive-affective system’ that is organized, integrated, coherent, and stable. Emotional states are a regulatory factor within the informationprocessing system. As Bugental and Goodnow put it, “emotional states

Having, Doing, and Being 143 influence what is perceived and how it is processed, and the interpretations made of ongoing events subsequently influence emotional reactions and perceptual biases. Affect and cognition are appropriately conceptualized as interwoven processes.”52 Affect guides selective memory retrieval, influences perceptual vigilance, and constrains the attentional resources available for rational or reflective appraisal and response selection.53 Understanding personality as a unified cognitive-affective system is in contrast to Kohlberg’s moral stage theory that had little use for noncognitive mechanisms for explaining moral behavior. Third, the social-cognitive model is better able to account for the implicit, tacit, and automatic features of moral functioning.54 There is growing recognition that much of human decision making is under nonconscious control and occurs with an automaticity that belies the standard notions of rational, deliberative calculation.55 Though this possibility sometimes offends traditional accounts of moral development, there is no reason to think that automaticity is evident in every domain of decision making except the moral domain. However, unlike the social intuitionist model, which frontloads automaticity prior to understanding, judgment, and reasoning and presumes moral judgment to be based on intuitions that are constitutive of human nature (and hence prior to learning and enculturation), the social-cognitive approach to moral personality locates automaticity on the backend of development as the result of immersed and guided experience, extensive and focused practice, and intentional coaching and socialization.56 Automaticity emerges from expertise in life domains where we have vast experience and well-practiced behavioral routines.57 Fourth, SCM accounts for the felt necessity of moral commitments experienced by moral exemplars, their experience of moral clarity or felt conviction that their decisions are evidently appropriate, justified, and true. Typically, moral exemplars report that they ‘just knew’ what was required of them, automatically as it were, without the experience of working through an elaborate decision-making calculus.58 Yet, this is precisely the outcome of preconscious activation of chronically accessible constructs that it should induce strong feelings of certainty or conviction with respect to social judgments.59 Fifth, SCM is a dynamic model. It can account for changes in behavior and the situational variability in the display of a virtue.60 A dispositional signature can be found at the intersection of person and context as a result of the available and accessible social-cognitive schemas, the discriminative facility that it provides, and the eliciting and activating aspects of situations and contexts. The accessibility of social-cognitive schemas underwrites not only the discriminative facility in the selection of situationally appropriate behavior but also the automaticity of schema activation that contributes to the tacit, implicit qualities often associated with the ‘habits’ of moral character.61

144 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez VI.

TRAITS AND SCHEMAS REVISITED

Thus far we have taken sides in the great debate within personality science about how best to understand the basic units of personality. The terms of reference for this debate are often starkly drawn. For example, on the one hand there are broadband global traits that are assumed to adhere to persons as they move through and dominate situations. Persons and contexts may interact, but it is the person who brings situations to heel. Moreover, traits are understood as between-person classifications as they are group characteristics extracted statistically from surveys given to individuals. In contrast, social-cognitive units describe cognitive-affective mechanisms that reside ‘in the head’ as it were. They describe psychological systems that are in dynamic interaction with changing situational contexts. We followed Cantor in describing the distinction between traits and schemas as the difference between having and doing.62 Moral traits are for doing. The point of dispositions is to help us navigate the interpersonal, social, and cultural landscape that both conditions the display of personality and is reactive to it. Drawing a stark contrast between traits and schemas (and other socialcognitive units) is a narrative device for describing how situationism plays out in personality theory. For one option, traits are more important than situations. For the other, situational influence is built in to the very conception of social-cognitive units of personality. For the social-cognitive option, situations and schemas are in dynamic interaction and are mutually implicative. For one option, the great person-situation antimony dissolves into trait-dominance, at least in theory, although in practice the person variables disappear in the face of situational influence. For the other, a stable behavioral signature is to be found only at the intersection of Person x Context interactions. But we do not want to resolve the person-situation antimony by proposing yet another one—namely, the distinction between traits and schemas. Personality science might divide into two disciplines in terms of which construct takes precedence for explaining dispositions, but there seems to be broad consensus among contemporary personality researchers that dispositions and situations must be jointly considered when it comes to predicting or explaining behavior, and this holds for broadband (big-five) traits as much as for social-cognitive units. Caspi, Roberts and Shiner assert, for example, that the antimony between traits and social-cognitive theory is exaggerated and that the two approaches are not only complementary and mutually informative but also capable of useful integration.63 They write: “By integrating social-cognitive constructs (e.g., mental representations, encoding processes) into research on traits, developmentalists can advance understanding of how traits are directly manifested at different ages.”64 There is also convergence on how to understand the person-situation debate and, in turn, the nature of traits. The person-situation debate pitted social psychologists (who emphasize a person by context variability)

Having, Doing, and Being 145 against personologists (who emphasize traits that are carried across situations) on the question of whether dispositional traits were consistently displayed across situations (the personologist position) or were trumped by the demand characteristics of situations (the social psychologist position). As we have seen, evidence in favor of cross-situational consistency was often hard to come by. Personologists, for their part, mounted an impressive counterattack that demonstrated dispositional consistency across situations and across time. Several studies showed, for example, that traits measured in early childhood demonstrated temporal stability over many years and, indeed, predicted important outcomes.65 The person-situation debate turns on what to think about the ontological reality of traits, and on at least two conceptions of traits, there is little daylight between trait and social-cognitive theory.66 For example, the dispositional conception holds that traits are tendencies to behave in certain ways given certain activating conditions. Personality traits correspond to behavioral logic expressed in ‘if-then’ conditional propositions, such as: ‘if Jones is put in a situation where demands are placed upon his sense of competency, then he is aggressive.’ This is the view of the social-cognitive conception of personality, but it is not disputed by trait theorists, either.67 It is now a widely shared view that persons and situations interact in complex ways,68 that the person-situation distinction is a false one,69 that situational specificity and behavioral consistency are not antagonistic positions,70 and that traits are not static, nondevelopmental, and immutable essences but are instead organizational constructs that operate dynamically in transaction with environments.71 Moreover, even the distinction between having and doing is difficult to maintain except as an expository device, given recent evidence that trait possession is very difficult to distinguish from indicators of good adjustment.72 With respect to the dispositional notion of personality structure, then, there is much common ground between many trait and social-cognitive theorists. So if there are two disciplines, there is perhaps more that is shared than is contested between them. Of course, the two disciplines differ on just what are the real properties of individuals that account for dispositional coherence. Traits and social-cognitive constructs are very different things, although not necessarily incommensurable things. Our preference for the social-cognitive option represents a strategic bet that these constructs would lead to more robust integration with developmental theory.73

VII.

BUT THE PICTURE IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING DEVELOPMENT

Personality and morality are often discussed from the perspective of adults, as most of our discussion has demonstrated. But plenty happens before adulthood that bears on adult moral functioning. For example, when compared

146 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez to a matched comparison group, moral exemplars are more likely to report a childhood with secure attachments, intimate affiliations, and multiple supportive relationships.74 This analysis of exemplar life story narratives confirms recent accounts of early socio-personality development trajectories. For example, children who have relationships with a parent represented by a mutually responsive-orientation are more likely to develop along a prosocial personality.75 That is, they develop greater empathy, cooperation, prosocial skills, and conscience through early and middle childhood (as long as they have been studied) than those without a mutually responsive relationship with a parent. But there may be other caregiving practices, especially in early life, that bear on moral functioning as well. Like all animals, humans evolved to provide an early ‘nest’ for their young to optimize development based on the maturational schedule of the offspring. This is part of an extra-genetic inheritance.76 In fact, intensive parenting emerged with the evolution of social mammals more than thirty million years ago and increased in intensity through human evolution.77 Humans are the least developed among hominids (75% of brain left to grow after birth) with the longest maturational schedule (about twenty-five years). As a result, the functioning of brain and body systems are coconstructed by the type of caregiving received after birth. Because many epigenetic effects occur during the early years after birth, a faulty ‘nest’ can have long-term ramifications.78 For example, the reactivity of the stress response system is highly affected by early experience.79 D. Narvaez and colleagues have begun to study what they call the Evolved Developmental Niche (EDN). The human EDN for young children has been documented by anthropologists and is comprised of soothing perinatal experiences, extensive breastfeeding, needs met and cues attended to, preventing distress, copious affectionate touch (constant in infancy), multiple adult caregivers, positive social climate and support, and free play.80 Narvaez and colleagues find that all these practices influence the development of morality in young (three- to five-year-old) children, specifically impacting the development of self-regulation, empathy, and conscience.81 Thus, the neurobiology that underlies moral virtues may be dependent on early life experience (though experience during other periods of high plasticity, such as adolescence or voluntary therapy, can also redesign brain function). In fact, the type of moral orientation one favors in adulthood may be significantly influenced by early life experience.82 Three brain strata emerged through human evolution—the r-complex, paleomammalian, and neomammalian—providing a foundation for different global mindsets.83 Triune ethics theory (TET) builds on this evolutionary theory to identify three basic ethical orientations.84 A global mindset becomes an ethic when it guides decisions and actions, trumping other values. The r-complex and related structures represent a set of systems for self-protection and organism survival. The stress response facilitates survival, putting older parts of the brain in charge of behavior with

Having, Doing, and Being 147 fight-flight-freeze-faint responses. When these guide moral decisions and actions, the Safety Ethic is in play. The mammalian stratum emerged later and includes the social-emotional systems that mammals developed to care for and develop the young. When these prosocial emotion systems are dominant, the Engagement Ethic—relational attunement—is more likely to be deployed. The neomammalian is the most recent and most developed in humans and allows for imagination beyond the face-to-face. Fueled by selfprotective emotions, vicious or detached imaginations can ensue. When guided by prosocial emotional systems, a communal imagination is likely. When early life experience does not match up with the EDN, the survival systems may habitually influence decisions and behavior. Because survival systems are oriented to aggressive dominance or appeasing withdrawal, prosocial emotional systems and cortical controls of survival mechanism will be underdeveloped. In this case, the individual will be more stress reactive with a low threshold for threat in social situations. Perceiving threat more easily means that the individual frequently will be channeled physiologically into a self-protective mindset, which also necessarily impairs capacities for empathy and abstract thinking. Behavior enacted from this mindset, a safety ethic, can result in withdrawal, aggression, or a general distrust in social situations. Social ranking will be a priority along with aspects emphasized by culture to be part of personal safety (purity, ingroup dominance). Self-protective moral orientations develop during implicit social cognition development in early life (or subsequently from trauma or during periods of high plasticity) because threat-reactivity is set with a low threshold (as with post-traumatic-stress-disorder; PTSD) or epigenetic effects thwart calm response.85 For example, when the stress response is triggered, the brain/body mobilizes survival systems, impairing higher order thinking and prosocial emotions. Decisions and actions taken from this mindset, which can occur very early in processing, represent a safety ethic. Engagement requires capacities for presence, synchrony, and reverent hospitality, capacities orthogonal to the safety ethic. Communal imagination extends engagement with an ethic of love, sympathetic concern, and egalitarian respect.86 Both of these may require the early optimizing environment of the EDN. Indeed, using a retrospective measure with adults, Narvaez and colleagues found that EDN-history influences adult moral orientation.87 Greater EDN-consistent care was related to greater compassionate orientation toward others (engagement ethic), whereas less EDN-consistent care was related to greater self-protective moral orientations. But the imagination also can be hijacked for self-protection. When a stress response is activated from perceived threat, the imagination will combine with safety interests and be used for self-protection through deliberate social aggression or withdrawal, maximizing safety through manipulation and control (vicious imagination), or through disengagement from affiliative emotion (detached imagination).

148 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez VIII.

HAVING, DOING, OR BEING?

Though we have been discussing ‘having’ versus ‘doing’ in relation to moral personality, a third perspective may be more fundamental. Virtue is typically defined along the lines of doing the right thing in the right manner for the particular circumstances. In this case, doing has much to do with being because the manner of doing has a lot to do with being—which is comprised of such things as one’s attentional habits, emotional dispositions, and selfregulation, as well as practices of relational attunement and openness.88 Small-band hunter-gatherers (SBHG) represent the type of society in which the human genus spent 99% of its history.89 It also represents the type of society for which human brains and bodies are presumed to have evolved. Interestingly, members of these societies display quite a different nature of being than individuals raised in typical Western societies.90 They spend much of their time encouraging and experiencing positive social life (laughter, amusement, joy). Ongoing immersion in such a positive ‘climate’ facilitates prosocial behavior and being. In fact, the safety ethic is a rarity among small-band hunter-gatherers. Instead, they tend to live life primarily according to humanity’s highest moral capacities: face-to-face relationally attuned engagement and prosocial, communal imagination. Moral personality and virtue may be natural endowments of every human—a human essence, so to speak. But such an essence may only develop under conditions that match with evolution—the evolved developmental niche and subsequent socially supportive environments that match up with the evolved needs of the individual. Interestingly, small-band huntergatherers who receive EDN-consistent care are reported to display greater emotional presence, generosity and sense of equality, and perceptiveness— characteristics that comprise the virtues of the wisdom traditions: humility, charity, authenticity.91 Communion and agency flow together for the smallband hunter-gatherer rather than pull away from one other, as found in Western societies.92 In circumstances mismatched with evolutionary history, humanity’s fullest capacities may not be nurtured, and the nature displayed becomes less human than prehuman (i.e., selfishness, aggression, and lack of self-regulation). If wisdom is a state of being, then how being is constructed and supported should be of central concern. How adults structure their societies (and raise children) influence what duties they perceive, the nature of their autonomy, and what is conceptualized as a good human being.

IX.

CONCLUSION

The debates over traits and situations may be best solved by social-cognitive theory, which emphasizes the unique personality signature of a person in interaction with type of situation. Yet even this debate may need to shift toward a more fundamental and, dare we say, Aristotelian concern for

Having, Doing, and Being 149 being. Having the right feelings (‘being’) when taking action (‘doing’) may be as important as the action itself. The evolved nest for optimal development during the critical period of early life may best foster emotion systems and mindsets that can skillfully guide prosocial moral action. NOTES 1. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantam Vintage, 1972). 2. Kohlberg’s theory proposed that individuals develop cognitively toward a deontological sense of moral judgment, moving through three levels (preconventional, conventional, postconventional) and five or six stages. Moral reasoning develops from active social life during the course of maturation. Neo-Kohlbergian research found that enriched social experience, especially Western higher education, contributes to the development of general postconventional moral reasoning (reasoning like a philosopher). 3. J. C. Gibbs, Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg, Hoffman and Haidt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); L. Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development: Vol. 1. The Philosophy of Moral Development (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). 4. Moral law folk theory refers to the common perception that body and mind are separable entities. 5. M. Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 6. Johnson, Moral Imagination, 17. 7. D. K. Lapsley and P. Hill, “The Development of the Moral Personality,” in Personality, Identity and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, ed. D. Narvaez and D. K. Lapsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.) 8. A. Sameroff, “A Unified Theory of Development: A Dialectical Integration of Nature and Nurture,” Child Development 81 (2010): 6–22. 9. M. D. Lewis, “Bridging Emotion Theory and Neurobiology through Dynamic Systems Modeling,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 169–194. 10. D. Cervone, “The Two Disciplines of Personality Psychology,” Psychological Science 2 (1991): 371–377. 11. Cervone, “The Two Disciplines.” 12. N. Cantor, “From Thought to Behavior: ‘Having’ and ‘Doing’ in the Study of Personality and Cognition,” American Psychologist 45 (1990): 735–750. 13. G. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1937). 14. H. Hartshorne and M. A. May, Studies in the Nature of Character. Vol. 1: Studies in Deceit. Vol. 2 (with J. B. Maller, 1929), Studies in Service and Selfcontrol. Vol. 3 (with F. K. Shuttleworth, 1930), Studies in the Organization of Character (New York: Macmillan, 1928–1930). 15. W. Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: Wiley, 1968). 16. Mischel, Personality, 177. 17. W. Mischel, “Convergences and Challenges in the Search for Consistency,” American Psychologist 39 (1984): 351–364. 18. W. Mischel, “Continuity and Change in Personality,” American Psychologist 24, no. 11 (1969): 1012–1018. 19. P. E. Meehl, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books and Media, 1954/2013).

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43. 44. 45. 46.

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Having, Doing, and Being 157 McAdams, D. “The Moral Personality.” In Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, edited by D. Narvaez and D. K. Lapsley, 11–29. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. McCrae, R. R. and P. T. Costa. “A Five-factor Theory of Personality.” In Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 2nd edn., edited by L. A. Pervin and O. P. John, 139–154. New York: Guilford, 1999. MacLean, P. D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. New York: Plenum, 1990. Meaney, M. “Epigenetics and the Biological Definition of Gene X Environment Interactions.” Child Development 81, no. 1 (2010): 41–79. Meehl, P. E. Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction. Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books and Media, 1954/2013. Mischel, W. Personality and Assessment. New York: Wiley, 1968. ———. “Continuity and Change in Personality.” American Psychologist 24, no. 11 (1969): 1012–1018. ———. “Towards a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality.” Psychological Review 80 (1973): 252–283. ———. “On the Interface of Cognition and Personality.” American Psychologist 34 (1979): 740–754. ———. “Convergences and Challenges in the Search for Consistency.” American Psychologist 39 (1984): 351–364. ———. “Personality Dispositions Revisited and Revised: A View After Three Decades.” In Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, edited by L. A. Pervin, 111–134. New York: Guilford, 1990. Mischel, W., K. M. Jeffery, and C. J. Patterson. “The Layman’s Use of Trait and Behavioral Information to Predict Behavior.” Journal of Research in Personality 8 (1974): 231–242. Mischel, W., Y. Shoda, and R. Mendoza-Denton. “Situation-behavior Profiles as a Locus of Consistency in Personality.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 11, no. 2 (2002): 50–54. Murdoch, I. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970/1989. Narvaez, D. “The Neo-Kohlbergian Tradition and Beyond: Schemas, Expertise and Character.” In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Vol. 51: Moral Motivation through the Lifespan, edited by G. Carlo and C. Pope-Edwards, 119–163. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. ———. “Triune Ethics: The Neurobiological Roots of our Multiple Moralities.” New Ideas in Psychology 26 (2008): 95–119. ———. “Moral Complexity: The Fatal Attraction of Truthiness and the Importance of Mature Moral Functioning.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5, no. 2 (2010): 163–181. ———. “Development and Socialization within an Evolutionary Context: Growing up to Become ‘A Good and Useful Human Being’.” In War, Peace and Human Nature: The convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views, edited by D. Fry, 643–672. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. New York: Norton, 2014. Narvaez, D. and T. Bock. “Moral Schemas and Tacit Judgement or How the Defining Issues Test is Supported by Cognitive Science.” Journal of Moral Education 31, no. 3 (2002): 297–314. Narvaez, D., T. Gleason, L. Wang, J. Brooks, J. Lefever, A. Cheng, and Centers for the Prevention of Child Neglect. “The Evolved Development Niche: Longitudinal Effects of Caregiving Practices on Early Childhood Psychosocial Development.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2013): 759–773. doi: 10.1016/j. ecresq.2013.07.003.

158 D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez Narvaez, D. and D. K. Lapsley. “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise.” In Character Psychology and Character Education, edited by D. K. Lapsley and C. Power, 140–165. Notre Dame: IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Narvaez, D., A. Lawrence, A. Cheng, and L. Wang. Evolved Developmental Niche History: The Effects of Early Experience on Adult Health and Morality. Manuscript in preparation, 2014. Narvaez, D., J. Panksepp, A. Schore, and T. Gleason, editors. Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development: From Research to Practice and Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Narvaez, D., K. Valentino, A. Fuentes, J. McKenna, and P. Gray. Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution: Culture, Childrearing and Social Wellbeing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Narvaez, D., L. Wang, T. Gleason, A. Cheng, J. Lefever, and L. Deng. “The Evolved Developmental Niche and Sociomoral Outcomes in Chinese Three-year-olds.” European Journal of Developmental Psychology 10, no. 2 (2013): 106–127. Nisbett, R. E. and L. Ross. Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Ozer, D. J. Consistency in Personality: A Methodological Framework. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1986. Piaget, J. The Moral Judgment of the Child. Translated by M. Gabain. New York: Free Press, 1932/1965. Ro, E. and L. A. Clark. “Interrelation Between Psychosocial Functioning and Adaptive- and Maladaptive-range Personality Traits.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 122, no. 3 (2013): 822–835. doi: 10.1037/a0033620. Ross, L. “The Intuitive Psychologist and his Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 10, edited by L. Berkowitz. New York: Academic Press, 1977. Sameroff, A. “A Unified Theory of Development: A Dialectical Integration of Nature and Nurture.” Child Development 81 (2010): 6–22. Shoda, Y., W. Mischel, and J. C. Wright. “The Role of Situational Demands and Cognitive Competencies in Behavior Organization and Personality Coherence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 1023–1035. ———. “Intraindividual Stability in the Organization and Patterning of Behavior: Incorporating Psychological Situations into the Ideographic Analysis of Personality.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 674–687. Skinner, B. F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Bantam Vintage, 1972. Smith, H. The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Thompson, R. A. “Early Sociopersonality Development.” In Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol.3. Social, Emotional and Personality Development, edited by W. Damon and N. Eisenberg, 25–104. New York: Wiley, 1998. ———. “The Development of the Person: Social Understanding, Relationships, Self, Conscience.” Handbook of Child Psychology, 6th edn., vol. 3, edited by W. Damon and R. M. Lerner, 24–98. New York: Wiley, 2006. Thompson, R. A., S. Meyer, and M. McGinley. “Understanding Values in Relationship: The Development of Conscience.” In Handbook of Moral Development, edited by M. Killen and J. Smetana, 267–297. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. Tomkins, S. “Affect and the Psychology of Knowledge.” In Affect, Cognition, and Personality, edited by S. S. Tomkins and C. E. Izard, 72–97. New York: Springer, 1965. Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman. “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability.” Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973): 207–232.

Having, Doing, and Being 159 Walker, L. J. and J. A. Frimer. “Moral Personality Exemplified.” In Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, edited by D. Narvaez and D. K. Lapsley, 232–255. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wright, J. C. and W. Mischel. “A Conditional Approach to Dispositional Constructs: The Local Predictability of Social Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55 (1987): 454–469. ———. “Conditional Hedges and the Intuitive Psychology of Traits.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55 (1988): 456–469.

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Part III

Asian Philosophy and Psychology on Virtue and Happiness

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8

Seeing Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ in Light of Contemporary Psychology Stephen C. Angle

I.

INTRODUCTION

A central goal of my 2009 book Sagehood was to demonstrate the value of putting neo-Confucian thinkers like Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and Wang Yangming (1472–1529) into dialogue with contemporary Western philosophers.1 In Sagehood, I also dipped into some recent psychological literature on the lives and psychology of moral exemplars, which I used to challenge and enrich my account of neo-Confucian moral education. Given that neoConfucian thinkers are particularly concerned with understanding what we now call ‘moral psychology,’ I reasoned it makes sense to see what comes from examining their accounts of development and functioning of the ‘heartmind (xin)’ in light of empirical studies.2 The present chapter has a similar motivation. As I have continued to read both psychological literature and the works of philosophers who are engaged with psychologists (including Nancy Snow’s important Virtue as Social Intelligence), it has struck me how much common ground there is between certain post-Kohlberg contemporary research programs and the feature of neo-Confucian philosophizing that I call ‘active moral perception.’ By bringing out the homologies between these two very different bodies of theory, I believe that progress can be made toward a whole series of objectives. To begin with, it is valuable to emphasize to comparative philosophers the new directions in which post-Kohlberg moral psychological research is moving, so that others can recognize the possibilities for fruitful interaction. In addition, one reason that Kohlberg and his followers were not friendly to an emphasis on virtues was the possibilities for relativism that a virtue approach seemed to open up.3 The new research I will be discussing is much friendlier to virtue ethics but also more open to cultural differences. Since neo-Confucianism offers a culturally distinctive set of moral psychological categories and narratives about exemplars, this gives us an opportunity to reflect on whether a problematic form of relativism has emerged. I will show here that hundreds of years ago, Chinese philosophers had at least some of the insights that are now being unpacked and tested by psychologists, and furthermore that the neo-Confucians articulated an ethical

164 Stephen C. Angle theory that meshes well with these insights. Given this, and also given that the neo-Confucians are working out of a tradition that is in many ways different from Western traditions, we might expect that the neo-Confucians can offer novel and perhaps challenging perspectives from which contemporary philosophers and psychologists can learn. I will suggest that this is indeed the case. At the same time, I will argue that attention to contemporary psychology is extremely valuable for the further development of contemporary Confucian ethics. For some—especially those influenced by the great twentieth-century Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909–1995)—this will be my most controversial claim, but by showing the ways in which neoConfucian philosophy and current psychology are converging, I hope to suggest a fruitful direction for the reinterpretation and further development of Confucianism.

II.

THE POST-KOHLBERGIAN TURN TOWARD MORAL IDENTITY

Lawrence Kohlberg was the dominant force in psychological research into human moral functioning for several decades. Indeed, he is largely credited with initiating empirical psychological research into the subject. Drawing on Piaget’s theories of childhood cognitive development and on a reading of Kant’s moral philosophy, Kohlberg’s research program focused on stages of development in moral reasoning. Unless a given behavior was motivated by an explicit moral judgment, in fact, Kohlberg and his colleagues denied that it had any moral status.4 By the 1980s, though, problems with Kohlberg’s approach were emerging, as were alternative paradigms. Martin Hoffman had argued that moral emotions—and, in particular, empathy— were vital to moral functioning.5 Augusto Blasi showed that there exists what he called a “judgment-action gap”: Sophisticated moral reasoning turned out to be only weakly correlated with actual moral action.6 Blasi therefore concluded that the story had to be more complex than Kohlberg allowed and hypothesized that moral self-identity, including the “readiness to interpret the world in moral terms,”7 may be an important aspect of our overall moral functioning.8 Darcia Narvaez and Daniel Lapsley, two psychologists whose work has built on Blasi’s insight, have diagnosed the problem wrought by Kohlberg’s dominance as stemming from “adopting a particular philosophical tradition as our starting point,” which led to “philosophical objections [being] improperly used to trump the empirical claims of a theory.”9 Rather than such a “moralized psychology,” they prefer a “psychologized morality” that is open to a wide range of psychological approaches.10 I will revisit some of these broad, methodological claims later in the essay. For now, let us focus on the approach Blasi initiated—namely, theory and research built around the idea of moral personality and identity. In

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 165 particular, I want to look at how researchers have followed up on his suggestion that “readiness to interpret the world in moral terms” might be important because this turns out to resonate strongly with the neo-Confucian understanding of moral perception. One important source of inspiration has been the work of John Bargh and colleagues on “automaticity.”11 Narvaez and Lapsley argue that one has a “moral character” to the extent that “moral schemas are chronically accessibled for social information processing,” which they understand primarily in terms of Bargh’s category of “preconscious automaticity.”12 Narvaez and Lapsley point out that a key feature of moral exemplars that is noted by Colby and Damon13 (among others) is the exemplars’ experience of moral action as necessary: They see the moral course of action as obvious rather than as one among other alternatives.14 Narvaez and Lapsley write, “any theory that attempts to explain the exemplary behavior of ‘moral saints’ along with more prosaic forms of moral identity necessarily requires a specification of the social-cognitive sources of preconscious automaticity.”15 Narvaez and Lapsley recognize that Bargh has identified other forms of automaticity and see some significance to both postconscious and goaldependent automaticity, but their main focus is simply on chronically accessibly moral schema no matter what the exact mechanisms of acquisition and activation might be.16 In a subsequent paper, they write, “The source of individual differences in construct accessibility lies in the particularities of each person’s unique developmental history.”17 Their methodology in this latter paper is to identify moral “chronics” and then empirically demonstrate that they are more likely than nonchronics to make spontaneous moral inferences and employ moral categories to evaluate characters in narratives. Their tentative conclusion is that “chronically accessible moral schemas dispose one to ‘see’ readily the moral dimensions of experience.”18 In her recent book, moral philosopher Nancy Snow emphasizes Bargh’s category of “goal-dependent automaticity” in order to explain habitual virtuous behavior.19 Snow stresses that “for a mature agent to be considered truly virtuous, virtuous actions must be performed for the right reasons, that is, with the appropriate motivation.”20 I take it that this is the main reason for Snow’s focus on goal-dependent automaticity: Since the automatic actions are dependent on a “virtue-relevant goal,” they can be justified as fully virtuous actions, despite not having been consciously chosen. The practical rationality of such virtuous actions can be seen in their amenability to post-facto reflective endorsement: “reflecting on the virtuous habits she has acquired, [the agent] should be able to honestly and intelligibly link them with her own virtue-relevant goals [e.g., being just], even though she is not conscious of her reasons for acting when she acts.”21 Based on my understanding of Bargh’s categories of automaticity, I want to suggest that they differ from one another primarily in the way they are caused (in Bargh’s terms, they differ in terms of “necessary preconditions”), but at least as ideal types, will not differ from one another in the ways they

166 Stephen C. Angle are justified or experienced.22 Preconscious automaticity may have a variety of origins—more on which later—but it seems every bit as amenable to post-facto reflective endorsement as either of the other types of automaticity. As for postconscious automaticity, the same should be true. Postconscious automaticity takes place when conscious focusing on (for example) a moral concept has subsequent consequences that are generated automatically and outside of conscious awareness; the activation of a moral concept can “reverberate throughout the cognitive system.”23 I speculate that only when the automaticity breaks down to some degree—one might find the need to question the results of a preconsciously shaped perception, re-prime a postconscious process, consciously and deliberatively support the goal associated with goal-dependent automaticity, and so on—will the different causal preconditions leak into the phenomenology. If moral chronicity is important—a conclusion that the neo-Confucians, in their own way, will reinforce—then it will be important to determine how one comes to be a ‘moral chronic’: How does one acquire the relevant cognitive-affective schemas, goals, commitments, and so on, and how do they become so readily accessible that the various automatic processes described above are enabled? This is a large research area, but a few points are worth noting, as they will connect up with aspects of the neo-Confucian account we will examine in the next section. First, one theme within moral development research is the importance of “warm, responsive parenting in early life”;24 a complementary idea is that “ ‘committed compliance’ on the part of the child to the norms and values of caregivers motivates moral internalization.”25 Others emphasize that immersion in good relationships and communities are key to fostering the intuitions that lead to moral chronicity.26 In all these cases, the researchers are describing mechanisms of moral growth that do not depend on the learners consciously seeking to internalize anything. A second theme, though, is that conscious cultivation also plays an important role, though typically at later ages (adolescence and young adulthood, in particular). Snow writes of the way in which compassion can be recognized as domain-dependent, leading one to aim at “extending” one’s compassion more globally. She says that this “is not an easy process,” requiring “introspection and the deliberate training of [one’s] capacities for affect, perception, and response.”27 An emerging psychological literature aims to flesh out how these various kinds of training might work and to engage in empirical testing of their effectiveness; I discuss some of this briefly below, in Section IV. Because of differences at every level from the genetic to the cultural, one result of the picture of the ‘moral chronic’ that I have been exploring here is the possibility—indeed, the likelihood—of significant differences among the moral schemas that are chronically available to different virtuous people, and even the possibility that multiple schemas may be available to a single person. Two main sources have been put forward for the multiplicity of moral schemas: distinct, modular capacities of our brains with connections

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 167 to different stages in human evolution and cultural differences. One version of the brain-based sources of differences is Narvaez’s “Triune Ethics Theory,” according to which three crucial stages in human brain evolution left us with three distinct ethical orientations, each of which uses cognitive and emotional propensities to engineer moral behavior in different ways.28 She sees possibilities for both conflict and for synthetic unity, as well as for shifting from one to another depending on situational contexts, though she also suggests that moral chronics will probably be more stable. Philosopher Peggy DesAutels has also argued for the existence of multiple capacities for moral perception: an “abstract” competence that focuses on high-level problem solving and a “concrete” capacity that uses “embodied, low-level thought processes” to respond to “finely grained situations.”29 While DesAutels says that most adult humans have both these competences to one degree or other, her emphasis is less on possibilities for synthesis than on possibilities for gestalt-like shifting from one perspective to another, depending on the particular situation.30 In addition to brain- and development-based differences, it is unquestionable that broad cultural factors will also lead to differences in moral schemas. This is easy enough to see just from considering the ways researchers investigate chronicity: all of the phenomena studied, from subjects’ likelihood to use of moral descriptions of a story to their patterns of inference, take place in a particular language that makes a given set of inferentially rich, interrelated moral concepts available.31 A second way that cultural distinctiveness may enter into the picture is seen in Dan McAdams’s provocative three-level model of moral personality. McAdams argues that layered on top of character traits and goals or schemas is “an emerging narrative identity—an internalized and evolving story of the reconstructed past and imagined future that aims to provide life with unity, coherence, and purpose.”32 His own work has focused on the “redemptive” narrative that he finds to be characteristic of Americans, but he notes that it is “quite likely that the life stories of moral exemplars in other societies do not resemble the redemptive self.”33 To this degree, then, he postulates that moral personalities may vary considerably, with “each culture provid[ing] its own characteristic range.” Let me conclude this section with some significant cautionary notes that have been sounded about the link Blasi and others have proposed between moral identity and moral action. David Moshman explores the ways in which what he calls a “false moral identity” can be maintained through various sorts of self-serving denials of evidence and can generate deadly immorality.34 Skitka and Morgan argue that attitudes experienced as strong moral convictions, which they call “moral mandates,” can be variously problematic, leading to intolerance, unwillingness to compromise or accept procedural solutions, unconcern with the means used to achieve the “mandated” end, and an erosion in trust in legal authorities.35 These are the sorts of concerns that a robust ethical theory will have to find ways to counter. It

168 Stephen C. Angle is outside the scope of the present essay to look at ways that extant Western ethical theories do so, but as part of the next section, we will see that neoConfucian theories can readily handle both types of challenges.

III.

NEO-CONFUCIAN ACTIVE MORAL PERCEPTION

Chapter Seven of Sagehood is devoted to showing how the ease with which a Confucian sage is supposed to be able to act ethically follows from two things: a commitment to view the world as susceptible to harmony and a resulting ‘active moral perception.’ My main source is the great Ming dynasty neo-Confucian master WangYangming; I offer my account in part as an interpretation of Wang’s famous teaching concerning the “unity of knowledge and action.” I also draw on the contemporary Confucian thinker Antonio Cua and on Western philosophers like Iris Murdoch and Larry Blum. In this section of the present chapter, I will summarize the idea of active moral perception and make some initial connections to the work of the psychologists discussed already. First, a bit of background. Like most neo-Confucians, Wang believed that the universe is structured by Universal Coherence (tianli), which means that there is an ideally valuable and intelligible way that all things can fit together. Furthermore, we can perceive this Coherence—both in the ways it is implicit in specific situations and in ever-greater and more complex contexts—in part because Coherence is in our own heartminds, although for various reasons we are often not cognizant of nor motivated by our reaction to Coherence. (The heartmind (xin) is the unified seat of cognition and feeling.) Exactly how to understand Coherence (another translation for which is ‘principle’) is a matter of considerable controversy, both within the tradition and in contemporary scholarship. All should agree, though, that Coherence is closely linked to the idea of harmony and that realizing Coherence (or harmony) constitutes the Way (dao) for humans. In a famous Analects passage, Confucius’s moral development is described as progressing from a “commitment to learning” at age fifteen, through a variety of steps until, at age seventy, he was able to “follow his heartmind’s desire without overstepping the bounds.”36 Wang Yangming is recorded as having had the following conversation with a student named Tang Xu: Tang Xu asked, “Does establishing one’s commitment (li zhì) mean to always preserve a good thought, and to do good and remove bad?” [The Teacher] replied: “When a good thought is preserved, that is Universal Coherence. . . . This thought is like the roots of a tree. Establishing one’s commitment is nothing other than nurturing this good thought. To be able to ‘follow his heartmind’s desire without overstepping the bounds’ is simply when one’s commitment has reached maturity (shu).”37

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 169 Establishing a commitment is to nurture or preserve a “good thought.” When one can do this always, one’s commitment has matured and one can act with sagely ease. Now consider the following passage: [A student] asked about “establishing commitment.” The teacher said: “It is simply to want to preserve Universal Coherence in every thought. If one does not neglect this, in time it will naturally crystallize in one’s mind. This is like what the Daoists call “the congealing of the sageessence.” If the thought of Universal Coherence is always preserved, then the gradual steps to the levels of beautiful person, great person, sage, and spiritual person are all but the cultivation and extension of this one thought.38 What needs to grow, in other words, is the consistency with which we “want to preserve universal coherence in every thought”: this consistent disposition is “commitment.” As far as this passage tells us, though, Universal Coherence itself and our ability to identify it do not themselves develop. One more passage will fill out the picture: [The Teacher said,] “When a good thought arises, recognize it and develop it fully. When a bad thought arises, recognize and stop it. Recognition and developing or stopping are commitment. This is intelligence endowed by Heaven. This is all a sage has. A student must preserve it.39 Again, the ability to recognize whether something is good or bad—that is, whether it fits with Universal Coherence—is already present in us (“endowed by Heaven”). This is what Wang elsewhere calls “good knowing (liangzhi).”40 What we need to develop is the reliable disposition to deploy our recognitional capacity; when this happens, our commitment has matured. The passage we just looked at leaves open the possibility that one notices a thought, judges it to be good or bad, and then takes a further step of developing it or stopping it. If we turn to Wang’s discussion of the unity of knowledge and action, though, we will see that what he really has in mind would be better punctuated as ‘recognize-it-and-develop-it-fully’ or ‘recognize-it-and-stop-it’: The recognition and the action are part of a single process. As Wang says, “true knowledge and action”: . . . are “like loving beautiful colors and hating bad odors.” Seeing beautiful colors appertains to knowledge, while loving beautiful colors appertains to action. However, as soon as one sees that beautiful color, he has already, automatically loved it. It is not that one sees it first and them makes up one’s mind to love it.41 Thus, when one says one knows that one’s parents should be served with filial piety but cannot put it into practice, one does not really ‘know’: It is

170 Stephen C. Angle not true knowledge. If one had true knowledge, then seeing one’s parents would automatically bring with it the motivation to treat them with filial piety, just as seeing a beautiful flower automatically brings with it the motive to love the flower. It is clear that ‘know’ is being used here in a special way, since ‘true knowledge’ entails more than just cognitive information. In light of the earlier passages we have considered, it is plausible to read Wang as holding that true knowledge of something is equivalent to having a mature commitment toward that thing. That is, we truly know only when we reliably want to preserve and develop good thoughts (and want to stop bad ones). I believe that Antonio Cua captures much of this when he writes that such a commitment: . . . is to adopt an attitude and resolve, with one’s heart and mind, to look at things and events in such a way that they can become constituents in a harmonious unity without the form of the unity being specified in advance of experience of man’s confrontation with the changes in the natural world. Thus, to adopt this ideal attitude is to see human life in its morally excellent form, as possessing a coherence in which apparently conflicting elements are elements of an achievable harmonious order. The presence of conflicting elements is in experience a fact to be acknowledged. Acknowledgment brings with it a task of reconciliation. . . . Since the desired coherence of the moral order is not spelled out a priori, harmonization of the conflicting elements in experience is essentially a creative endeavor on the part of both the Confucian moral theorist and the agent.42 One’s commitment ensures that one’s experience of the world is not the passive noticing of moral features; one rather experiences the world as making demands on one—demands that may entail a kind of creativity, since Coherence is implicit in the unique situation before one, rather than being spelled out in advance. I call this ‘active’ moral perception because of one’s motivated engagement with the process of perception. This does not mean that one is actively steering what one sees. Rather, one is ‘looking for harmony’ in the sense that one is primed to see and react favorably to opportunities for harmony. One expects ‘good thoughts’ to be aspects of Coherence: that is, to be good because of the ways that they fit in with larger patterns of value and intelligibility. Thanks to these expectations, one is much more able to see such patterns and opportunities whenever and wherever the world offers them up. As I understand it, this is precisely a kind of moral chronicity whereby one automatically sees-and-responds to Coherence. In addition, I have been emphasizing the need for one to take on and develop a ‘commitment,’ without which one will fail to acquire ‘true knowledge.’ This, too, is a kind of ‘activity,’ but it is distinct from active moral perception itself and relies on

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 171 a different sense of ‘active.’ I will say more about the active development of this commitment, including differences among WangYangming, other Confucians, and current Western theorists, in the following section.

IV.

COMPARATIVE ISSUES

Neo-Confucian active moral perception, I submit, has many similarities to the model of moral functioning that the contemporary psychologists discussed in Section II are beginning to articulate. In this final section, it is time to explore some of the issues that arise from juxtaposing these two very different traditions of inquiry and suggest ways that the psychologists (and their philosophical peers) can learn from Wang Yangming and the heirs of Wang Yangming can learn from the psychologists. Shallow knowledge. To begin with, we might ask whether Wang Yangming’s idea of “shallow knowledge,” whereby one knows one should be (for example) filial towards one’s parents but does not put this into action, corresponds to anything in the psychological discussions. This connects to questions I raise at the end of Sagehood’s Chapter Seven, and I now feel that we make further progress. In Sagehood, I discuss philosopher Lawrence Blum’s example of Tim. Tim encounters an ethically ambiguous situation, initially fails to notice the possible concerns, but somewhat later, ruminating on his experience, comes to see the experience in moral terms, as an instance of racism. Blum writes: “This perception of racism becomes his ‘take’ on the situation. He now sees an issue of injustice in the situation in a way he did not at first.” There is something admirable in Tim’s realization: “Prior to any action Tim might take in the situation, it is (ceteris paribus) a (morally) better thing for him to have recognized the racial injustice than not to have done so.”43 Still, Blum emphasizes that Tim’s new perception leaves vital questions still open: Note that seeing a situation in moral categories does not entail seeing one’s moral agency as engaged by that situation. People often see a situation as involving a wrong but not regard themselves as morally pulled to do anything about it. For example, even when Tim comes to see injustice as having taken place, he may think of that injustice as over and done with and not implying anything for him to do about it. The issue of what makes a moral being see her sense of agency as engaged by a situation— and how perception fits into this—deserves further exploration than I can undertake here.44 On the one hand, we can see Tim as arriving at a kind of shallow knowledge that racism took place, since we are imagining that he was not moved to take it up actively as a personal concern. So Wang’s category looks relevant. On the other hand, we might see Blum as posing a significant challenge

172 Stephen C. Angle to both Wang and to the contemporary psychologists who similarly emphasize the categories through which we perceive events: Can moral perception really be passive and inactive, as it is for Tim? Wang Yangming’s answer is very apt. He would say that knowledge and action have become separated because of the intrusions of selfishness. He holds that the default (‘original’) situation is one in which, when we attend to a situation and see it in value-laden terms, our perception is active, motivation is engaged, and we react. There are only two ways in which this can go wrong: when we fail to pay attention in the first place or when the see-and-react process is disrupted by selfishness. In fact, these two are closely linked. Working to deepen a commitment to learning and the Way, which we might see as focusing on the failure to pay attention, really just is the flip-side of working to remove selfishness; Wang would surely explain the failure to pay adequate attention as itself a kind of selfishness. And if we turn to the psychological literature, we will find an at least partial correlate to Wang’s concern with selfishness—namely, the idea of ‘moral disengagement.’ For example, Albert Bandura has explored the ways in which “The self-regulatory mechanisms governing moral conduct do not come into play unless they are activated, and there are many psychosocial maneuvers by which moral self-sanctions are selectively disengaged from inhumane conduct.”45 If we follow Blasi in thinking that moral self and identity are part of the bedrock explanation of moral functioning, we can then deploy the idea of selfishness or disengagement to explain those times when moral knowledge is shallow and moral perception is inactive.46 Moral development. Turn now to the question of whether and how our moral functioning develops. Some of what I discussed in Section II will sound very congenial to Confucians: The importance of parents and, in particular, of ‘committed compliance’ with one’s parents’ values sounds a great deal like Confucian filial piety. Confucians will also like the idea that relationships and community are vital to, and even constitutive of, a good moral personality. Both classical and neo-Confucians have much to say (although they say somewhat different things) about more conscious ethical cultivation, some of which resonates strongly with Snow’s talk of “extending” compassion (see Mencius).47 Two themes in Section II, though, pose significant challenges to Confucians, and especially to the neo-Confucianism of Wang Yangming on which I have been focusing. First, if we see fully developed moral capacity as relying on a synthesis of Narvaez’s “triune ethics” or of McAdams’s three levels, can that be squared with Wang’s confidence that one’s liangzhi is complete and fully formed? (This challenge is all the greater if synthesis is impossible and we are left with distinct and incompatible options in our ethical toolkit, as DesAutels posits.) Second, some of the psychologists have suggested that we view ethical functioning as a skill that we can develop, instead of the result of a faculty or faculties that we learn to deploy. This certainly sounds very different from Wang Yangming.

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 173 In fact, P.J. Ivanhoe has recently argued that the development of an ethical sensibility is “a prolonged, complex, and at times difficult process that seems to have more in common with acquiring a skill or art than possessing a faculty.”48 Part of his argument is that the analogy with vision that both John McDowell and Wang Yangming employ is misleading, since, for example, “we don’t tend to believe that our understanding of redness improves with greater experience of red things in the way we feel our ability to understand and deal with issues surrounding what it is to really love or care for someone does.”49 Whether or not this point is telling against McDowell, I think that Wang has a ready response. Wang’s claim is that seeing-and-reacting would be easy if we only looked, unclouded by selfishness. We do not have to learn to care for others or to feel pain at their suffering; we need to learn to eliminate biases and distractions—and learning that can be a prolonged, complex, and difficult process. Later in his essay, Ivanhoe acknowledges that Wang may have a somewhat easier time responding to this criticism than McDowell but makes two further points. First, Ivanhoe says that many cases of moral failure come not from selfishness but from “a simple lack of information or enough experience.” Second, he suggests that the “growth of our moral sensibilities does not feel like the spontaneous realization of a fully formed innate faculty,” but is more like the cultivation of taste by a connoisseur.50 With regard to the first, I would say that Wang has no trouble with the idea that we often lack information. Liangzhi isn’t magic; it simply responds to situations and responds not by magically telling us facts we don’t know, but by showing us the world (insofar as we understand it) in apt moral coloration. There is nothing problematic about our need to find out details, either in order to understand the situation or to know how best to implement our desired response. As Ivanhoe notes, Wang actually recognizes the need to “investigate many actual details” quite explicitly, even while emphasizing that the basis of one’s moral response lies not in the details but in removing selfness and preserving Universal Coherence.51 Concerning Ivanhoe’s suggestion that moral development is more like the gradual cultivation of taste, I reply (on Wang’s behalf) that moral responsiveness is a many-times-a-day affair that we all engage in, mostly rather well. When we go wrong, it’s typically the case that we can readily come to see what the better response would have been, when it is explained to us. Moral responsiveness is not, typically, a deeply subtle matter such that only those with much training can see it. It is not like tasting the hint of cloves in a bottle of fine wine—the ‘hint’ that is so subtle that even when an enthusiastic but under-educated wine drinker like myself is told of it, I still cannot perceive it. While more could surely be said on the subject (including further exploration of relevant psychological literature), I do not find it obvious that a connoisseur’s taste is the right way to understand a moral exemplar.

174 Stephen C. Angle Even if we do not follow Ivanhoe in adopting the model of the connoisseur, we still might be tempted by the idea that the notion of skill must play a role in explaining moral development. Psychologists have engaged in extensive studies of expert or skilled behavior and of the acquisition of expertise and are beginning to apply these frameworks to moral development.52 Philosopher Daniel Jacobson has argued that McDowell’s model of moral perception cannot be combined with a skill model of virtue, since the development of skills requires feedback based on concerns that we already have, whereas McDowell’s understanding of virtuous perception ties it to a distinct “space of reasons” that simply “silences” our preexisting emotional reactions.53 If this is correct, then is Wang equally vulnerable? Perhaps not, since Wang makes clear that we all already care about the deliverances of liangzhi, even though we do not always feel them as strongly and clearly as we should. Still, what would growing skill be about, on Wang’s model, if not the growing expertise of our liangzhi itself? The obvious answer for us to try out is the skill of being more maturely committed to the Way and (consequently) less selfish. Perhaps the skill model can help us understand the gradual development of a nonselfish perspective on the world, and the increasing force with which we experience the felt goodness of liangzhi can provide the needed feedback to make skilled improvement possible. Much of what I said above about connoisseurs applies to experts as well: I think we have reason to resist a too-simple conflation of moral exemplar and moral expert. One advantage of an engagement with Wang is that he pushes us to think about the assumptions underlying psychologists’ explanations of moral functioning. At the same time, several challenges remain for Wang and for contemporary Confucians. Wang’s talk of a unitary “good knowing” may need to be rethought as a kind of idealization—a way of referring to a perceptual capacity that we have without needing to learn it, but which rests on various other functions that can be separately analyzed. For that matter, even if I have found Wang’s way of talking about active moral perception to be extremely insightful, we should remember that other neo-Confucians disagreed with him on key matters of analysis and pedagogy and perhaps they were closer to the truth than he. There are many directions in which future research based on the ideas canvassed in this paper might go.

V.

CONCLUSION

In two ways, the approach of this paper can be seen as friendly to some degree of relativism or pluralism. First, rather than making a putatively universal notion like Kohlberg’s reciprocity central to my account, I have focused on moral perception. As I noted earlier, insofar as moral perception involves categories that are articulated via language and culture, it seems hard to deny that a plurality of schemas will result. Second, I have explicitly invoked the theorizing and categories of a non-Western tradition.

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 175 Notwithstanding the important similarities between neo-Confucian and contemporary psychological theories, there can be no doubt that significant differences are also present. Consider, for example, the role of Universal Coherence in Wang’s framework. I also mentioned above the explicit place of culturally distinctive narratives in McAdam’s three-level model of moral personality theory. At the same time, however, we should not downplay the ways in which objectivity enters into the accounts of many of my sources. Even though neo-Confucians emphasize particularity and the partly constitutive role of one’s own reactions in determining Coherence, they are still committed to the objectivity of Coherence: One can be wrong about it, and can be brought to see this.54 Wang would also criticize any theory not built around Coherence and liangzhi (good knowing) as failing to grasp the way the universe is. The psychologists tend to be less interested in the construction of specific normative theories, but even though the researchers on whom I have drawn reject Kohlberg’s Kantianism, they still offer us at least two sources of objectivity. First, their work on the empirical basis of moral functioning offers various potential constraints on normative theories. For example, if a goal of one’s normative theory is to better-cultivate high moral functioning on the model of actual exemplars, then understanding how and why exemplars do what they do should be critical. Second, built in to many of the psychological theories I have examined are explanations of how one can go wrong—for instance, as discussed in the section above on ‘shallow knowledge.’ In short, the framework for understanding morality that is implicit in this essay certainly allows for a plurality of moral perspectives, but it also points toward various ways in which these perspectives will share commonalities and perhaps—especially if we allow that our theorists are fallible people who may be wrong about some aspects of their subject—engage in legitimate mutual influence and cross-perspective learning. I mentioned near the beginning that some contemporary psychologists, disturbed by the degree to which their subdiscipline had been held hostage by the framework of a single philosophical tradition (namely, Kantian morality), advocate ‘psychologized morality’ rather than ‘moralized psychology.’ I certainly agree that we need to be very cautious about allowing a particular philosophical tradition to artificially narrow the kinds of empirical questions that researchers pursue. Nonetheless, we also want to avoid the opposite problem: namely, allowing the empirical research—which will always be constrained by which types of experiments are practicable, fundable, interesting to leading researchers, and so on—to dictate the confines of morality. Superior to either extreme would be an open and ongoing dialogue among philosophical and psychological approaches, each looking to the others for inspiration, support, and challenges. Following in the footsteps of scholars like Joel Kupperman and Owen Flanagan, I want to further suggest that bringing non-Western philosophical voices into these cross-disciplinary conversations can have extremely salutary effects.

176 Stephen C. Angle NOTES 1. Stephen C. Angle, Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2. Similarly, in a more recent article, I juxtaposed themes from Zhu Xi’s account of moral education with the work of psychologists Lawrence Kohlberg and Martin Hoffman, showing that contemporary scholars seeking to develop the ideas of Kohlberg or Hoffman have good reason to attend to Zhu Xi’s insights, and also arguing that contemporary Confucians should see Western studies of moral education as sources of stimulating challenges and helpful resources. See Stephen C. Angle, “A Productive Dialogue? Contemporary Moral Education and Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian Ethics,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38 Supplement s1 (2011): 183–203. 3. John C. Gibbs, Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 4. 4. Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” in Character Psychology and Character Education, ed. Daniel K. Lapsey and F. Clark Power (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2005), 141. 5. Martin L. Hoffman, “Moral Development,” in Handbook of Child Psychology, ed. P. Mussen (New York: John Wiley, 1970), 261–361. 6. Augusto Blasi, “Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Psychological Bulletin 88, no. 1 (1980): 1–45. See also Augusto Blasi, “Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Theoretical Perspective,” Developmental Review 3 (1983): 178–210. 7. Augusto Blasi, “Bridging Moral Cognition,” 40. 8. Sam A. Hardy, “Identity, Reasoning, and Emotion: An Empirical Comparison of Three Sources of Moral Motivation,” Motivation and Emotion 30, no. 3 (2006): 205–213 is an empirical analysis of three different sources of moral motivation: identity, empathy, and moral reasoning. In Hardy’s research, identity and empathy, but not moral reasoning, were positively correlated with overall prosocial behavior. 9. Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” 23. 10. Ibid., 143. 11. John A. Bargh, “Conditional Automaticity: Varieties of Automatic Influence in Social Perception and Cognition,” in Unintended Thought, ed. James S. Uleman and John A. Bargh (New York: Guilford Press, 1989), 3–51. 12. Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” 146. 13. Anne Colby and Damon William, Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment (New York: The Free Press, 1992). 14. Moral philosophers who have commented on the feeling of necessity attending the behavior of moral exemplars include Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of the Good (New York: Routledge, 1970), 1–45; Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper and Row, 1979); and Joel Kupperman, Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 15. Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” 143. 16. Ibid., 146–147. 17. Darcia Narvaez, Daniel K. Lapsely, Scott Hagele, and Benjamin Lasky, “Moral Chronicity and Social Information Processing: Tests of a Social

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 177

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

Cognitive Approach to the Moral Personality,” Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006): 968. Ibid., 981. Another related dimension of moral chronicity is what Gibbs calls “field independence” (Moral Development and Reality, 119): the ability to see things veridically notwithstanding cognitive or social pressures to do otherwise (e.g., optical illusions or peer pressure). Gibbs discusses ways in which primed moral schemas (in “high-commitment participants”) can overcome prejudicial stimuli (Ibid., 125). Nancy E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010). Ibid., 53. Ibid., 60. Bargh, “Conditional Automaticity,” 10. Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,”144 and Bargh, “Conditional Automaticity,” 15–17. It would be interesting to explore to what degree the effects of Iris Murdoch’s idea of “attention,” which is supposed to influence the way one automatically perceives a given individual, might be explained via postconscious automaticity. Be this as it may, once again the phenomenology of the automatic effects (for example, Murdoch’s M subsequently “just seeing” various aspects of D’s behavior as socially appropriate) will be the same as in either of the other two cases. See Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection.” Darcia Narvaez, “Triune Ethics Theory and Moral Personality,” in The Moral Personality, ed. Darcia Narveaz and Daniel K. Lapsley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146. Daniel K. Lapsely and Patrick L. Hill, “The Development of the Moral Personality,” in Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, ed. Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K Lapsley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 199. Both the importance of good relationships and communities, and the negative influences of bad communities, are explored in Clark F. Power, “The Moral Self in Community,” in Moral Development, Self, and Identity, ed. Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 47–64; Robert Atkins, Daniel Hart, and Thomas M. Donnelly, “Moral Identity Development and School Attachment,” in The Moral Self in Community, ed. Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 65–82; Lapsley and Hill, “The Development of the Moral Personality;” and Daniel Hart and M. Kyle Matsuba, “Urban Neighborhoods as Contexts for Moral Identity Development,” in The Development of the Moral Personality, ed. Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 214–231. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence, 34. She calls them the “Security Ethic,” which is the most primitive; the “Ethic of Engagement,” which underlies the values of compassion, social harmony, and togetherness; and the “Ethic of Imagination” in which advanced moral judgment follows from the ability to coordinate a variety of evolutionarily earlier capacities. See Narvaez, “Triune Ethics Theory and Moral Personality.” Peggy DesAutels, “Psychologies of Moral Perceivers,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 22 (1998): 266–279. Ibid., 278. For one particularly clear example, see Narvaez et al., “Moral Chronicity and Social Information Processing.” My point in mentioning the richness of the concepts is to point out that neither subjects nor researchers are confined

178 Stephen C. Angle

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

to a ‘thin’ language (e.g., of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’), which might have a greater chance of being transcultural. Dan P. McAdams, “The Moral Personality,” in Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, ed. Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 19. Ibid., 25. David Moshman, “False Moral Identity: Self-Serving Denial in the Maintenance of Moral Self-Conceptions,” in Lapsley and Narvaez, Moral Development, Self, and Identity, 83–109. Linda J. Skitka and Scott G. Morgan, “The Double-Edged Sword of a Moral State of Mind,” in The Dynamic Moral Self: A Social Psychological Perspective, ed. Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 355–374. Compare Confucius, Analects, With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 9. I cite Wang Yangming’s Record for Practice (also translated as “Instructions for Practical Living”) by section number from Wang Yangming, Instructions for Practical Living, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), §53. Translations are my own, from the Chinese original, Wang Yangming 王陽明,傳習錄詳註集評 [Record for Practice with Detailed Annotations and Collected Commentary] (Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1983). Ibid., §16. Ibid., §71. Ibid., §143. Ibid., §5. A. S. Cua, Moral Vision and Tradition: Essays in Chinese Ethics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 1998), 124–125. Lawrence A. Blum, “Moral Perception and Particularity,” Ethics 101 (1991): 706–707. Ibid., 708, n9. Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanties,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 193. Seeing the self as morally, actively engaged by a situation does not mean that one sees oneself as completely responsible for resolving the situation. Elise Springer’s work on the communicative and ecological dimensions of moral criticism, in which one’s “taking up a moral concern” can then follow many different pathways, is extremely apt here. See Springer, Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Compare Mengzi, Mengzi, With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Bryan Van Norden (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), 11. Philip J. Ivanhoe, “McDowell, WANG Yangming, and Mengzi’s Contributions to Understanding Moral Perception,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 10, no. 3 (2011): 281. Ibid. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 283. Wang, Record for Practice with Detailed Annotations, 30; Wang, Record for Practice, 8 (§3). Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” 150–160. Daniel Jacobson, “Seeing by Feeling: Virtues, Skills, and Moral Perception,” Ethic Theory Moral Practice 8, no. 4 (2005): 400. Angle, Sagehood, chap. 2.

Confucian ‘Active Moral Perception’ 179 REFERENCES Angle, Stephen C. Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. “A Productive Dialogue? Contemporary Moral Education and Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian Ethics.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38 Supplement s1 (2011): 183–203. Atkins, Robert, Daniel Hart, and Thomas M. Donnelly. “Moral Identity Development and School Attachment.” In The Moral Self in Community, edited by Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez, 65–82. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. Bandura, Albert. “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 193–209. Bargh, John A. “Conditional Automaticity: Varieties of Automatic Influence in Social Perception and Cognition.” In Unintended Thought, edited by James S. Uleman and John A. Bargh, 3–51. New York: Guilford Press, 1989. Blasi, Augusto. “Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature.” Psychological Bulletin 88, no. 1 (1980): 1–45. ———. “Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Theoretical Perspective.” Developmental Review 3 (1983): 178–210. Blum, Lawrence A. “Moral Perception and Particularity.” Ethics 101 (1991): 701–725. Colby, Anne and William Damon. Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Confucius. Analects, With Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008. Cua, A. S. Moral Vision and Tradition: Essays in Chinese Ethics. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. DesAutels, Peggy. “Psychologies of Moral Perceivers.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 22 (1998): 266–279. Flanagan, Owen. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Gibbs, John C. Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003. Hallie, Philip. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Hardy, Sam A. “Identity, Reasoning, and Emotion: An Empirical Comparison of Three Sources of Moral Motivation.” Motivation and Emotion 30, no. 3 (2006): 205–213. Hardy, Sam A. and Gustavo Carlo. “Identity as a Source of Moral Motivation.” Human Development 48 (2005): 232–256. Hart, Daniel and M. Kyle Matsuba. “Urban Neighborhoods as Contexts for Moral Identity Development.” In The Development of the Moral Personality, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 214–231. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hoffman, Martin L. “Moral Development.” In Handbook of Child Psychology, edited by P. Mussen, 261–361. New York: John Wiley, 1970. ———. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ivanhoe, Philip J. “McDowell, Wang Yangming, and Mengzi’s Contributions to Understanding Moral Perception.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 10, no. 3 (2011): 273–290. Jacobson, Daniel. “Seeing by Feeling: Virtues, Skills, and Moral Perception.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8, no. 4 (2005): 387–409.

180 Stephen C. Angle Kohlberg, Lawrence. Essays on Moral Development. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1984. Kupperman, Joel J. Character. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Lapsley, Daniel K. and Patrick L. Hill, “The Development of the Moral Personality.” In Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 185–213. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Lapsley, Daniel K. and Darcia Narvaez. “Moral Psychology at the Crossroads.” In Character Psychology and Character Education, edited by Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power, 18–35. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. ———. “The Development of the Moral Personality.” In Triune Ethics Theory and Moral Personality, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 185–214. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. McAdams, Dan P. “The Moral Personality.” In Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 11–29. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. McDowell, John. “Virtue and Reason.” The Monist 62 (1979): 331–350. Mengzi. Mengzi, With Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Bryan Van Norden. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008. Moshman, David. “False Moral Identity: Self-Serving Denial in the Maintenance of Moral Self- Conceptions.” In Moral Development, Self, and Identity, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 83–109. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. Murdoch, Iris. “The Idea of Perfection.” In The Sovereignty of the Good, 1–45. New York: Routledge, 1970. Narvaez, Darcia. “Triune Ethics Theory and Moral Personality.” In The Moral Personality, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 136–158. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Narvaez, Darcia and Daniel K. Lapsley. “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise.” In Moral Psychology at the Crossroads, edited by Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power, 140–165. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Narvaez, Darcia, Daniel K. Lapsley, Scott Hagele, and Benjamin Lasky. “Moral Chronicity and Social Information Processing: Tests of a Social Cognitive Approach to the Moral Personality.” Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006): 966–985. Power, F. Clark. “The Moral Self in Community.” In Moral Development, Self, and Identity, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 47–64. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. Skitka, Linda J. and G. Scott Morgan. “The Double-Edged Sword of a Moral State of Mind.” In The Dynamic Moral Self: A Social Psychological Perspective, edited by Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, 355–374. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Snow, Nancy E. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010. Springer, Elise. Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Wang, Yangming. Instructions for Practical Living. Translated by Wing-tsit Chan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Wang, Yangming. 王陽明.傳習錄詳註集評 [Record of Practice with Detailed Annotations and Collected Commentary]. Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1983.

9

Is Self-Regulation a Burden or a Virtue? A Comparative Perspective Hagop Sarkissian

It was during my second year of graduate studies at Duke University that I began thinking about the various burdens and impositions demanded by Confucian ethics. I was giving a ‘brownbag’ talk to my fellow PhD students about the concept of ritual propriety (li禮) in the Analects of Confucius— referring to the strictures of proper behavior that permeate Confucian ethical concerns. Ritual propriety delineates how one should comport oneself (forms of speech, clothing, demeanor, etc.) in a vast array of life circumstances (family life, social life, formal ceremony, etc.). I argued that one of the chief functions of abiding by norms of ritual propriety was to signal one’s values, attitudes, and commitments to others in a clear and predictable fashion, allowing others to easily (even effortlessly) grasp them. This, in turn, would make it possible to coordinate one’s activities in social life with minimal friction. Such signals would be especially important, I argued, in strategic encounters, or exchanges in which conflict (especially moral conflict) was possible. Thus, while the weightiness of ritual propriety in the Analects might seem strange to us, I argued that, when properly understood, it was meant to advance valuable goals of social cohesion and harmony. During the Q&A session that followed my presentation, a fellow PhD student from South Korea offered the following comment, which I now paraphrase from memory: You can only see the good side of ritual propriety, but that’s because you don’t know what it’s like to live in a society that emphasizes it. Those rules and norms are just ways to force people to do things and accept certain restraints on their personal lives. They are tools to bully people around and force them to be compliant and respectful even when these attitudes are not merited. So I don’t think it’s a good thing at all. This was discouraging. In my colleague’s experience growing up in South Korea, ritual propriety provided more burdens than benefits and served to stifle one’s behavior and limit one’s scope of self-expression.

182 Hagop Sarkissian This started my reflections on the role of imposition in Confucian virtue ethics. What sorts of burdens does it place on individuals? What skills, strengths, and talents would one need to flourish with it? Are the burdens reasonable? What I offer in this paper are some thoughts about this issue, focusing on the Confucian notion of ritual propriety. I argue that the main burden of ritual propriety lies in demanding that individuals constantly monitor and regulate their overt behavior in social life. This requires selfregulation, which has been explored extensively in experimental psychology. Many studies suggest that efforts at self-regulation are doomed to fail because they deplete a cognitive resource of limited supply; hence, asking individuals to self-regulate may be a self-defeating proposition. Moreover, evidence suggests that individuals who consciously attempt to regulate their conduct in social life suffer many undesirable social consequences, such as social isolation and alienation. However, the empirical data are not as neat as a cursory glance might reveal. Emerging evidence suggests that difficulties arising from efforts at self-regulation are not inevitable and that self-regulation need not be especially burdensome imposition. In the end, I suggest that there are many benefits that might balance out (or even outweigh) the costs exacted by an ethics that requires such self-regulation.

I.

THE BURDENS OF CONFUCIAN ETHICS

From our own perspective in a Western liberal democracy, Confucian ethics might seem burdensome because of two of its central features: filial piety and ritual propriety. The virtue of filial piety (or filiality, xiao 孝) is one of the most important in the Confucian canon, referring to a rich set of obligations and expectations that attend virtually all aspects of family life.1 For example, parents and elder siblings have obligations to nurture the younger members of the family who, in turn, must be devoted and obedient. As parents age, their children must care for them out of love and gratitude for the care they have received. So far, so good. Yet, parental care is just one of many filial obligations. Bearing offspring, for example, was thought to be a filial obligation; in Mencius 4A26 we are told that “among the three unfilial things, to have no posterity is the worst.”2 Moreover, though children may remonstrate with their parents when appropriate, they must desist and obey without resentment should their counsel fall on deaf ears.3 Confucian ethics emphasizes that families are naturally hierarchical, requiring one to be subordinate to the elders in one’s family. The parent/child dyad is perhaps the most salient, but in traditional Confucian morality, all family members would be related in a strict hierarchical fashion: wives to husbands, children to parents, and younger siblings to elder siblings. Families thus prepare one to enter society with an understanding of oneself as a person nested within networks of hierarchical relationship

Self-Regulation 183 dyads with attendant duties and obligations. (The sentiments expressed by my fellow grad student above in part reflect how such hierarchical relations extend to all aspects of social life.) No discussion of imposition in Confucian ethics could neglect to consider these aspects of filial piety. However, I will not focus on them in what follows. Many have argued that the extreme emphasis on filial duties and deference to social superiors are aspects of Confucianism that ought to be reformed or jettisoned; without mitigating these sources of imposition, Confucianism risks irrelevance to modern concerns.4 Instead, I will focus on the demands of ritual propriety (li 禮), another hallmark of Confucian ethics, and one about which Western philosophers seem far more sanguine.5 Ritual propriety refers to general norms governing appropriate behavior in social, familial, and political stations. Paradigmatic examples of ritual propriety include norms governing religious rites such as ancestor worship, as well as formal ceremonies such as weddings, funerals, and visits to court. More generally, though, ritual propriety refers to the appropriate manners, customs, strictures, and protocols of social, political, and familial life. Ritual propriety would indicate, for example, appropriate dress for ceremonial occasions as well as appropriate conduct for a boss or a worker, a guest or a host. Insofar as it requires learning and abiding by a large number of rules, ritual propriety can seem an imposition on one’s life. What’s more, simple compliance with such rules was considered a mere starting point. Confucius recognized a wide gap between observing the norms of ritual propriety on the one hand and acting virtuously on the other. The latter requires appropriate dispositional attitudes; there must be an appropriate emotional ‘presence,’6 as emotional authenticity trumps procedural formality.7 Further still, propriety must be observed effortlessly, naturally, and spontaneously; the virtuous exemplar will not appear ‘troubled.’8 And finally, there is the matter of matching propriety to occasion, for which there is no algorithm. Knowing when to observe propriety—and, importantly, when not to—was requisite to the exercise of virtue. In all these ways, then, observing ritual propriety can be seen within the tradition as an imposition requisite to the realization of virtue. Given these qualifiers, we can pose the following general form of imposition in Confucian ethics (which will be the focus of the remaining discussion): In any particular situation, one must regulate one’s behavior out of consideration both to the general demands of ritual propriety that may apply in that situation (for example, in one’s role as a guest or host, senior or junior, kin or neighbor) as well as to the particular person(s) at hand and the way one is situated with regards to them. It requires a continual awareness of oneself in one’s context, including how one’s behavior and expressions might be perceived by one’s audience. In other words, properly meeting the demands of ritual propriety—a central component of Confucian ethical practice—requires a continual process of self-monitoring. I call this the

184 Hagop Sarkissian general form of imposition in Confucian virtue ethics because it cuts across the various other types of demands that it has (for example, to be upright or filial or compassionate).

II.

SELF-MONITORING AND SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

We find this emphasis on self-monitoring reflected clearly in many passages in the Analects.9 Consider, for example, the following: 16.10—Confucius said, “The gentleman focuses on nine things: when looking, he focuses on seeing clearly; when listening, he focuses on being discerning; in his countenance (se色), he focuses on being amiable; in his demeanor (mao 貌)), he focuses on being reverent; in his speech, he focuses on being dutiful; in his actions, he focuses on being respectful; when in doubt, he focuses on asking questions; when angry, he focuses on potential negative fallout; and when presented with the opportunity for profit, he focuses upon what is right.” In this passage, we have rather specific advice on how to properly conduct oneself in the company of others and how to behave in ways commensurate with ritual propriety. Two things are paramount: proper discernment of one’s situation and audience and fine awareness of how one might be interpreted by others. I will consider each in turn. Discernment. Discernment requires proper understanding of another’s general mood as well as any specific intentions or preoccupations the person might have—especially any that might be in place because of situational demands or constraints. Put another way, it requires an ability to read minds. To the extent that our emotional lives are transparent, this should not be too difficult a task; indeed, Confucius directs attention to this transparency of emotions,10 and commands his disciples to remain attentive to related clues.11 Hence, we are told that a moral exemplar “examines what is said, is a keen observer of others’ demeanor, and thoughtful in deferring to others.”12 By ‘mind reading,’ then, I mean inferring motives, meanings, and intentions from words, gestures, and expressions. Virtuous conduct and the demands of maintaining social harmony require constant fine-tuning of one’s own behavior, and so mind reading is indispensable to realizing it. Self-awareness. One must be conscientious of oneself as an actor in the social world. This explains why the Analects is a preoccupation with seemingly minute matters of conduct, such as one’s posture, countenance, tone of voice, choice of words and attire, and overall comportment.13 Crucially, as we will see below, these aspects of one’s visible person were thought to affect how others behave and thus how interpersonal situations unfold. A virtuous person must be aware of how they influence others’ attitudes and behavior, and this in turn requires monitoring one’s overt signals—such as

Self-Regulation 185 one’s expressiveness or demeanor (rong容/ mao 貌), countenance (yan 顏/ se 色), and tone of voice (ciqi 辭氣). A common reaction to such impositions is to consider them overly burdensome. Confucius himself seems to admit as much. Those aiming for virtue “must be strong and broad, for their burden is heavy and their course is long. They take being exemplary (ren 仁) as their task. Is this not heavy? They carry this burden until their dying day. Is this not long?”14 Much of this burden, I argue, consists in continual self-regulation and self-restraint— stifling, prolonging, or rechanneling one’s personal impulses or desires out of consideration for those in one’s company and the general norms of proper behavior that apply to the situation. Consider Analects 9.1: Yan Yuan asked about being an exemplary person. The Master said 克己 復禮—“Restrain yourself and turn back to observing ritual propriety.” The reflexive pronoun ji 己 here refers to one’s personal or private self— that is, one’s private interests or desires. What one must overcome are precisely those private impulses, desires, and inclinations that one may naturally have out of respect for accepted norms of proper behavior. This can be suffocating. Early critics of Confucian ethics claimed that such subordinations to the interests of others and the demands of ‘proper behavior’ were just various forms of self-imprisonment and hardly indicative of a person who had progressed in moral life: This is not what I would call getting somewhere. If a man is caught in a place where he can’t get out, is that what you think is getting somewhere? Then the pigeons and doves in a cage must be supposed to have got somewhere too. And to have such inclinations for (ritual) sounds and colors blocking you up from the inside, and leather cap or snipe feather hat, memorandum tablet in the belt and trailing sash [the accoutrements of a nobleman] constricting you from the outside; to be inwardly squeezed by the bars of your pen, outwardly lashed by coil upon coil of rope, and complacently in the middle of the ropes suppose that you have got somewhere, amounts to claiming that the condemned man with his chained arms and manacled figures, or a tiger or leopard in its cage, has got somewhere too. Whoever subordinates his true nature in order to be “exemplary” (ren) and “right” (yi) . . . is not what I would call a fine man.15 In this memorable passage of the Zhuangzi (a Daoist text compiled not long after the Analects), regulating oneself and stifling one’s natural inclinations and desires to what is ritually proper is likened to incarceration; endorsing such behavior is treated as a form of self-delusion. If conventional norms of propriety are simply artificial constraints on one’s individuality—if they only serve to limit one’s exercise of individualism—then there seems little good reason to abide by them.

186 Hagop Sarkissian III.

SELF-REGULATION EAST AND WEST

That Confucian ethics places great and weighty impositions on individuals by demanding self-regulation is clear. And if we examine what costs are exacted by such self-regulation, the literature in experimental psychology seems to give us little reason to doubt this assessment. According to this literature, prolonged or serial attempts at self-control often fail owing to something called “ego depletion,’’ which refers to a general state of cognitive fatigue that results from such efforts.16 Self-regulation is an important human capability, crucial to fulfilling any goal-directed behavior and for fulfilling any number of individual needs, and manifests itself in such behaviors as resisting impulses and delaying gratification. It can be understood as any effort to channel, guide, reshape, or override basic behavioral tendencies, habits, emotions, and automatic reactions. Colloquially, it can be characterized as willpower.17 It has, therefore, been studied extensively. The results of several research programs indicate that, perhaps unsurprisingly, individuals seem to have a finite supply of self-regulatory resources that can be depleted by any task requiring controlled, willful behavior (such as adhering to norms of proper behavior). The result is that if one is then faced with subsequent tasks also requiring self-regulation, one’s performance on these tasks will be poor, perhaps even disastrous. In the standard ego depletion paradigm, participants are asked to perform a task intended to exhaust some of their self-regulatory resources. For example, subjects are asked to view a disturbing video clip while making sure to inhibit their emotional responses, or asked to persist at a frustrating or demanding paper and pencil task, or (perhaps most sadistically) to avoid eating a tasty treat that is placed in front of them in the experimenter’s room. Upon completion of this initial task, participants are asked to perform another, unrelated task also requiring self-regulation—for example, solving a challenging puzzle. The routine result is that subjects’ performance on these latter tasks is markedly worse than control groups.18 (This finding is confirmed by everyday experience, such as the eating binge that frequently follows the end of a diet; after exerting willpower over a long period of time and resisting urges to eat foods one desires, one ends up in a state of overall regulatory weakness.) Indeed, there are many potentially negative consequences of depleting one’s self-regulatory resources. The literature on emotional self-regulation in Western (mostly American) society suggests that frequent suppression of emotions in one’s daily life is correlated with many undesirable consequences, such as isolation from one’s social group, lower levels of social support, lower ratings of likeability, a decrease in successful interpersonal coordination, and greater emotional distance.19 Even during one-off interactions, suppressing one’s natural emotions tends to distract one’s attention away from other individuals present, leading to decreased responsiveness to their words and actions. This (inadvertently) signals to others a lack of interest or concern—perhaps even hostility—causing them to withdraw in

Self-Regulation 187 turn, reduce their overall friendliness, and making them unwilling to continue the interaction.20 Such experiments suggest that there are high costs to pay for self-regulation. Of course, there are doubtlessly costs to pay for refusing to self-regulate as well; some form of self-restraint is necessary for social existence to be possible at all. Nonetheless, to the extent that meeting the ideals of Confucian ethical conduct requires a continual process of self-monitoring and self-regulation, one might wonder whether it is a good thing to do—especially with regards to one’s overall psychological health. Here, however, it is important to note that one’s culture is an important moderator of the development of self-regulatory resources.21 Individuals in Western liberal democracies are comparatively lax in imposing norms of selfregulation in everyday exchanges. It is not that we in the West don’t value self-regulation but rather that we have values of freedom of self-expression that are weighty and tend to trump norms requiring such conformity to rules of good behavior. Suppression of emotional response normally occurs in a defensive context, to protect oneself when one feels a lack of trust in one’s company.22 East Asians—that is, members of collectivist societies committed to observing norms of ritual propriety—engage in self-regulation in a much broader range of social situations and with greater overall frequency.23 Thus, one might think that the costs accrued to individuals in these societies are proportionally greater. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise. East Asians show far less of these deleterious consequences: They are less likely to be distracted by efforts at self-regulation, to withdraw from others, and to create unfriendly or hostile environments.24 More generally, East Asians seem to have higher reserves of self-regulatory strength, showing little evidence of ego-depletion in a number of paradigmatic experiments. For example, in one study, Seeley and Gardner invited participants of Western and East Asian backgrounds to participate in a study on self-regulation.25 During the first phase of the study, subjects were given a standard ego-depletion task—namely, they were asked to think of a white bear and then to suppress any thoughts of white bears. (This requires self-regulation.) A control group was instructed to think about whatever they liked. Over the next five minutes, all subjects were instructed to speak out loud freely into a tape recorder and to knock on their cubicle wall whenever they happened to think of a white bear. This was the self-depletion task. Next, they were then asked to squeeze a handgrip exerciser. Those in the control group (whether East Asian or Western) performed similarly in the handgrip test. However, those in the manipulation group—namely, those who were asked to think-and-then-not-think of white bears—showed a significant difference based on cultural background; whereas Westerners performed worse than average, East Asians performed better). While more work needs to be done in this area, experimental evidence suggests that East Asians, who engage in self-regulation regularly, suffer comparatively little costs in doing so. This suggests that it is a resource that can be strengthened over time.26 Another possibility is that East Asians

188 Hagop Sarkissian take a different attitude toward self-regulation itself. From one perspective, demands to regulate oneself in social contexts might seem like an undesirable imposition. Yet, in societies that place comparatively greater weight on it, self-regulation is seen in a different light. For example, in a review of the literature on emotional expression in Chinese culture, Michael Bond argues that individuals in Chinese cultures such as Hong Kong are particularly adept at adjusting their emotional expressions and responses as a function of their audience.27 Given that one’s actions always affect others in some way, special attention is paid not to disrupt interpersonal harmony. Selfregulation not only serves to comfort others but also to improve one’s own immediate environment and thus, indirectly, one’s own levels of comfort and ease. According to this way of looking at self-regulation: . . . one can be serving oneself as one serves others. In fact, many Chinese report that a moderate emotional demeanor promotes harmony by giving others space to express themselves more easily. One restrains oneself so as not to impose on others, thereby allowing the relationship to develop more mutually—not out of an expressive House of Commons, but as two streams slowly merging. By restraining oneself out of consideration for others, one protects one’s internal balance from strong responses that reciprocation from one’s partner may induce.28 Here, we are reminded of two important passages in the Analects: 14.42—Zilu asked about the gentleman. The Master said, “He cultivates himself in order to be respectful.” “Is that all?” “He cultivates himself in order to comfort others.” “Is that all?” “He cultivates himself in order to comfort all people.” 1.12—Of the things brought about through the practice of ritual propriety, [social] harmony is the most valuable. Of the ways of the former Sage Kings, this is the most beautiful. Being virtuous on this conception involves being considerate of how one may be affecting others in one’s context, allowing them to express themselves freely and comfortably without feeling the need to exercise self-restraint. Put another way, the imposition of self-restraint is done so as to relieve others of the imposition of self-restraint.

IV.

REGULATING OTHERS THROUGH SELF-REGULATION

Indeed, according to the Analects, self-regulation also allows one to exercise effective moral power, shaping situations and channeling the trajectory of one’s interactions with others toward morally laudable goals by eliciting

Self-Regulation 189 favorable attitudes and responses from other people. Master Zeng, a disciple of Confucius, expresses such thoughts to his own students on his deathbed: Analects 8.4—There are three things in our dao [teaching] that a nobleman values most: by altering his demeanor (容貌) he avoids violence and arrogance; by rectifying his countenance (顏色) he welcomes trustworthiness; through his words and tone of voice (辭氣) he avoids vulgarity and impropriety.29 The nobleman changes others by regulating himself. In general, the message seems to be the following: As one becomes aware of oneself as a source of influence on one’s immediate situations, this allows one to begin affecting the trajectories of one’s interactions toward morally desirable outcomes. This ability to shape situations and influence others through noncoercive self-regulation can help us understand the concept of de (德), referring to moral power or moral charisma. Individuals who regulate themselves and attend to the aesthetics of their conduct out of consideration of others were seen to have a power of effecting significant changes in others; at the limit, others would be literally ‘transformed’ by their presence: Analects 12.19—The power (de 德) of a gentleman is like the wind, the power (de 德) of a petty person is like the grass—when the wind moves over the grass, the grass is sure to bend. Analects 9.14—The Master [Confucius] expressed a desire to go and live among the Nine Yi Barbarian tribes. Someone asked him, “How could you bear with their uncouthness?” The Master replied, “If a nobleman were to dwell among them, what uncouthness would there be?” These claims might seem like hyperbole, but small changes to one’s own conduct and signals can have profound impact on the behavior of others. In fact, many such effects have been measured.30 For example, highly expressive individuals are able to affect the moods of others even in the absence of verbal communication—by just being in their presence (a very de-like quality).31 Slight changes in verbal cues can also shape behavior in significant ways. For example, verbal tone can sometimes outstrip verbal content in affecting how others interpret verbal expressions;32 a slightly negative tone of voice can significantly shift how others judge the friendliness of one’s statements, even when the content of those statements are judged as polite.33 In game theoretic situations with real financial stakes, smiling can positively affect levels of trust among strangers, leading to increased cooperation.34 Other subtle cues, such as winks and handshakes, can enable individuals to trust one another and coordinate their efforts to maximize payoffs while pursuing riskier strategies.35 All of these are plausible instances of self-regulation and analogous to the kinds of subtle behavioral cues that are

190 Hagop Sarkissian the focus of the Analects, where they are characterized as being important sources of moral power. In sum, one’s choice of words, emotional expressions, mannerisms, tone of voice, posture—each of these variables can trigger behavior patterns in others, to which we respond in kind, in a continual process of impact and adjustment. Consider again Analects 9.1: Yan Yuan asked about being an exemplary person. The Master said 克己 復禮—“Restrain yourself and turn back to observing ritual propriety.” The passage continues: “If for the span of a single day you are able to restrain yourself and turn back to observing ritual propriety, everyone else would become exemplary too.” Engaging in self-regulation may seem like an imposition on one’s freedom to express oneself, yet when done skillfully, its effects on others would make it more likely that any and all situations one entered would be amenable to agreeable outcomes. By proactively introducing signals that foster an environment amenable to cooperation, one can enhance the probabilities of positive outcomes emerging, making the impositions of Confucian ethics potentially rewarding. Self-regulation is conceived within the tradition itself as a potent source of virtue.

V. SELF-REGULATION: WHEN AND WHY Finally, it is important to qualify in what ways and to what extent observing ritual propriety is an imposition. First, it is not clear that one needs to self-regulate in each and every interpersonal interaction. Demands for self-regulation will be most acute in a couple of situation types. One such situation type is when one is in the company of unfamiliar individuals; the less familiar the audience, the more important such self-regulatory management.36 Initial forms of greeting and address, preliminary remarks, and other initial moves have disproportionately strong influence on our cognitions of one another. Moreover, there is a pronounced asymmetry between the impact of negative impressions and positive ones.37 We are quicker to form and recall negative impressions, and are also more likely to do so. We also tend to be more certain about our negative assessments of others,38 take less time to arrive at them,39 and require less information to be convinced of them relative to positive impressions.40 Finally, once a negative character evaluation is made, we tend to seal it away from revision or interference.41 Given these facts, carefully observing norms of self-regulation at the outset of new relationships can be understood as perhaps being meant to mitigate or stave off such undesirable consequences. Another situation type is when one is the main focus of an entire group’s attention. Here, the importance of self-regulation is heightened in proportion to the greater impact one can have on others through their shared

Self-Regulation 191 focus. Self-regulation in such situations requires that one conceive of oneself from the audience’s point of view and to regulate oneself in ways that will meet or satisfy their expectations. Indeed, individuals in East Asian societies that emphasize self-regulation have different types of memories depending on whether or not they are the focus of attention: When they are, they remember the experience or episode more from a third-person perspective than a first-person perspective.42 (Westerners show no such tendency to adopt external, third-person perspectives on themselves when the focus of attention.) Finally, whether or not self-regulation will be seen as an unwelcome imposition will hinge greatly upon the individuals for whom one is selfregulating. It may be very difficult to self-regulate for individuals one finds undeserving of such constraints. However, this need not always be the case. If others themselves self-regulate, then complying should be rather easy, perhaps even effortless. One way to think of the ways in which self-regulation can be seen as a multiperson project is through the notion of mutual ethical bootstrapping.43 By being mindful of the ways one’s own behavior might impinge upon another, we can prompt or lift one another toward our joint moral ends. Whether any individual will be able to meet her ethical aims on any particular occasion will hinge on the actions and manners of others in her presence, which in turn will hinge on her own, in a common, reciprocal environment. Regulating oneself affects how others react and thereby the kinds of reactions an individual faces in turn. The bootstrapping is mutual. VI.

CONCLUSION

I began by noting that there is an important question to ask when assessing the viability of any particular ethical system—namely, what particular impositions and burdens does it place upon individuals? I have argued that the general form of imposition in Confucian ethics consists of self-regulation out of consideration of others and social harmony. Self-regulation requires an ability to carefully discern others’ expectations and intentions and to control and channel one’s own signals and expressions. Within the tradition, this type of imposition is thought to be requisite to maintaining harmonious relationships. While burdensome, such impositions also represent pathways to improve oneself and one’s moral environment, allowing one to exercise a certain kind of moral power. NOTES 1. Y. W. Hsieh, “Filial Piety and Chinese Society,” in The Chinese Mind: Essentials of Chinese Philosophy and Culture, ed. C. A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1967); Chenyang Li, “Shifting Perspectives: Filial

192 Hagop Sarkissian

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

Morality Revisited,” Philosophy East & West 47, no. 2 (1997): 211–232; David B. Wong, “Chinese Ethics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta (2013). Bryan W. Van Norden, Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2008), 100. D. C. Lau, Confucius: The Analects (Shatin: Chinese University Press, 1992), 4.18. Controversially, both Confucius and Mencius maintain that, in at least some cases, filial morality requires one to favor one’s family, even when doing so necessitates concealing their misdeeds, such as criminal behavior (e.g., Lau, Analects, 13.18; Mencius 5A3; 7A35). See David Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking Through Confucious (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989); Philip J. Ivanhoe, “Filial Piety as a Virtue,” in Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, ed. R. L. Walker and P. J. Ivanhoe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Qingping Liu, “Filiality Versus Sociality and Individuality: On Confucianism as ‘Consanguinitism,’”Philosophy East & West 53, no. 2 (2003): 234–250; and Qingping Liu, “Confucianism and Corruption: An Analysis of Shun’s Two Actions Described by Mencius,” Doa: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 6, no. 1 (2007): 1–19. For an overview of recent work in this area, see Hagop Sarkissian, “Minor Tweaks, Major Payoffs: The Problems and Promise of Situationism in Moral Philosophy,” Philosopher’s Imprint 10, no. 9 (2010): 1–15. See, for example, Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Hall and Ames, Thinking; David B. Wong, “Harmony, Fragmentation, and Democratic Ritual,” in Civility, ed. L. S. Rouner (Chicago: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). Lau, Analects, 3.12, 3.26. Ibid., 3.4, 17.11. Ibid., 9.28, 14.30. Translations of passages from the Analects are the author’s own, following the text, Lau, Analects. Lau, Analects, 1.3, 5.5, 5.10, 5.25, 6.16, and 8.4. Ibid., 2.10, 7.28, 9.24, 11.21, and 12.20. Ibid., 12.20. Book ten of the Analects, for example, is devoted entirely to detailed observations of Confucius’s overt behavioral mannerisms in various social contexts. Lau, Analects, 8.7; see also 6.22. Translation adopted with slight modification from A. C. Graham, Chuangtzu: The Inner Chapters (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981). M. Muraven and R. F. Baumeister, “Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources: Does Self-Control Resemble a Muscle?” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 2 (2000): 247–259; M. Muraven, D. M. Tice, and R. F. Baumeister, “Self-Control as Limited Resource: Regulatory Depletion Patterns,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 3 (1998): 774–789. Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). Muraven and Baumeister, “Self-Regulation”; Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister, “Self-Control.” Emily A. Butler et al., “The Social Consequences of Expressive Suppression,” Emotion 3, no. 1 (2003): 48–67; James J. Gross and Oliver P. John, “Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 2 (2003): 348–362.

Self-Regulation 193 20. E. A. Butler, T. L. Lee, and J. J. Gross, “Emotion Regulation and Culture: Are the Social Consequences of Emotion Suppression Culture-Specific?” Emotion 7, no. 1 (2007): 30–48. 21. See, for example, Gisela Trommsdorff, “Culture and Development of SelfRegulation,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3, no. 5 (2009): 687–701. 22. Butler, Lee, and Gross, “Emotion Regulation.” 23. I should note that this comparative claim does not apply to situations such as watching a movie, where one is not the focus of anyone’s attention. In these types of situations, there is no difference in overall expressiveness between East Asian and Western subjects and no tendency toward suppression among East Asians (see, e.g., Jeanne L. Tsai, Robert W. Levenson, and Laura L. Cartensen “Autonomic, Subjective, and Expressive Responses to Emotional Films in Older and Younger Chinese Americans and European Americans,” Psychology and Aging 15, no. 4 (2000): 684–693). 24. Butler, Lee, and Gross, “Emotion Regulation.” 25. Elizabeth A. Seeley and Wendi L. Gardner, “The ‘Selfless’ and Self-Regulation: The Role of Chronic Other-Orientation in Averting Self-Regulatory Depletion,” Self & Identity 2, no. 2 (2003): 103. 26. See, for example, Muraven and Baumeister, “Self-Regulation”; Mark Muraven, Roy F. Baumeister, and Dianne M. Tice, “Longitudinal Improvement of Self-Regulation through Practice: Building Self-Control Strength through Repeated Exercise,” The Journal of Social Psychology 139, no. 4 (1999): 446–457. 27. Michael Harris Bond, “Emotions and their Expression in Chinese Culture,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 17, no. 4 (1993): 245–262. 28. Bond, “Emotions,” 256. 29. In some recent work, Nancy Sherman has emphasized the importance of such factors in early Stoic ethics. See, for example, Nancy Sherman, “The Look and Feel of Virtue,” in Norms, Virtue, and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics, ed. C. Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 3. 30. See also Sarkissian, “Minor Tweaks,” 2010. 31. H. S. Friedman, L. M. Prince, Ronald E. Riggio, and M. Robin Dimatteo, “Understanding and Assessing Nonverbal Expressiveness: The Affective Communication Test,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, no. 2 (1980): 333–351. This is in line with the literature on emotional contagion. Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson outline a three-stage process on how this proceeds: 1) people automatically and continuously mimic others in interpersonal contexts, synchronizing facial expressions, mannerisms, tone of voice, posture, and so forth, 2) such mimicry elicits the relevant emotional states in the individuals at hand through a feedback mechanism, and 3) emotions are thereby transmitted and ‘caught’ by other individuals. See E. Hatfield, J. T. Cacioppo, and R. L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 32. M. Argyle, F. Alkema, and R. Gilmour, “The Communication of Friendly and Hostile Attitudes by Verbal and Non-Verbal Signals,” European Journal of Social Psychology 1, no. 3 (1971): 385–402. 33. Debi Laplante and Nalini Ambady, “On How Things Are Said: Voice Tone, Voice Intensity, Verbal Content, and Perceptions of Politeness,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 22, no. 4 (2003): 434–441.

194 Hagop Sarkissian 34. J.P.W. Scharlemann, C. E. Eckel, A. Kacelnik, and R. Wilson, “The Value of a Smile: Game Theory with a Human Face,” Journal of Economic Psychology 22 (2001): 617–640. 35. Paola Manzini, Abdolkarim Sadrieh, and Nicolaas J. Vriend, “On Smiles, Winks and Handshakes as Coordination Devices,” The Economic Journal 119, no. 537 (2009): 826–854. 36. Bond, “Emotions.” 37. Susan T. Fiske, “Attention and Weight in Person Perception: The Impact of Negative and Extreme Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (1980): 889–906. 38. Donal E. Carlston, “The Recall and Use of Traits and Events in Social Inference Processes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 16, no. 4 (1980): 303–328. 39. J. H. Lingle and T. M. Ostrom, “Retrieval Selectivity in Memory-Based Impression Judgments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 2 (1979): 180–194. 40. Vincent Y. Yzerbyt and Jacques-Philippe Leyens, “Requesting Information to Form an Impression: The Influence of Valence and Confirmatory Status,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 27 (1991): 337–356. 41. Oscar Ybarra, “When First Impressions Don’t Last: The Role of Isolation and Adaptation Processes in the Revision of Evaluative Impressions,” Social Cognition 19, no. 5 (2001): 491–520. 42. Dov Cohen and Alex Gunz, “As Seen by the Other. . . . : Perspectives on the Self in the Memories and Emotional Perceptions of Easterners and Westerners,” Psychological Science 13, no. 1 (2002): 55–59. 43. Sarkissian, “Minor Tweaks.”

REFERENCES Argyle, M., F. Alkema, and R. Gilmour. “The Communication of Friendly and Hostile Attitudes by Verbal and Non-Verbal Signals.” European Journal of Social Psychology 1, no. 3 (1971): 385–402. Baumeister, Roy F. and John Tierney. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. Bond, Michael Harris. “Emotions and their Expression in Chinese Culture.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 17, no. 4 (1993): 245–262. Butler, E. A., T. L. Lee, and J. J. Gross. “Emotion Regulation and Culture: Are the Social Consequences of Emotion Suppression Culture-Specific?” Emotion 7, no. 1 (2007): 30–48. Butler, Emily A., Boris Egloff, Frank H. Wilhelm, Nancy C. Smith, Elizabeth A. Erickson, and James J. Gross. “The Social Consequences of Expressive Suppression.” Emotion 3, no. 1 (2003): 48–67. Carlston, Donal E. “The Recall and Use of Traits and Events in Social Inference Processes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 16, no. 4 (1980): 303–328. Cohen, Dov and Alex Gunz. “As Seen by the Other. . . . : Perspectives on the Self in the Memories and Emotional Perceptions of Easterners and Westerners.” Psychological Science 13, no. 1 (2002): 55–59. Fingarette, Herbert. Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Fiske, Susan T. “Attention and Weight in Person Perception: The Impact of Negative and Extreme Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (1980): 889–906.

Self-Regulation 195 Friedman, H. S., L. M. Prince, Ronald E. Riggio, and M. Robin Dimatteo. “Understanding and Assessing Nonverbal Expressiveness: The Affective Communication Test.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, no. 2 (1980): 333–351. Graham, A. C. Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Gross, James J. and Oliver P. John. “Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-being.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 2 (2003): 348–362. Hall, David and Roger Ames. Thinking Through Confucius. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989. Hatfield, E., J. T. Cacioppo, and R. L. Rapson. Emotional Contagion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hsieh, Y. W. “Filial Piety and Chinese Society.” In The Chinese Mind: Essentials of Chinese Philosophy and Culture, edited by C. A. Moore. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1967. Ivanhoe, Philip J. “Filial Piety as a Virtue.” In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, edited by R. L. Walker and P. J. Ivanhoe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Laplante, Debi and Nalini Ambady. “On How Things Are Said: Voice Tone, Voice Intensity, Verbal Content, and Perceptions of Politeness.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 22, no. 4 (2003): 434–441. Lau, D. C. Confucius: The Analects. Shatin: Chinese University Press, 1992. Li, Chenyang. “Shifting Perspectives: Filial Morality Revisited.” Philosophy East & West 47, no. 2 (1997): 211–232. Lingle, J. H. and T. M. Ostrom. “Retrieval Selectivity in Memory-Based Impression Judgments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 2 (1979), 180–194. Liu, Qingping. “Filiality versus Sociality and Individuality: On Confucianism as ‘Consanguinitism.’ ” Philosophy East & West 53, no. 2 (2003): 234–250. ———. “Confucianism and Corruption: An Analysis of Shun’s Two actions Described by Mencius.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 6, no. 1 (2007): 1–19. Manzini, Paola, Abdolkarim Sadrieh, and Nicolaas J. Vriend. “On Smiles, Winks and Handshakes as Coordination Devices.” The Economic Journal 119, no. 537 (2009): 826–854. Muraven, Mark and Roy F. Baumeister. “Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources: Does Self-Control Resemble a Muscle?” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 2 (2000): 247–259. Muraven, Mark, Roy F. Baumeister, and Dianne M. Tice. “Longitudinal Improvement of Self-Regulation through Practice: Building Self-Control Strength through Repeated Exercise.” The Journal of Social Psychology 139, no. 4 (1999): 446–457. Muraven, Mark, Dianne M. Tice, and Roy F. Baumeister. “Self-Control as Limited Resource: Regulatory Depletion Patterns.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 3 (1998): 774–789. Sarkissian, Hagop. “Minor Tweaks, Major Payoffs: The Problems and Promise of Situationism in Moral Philosophy.” Philosopher’s Imprint 10, no. 9 (2010): 1–15. ———. “Recent Approaches to Confucian Milial Morality.” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 9 (2010): 725–734. Scharlemann, J.P.W., C. E. Eckel, A. Kacelnik, and R. Wilson. “The Value of a Smile: Game Theory with a Human Face: Journal of Economic Psychology 22 (2001): 617–640. Seeley, Elizabeth A. and Wendi L. Gardner. “The ‘Selfless’ and Self-Regulation: The Role of Chronic Other-Orientation in Averting Self-Regulatory Depletion.” Self & Identity 2, no. 2 (2003): 103. Sherman, Nancy. “The Look and Feel of Virtue.” In Norms, Virtue, and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics, edited by C. Gill, 59–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

196 Hagop Sarkissian ———. Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Trommsdorff, Gisela. “Culture and Development of Self-Regulation.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3, no. 5 (2009): 687–701. Tsai, Jeanne L., Robert W. Levenson, and Laura L. Cartensen. “Autonomic, Subjective, and Expressive Responses to Emotional Films in Older and Younger Chinese Americans and European Americans.” Psychology and Aging 15, no. 4 (2000): 684–693. Van Norden, Bryan W. Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2008. Wong, David B. “Harmony, Fragmentation, and Democratic Ritual.” In Civility, edited by L. S. Rouner. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. ———. “Chinese Ethics.” Wong, David, “Chinese Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), . Ybarra, Oscar. “When First Impressions Don’t Last: The Role of Isolation and Adaptation Processes in the Revision of Evaluative Impressions.” Social Cognition 19, no. 5 (2001): 491–520. Yzerbyt, Vincent Y. and Jacques-Philippe Leyens. “Requesting Information to Form an Impression: The Influence of Valence and Confirmatory Status.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 27 (1991): 337–356.

10 The Geography of Thought Revisited Reflections on Situationism and the Psychology of Asians Nancy E. Snow Situationism has entered the philosophical scene as a critique of virtue ethics (see the introduction to this volume). John Doris, for example, adduces studies of the psychology of East Asians to attack the Western conception of character and support his situationist alternative.1 On behalf of his cause, Doris2 enlists The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why by the psychologist Richard Nisbett.3 I do not think Doris can use Nisbett this way, and in this essay, I explain why. In section I, I offer a reading of Nisbett, and in II, I address Doris’s claims about studies of the psychology of East Asians and the roles they play in the situationist/virtue ethics debate. I conclude in III by offering a sketch of character derived from the Confucian tradition and draw from it some implications of relevance to the situationist/virtue ethics debate.

I.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT

Doris states that The Geography of Thought “. . . should be required reading for ethical theorists . . .”4 I am inclined to agree and for one of the same reasons that Doris suggests: It is edifying.5 Nisbett summarizes, in highly readable form, the results of more than ten years of empirical investigations into the psychology of East Asians—mainly populations of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans—on such topics as attention and perception, causal inference, the organization of knowledge, and reasoning.6 Nisbett emphasizes the theory of the social origins of mind.7 According to this theory, habits of mind are deeply influenced by social structures and practices. Nisbett spends all of chapter two articulating this theory and illustrating it with evidence from ancient Greece and China, as well as later eras.8 The basic picture is this: Ecology—the differing geographies and landscapes of ancient Greece and China—influenced economies and social structures, causing them to develop differently.9 The differing social structures and practices then shaped attention and folk metaphysics—that is, beliefs about the social and material world, in different ways. Finally, folk metaphysics shaped cognitive processes and tacit epistemology—that is, beliefs about how to get

198 Nancy E. Snow new knowledge.10 The upshot of this process is that a range of social and cognitive differences emerged in ancient Greece and China. Among them are the Greek emphasis on independence and individuality and the Chinese valuation of interdependence and harmony.11 Chapter two also includes summaries of major themes in the philosophies of ancient Greece and China, stressing ideas such as independence and individuality in the philosophies of the former and interdependence and social harmony in those of the latter. Nisbett writes: “So the philosophies of China and Greece were as different as their respective social life and selfconceptions. And the philosophical differences are reflective of the social ones, in several respects.”12 He ends this chapter with a list of predictions about cognitive differences between Easterners and Westerners that psychologists should expect to find if the social origins theory is true.13 Much of the rest of the book is devoted to explaining empirical psychological research that Nisbett believes bears out this list of predictions.14 Let us register some observations. Nisbett contends that the philosophical differences between the Greeks and the Chinese reflect social differences: “And the philosophical differences are reflective of the social ones, in several respects.”15 This suggests one-way causation—that the differing social life and circumstances of the Greeks and Chinese influenced their philosophies but not vice versa. This is consistent with Nisbett’s textual description of the social origins theory.16 Yet, an interesting graphic illustrating the theory is bidirectional, depicting feedback loops by means of which higher-order developments feed back to influence lower levels.17 It makes perfect sense to think, for example, that developing social structures would feed back to reshape the economic and ecological conditions from which they arose. Similarly, it makes sense to think that philosophical conceptions would not only reflect social practices but eventually influence them. This would be especially true if, as Eric Hutton argues, philosophies such as Confucianism influenced political structures, and these structures affected social practices and habits.18 It would seem, then, that on the construal of the social origins theory suggested by the graphic, the distinction between theory and practice in ancient Greece and China is seen as liable to become blurred. Philosophical theories (and presumably, other types of theory) influence social practice, and vice versa. There results, accordingly, an intermixing of normative ideals and expectations with descriptive practice. If the social origins theory is correct about this blending of normativity with description, and if this theory applies to present-day societies, as Nisbett thinks it does, since he believes its predictions are borne out by contemporary empirical psychological study, it would seem that present-day accounts of the cognition and social psychology of Easterners and Westerners in fact reflect the influence of an amalgam of theory and practice in which normative ideals and expectations and descriptions of practice shape each other.19 This blurring of theory and practice is exactly what we see in Nisbett’s third chapter on the social psychology of Easterners versus

The Geography of Thought Revisited 199 20

Westerners. The chapter begins with a list of generalizations about Westerners, situated between a rather remarkable prefatory comment and a conclusion. To quote in full: Most Westerners, or at any rate most Americans, are confident that the following generalizations apply pretty much to everyone: • Each individual has a set of characteristic, distinctive attributes. Moreover, people want to be distinctive—different from other individuals in important ways. • People are largely in control of their own behavior; they feel better when they are in situations in which choice and personal preference determine outcomes. • People are oriented toward personal goals of success and achievement; they find that relationships and group memberships sometimes get in the way of attaining these goals. • People strive to feel good about themselves; personal successes and assurances that they have positive qualities are important to their sense of well-being. • People prefer equality in personal relations or, when relationships are hierarchical, they prefer a superior position. • People believe the same rules should apply to everyone—individuals should not be singled out for special treatment because of their personal attributes or connections to important people. Justice should be blind. There are indeed hundreds of millions of such people, but they are to be found primarily in Europe, especially northern Europe, and in the present and former nations of the British Commonwealth, including the United States. The social-psychological characteristics of most of the rest of the world’s people, especially those of East Asia, tend to be different to one degree or another.21 The prefatory comment is a remarkable assertion about what Westerners believe, which, as far as I can tell, is empirically unsupported. More importantly, the list is brimming with value-laden content: Individual uniqueness, personal control, goal-oriented personal success and achievement, feeling good about oneself, equality or superiority of position, and impartial justice are identified as Western values. Nisbett contrasts them with alternatives endorsed by East Asians.22 For example, though Westerners are concerned with independent agency, exercising control, and pursuing personal goals, East Asians are more concerned with coordinated group action and with harmonizing with their group instead of personal success.23 Individual distinctiveness is not desirable nor is equality of treatment necessary or desirable. Rules are not universal but are local and particular. Personal choice is not highly valued.24 Nisbett goes on to conclude, on the basis of empirical study,

200 Nancy E. Snow that there are “. . . very dramatic social-psychological differences between East Asians as a group and people of European culture as a group.”25 Here are some questions about the attributes of Westerners and East Asians: Where do they come from? Are these attributes normative properties to which persons are encouraged to aspire, or descriptions of what they actually believe and value, or some combination thereof?26 I do not know if Nisbett directly addresses these questions, but we can offer the following partially conjectural explanation.27 The list is a compilation of observed attributes of Westerners and East Asians, empirically tested and found to be exhibited among members of different societies. Entries on the list were chosen for empirical study because of their ubiquity in the societies in question. If the social origins theory is true, the entries on the list, though descriptive in the sense that they have been documented to be actually held by members of the respective societies, are, in a deeper sense, expressions of the blending of normative ideals and expectations with the descriptive social practices of the cultures and societies of the research subjects. These meldings are likely to have been informed by philosophical conceptions. One more piece will complete our discussion of Nisbett.28 This is an elaboration of claims already made on the basis of the social origins theory. Nisbett argues on the basis of empirical study that East Asians and Westerners see differently and experience the world differently.29 In this, he relies on a social theory of cognition, according to which “. . . the critical factors influencing habits of mind are social . . .”30 As we have seen, the basic picture is that society influences how individuals experience and perceive the world, the kinds of traits they have, and how they understand themselves and others. Nisbett draws on the notion of “low-context” versus “high-context” societies to capture differences between Western and Eastern self-understandings.31 Westerners are “low-context,” Easterners, “high-context.” He writes: “To the Westerner, it makes sense to speak of a person as having attributes that are independent of circumstances or personal relations. This self—this bounded, impermeable free agent—can move from group to group and setting to setting without significant alteration. But for the Easterner (and for many other peoples to one degree or another), the person is connected, fluid, and conditional.”32 Nisbett’s perspective is consistent with earlier work by Markus and Kitayama, claiming that “. . . for many cultures of the world, the Western notion of the self as an entity containing significant dispositional attributes, and as detached from context, is simply not an adequate description of selfhood. Rather, in many construals, the self is viewed as interdependent with the surrounding context, and it is ‘the other’ or the ‘self-in-relationto-other’ that is focal in individual experience.”33 This is a strong claim, as it implies that the Eastern self does not really exist apart from its context. Markus and Kitayama do not shrink from this implication, indicating that: “. . . in some cultures, on certain occasions, the individual, in the sense of a set of significant inner attributes of the person, may cease to be

The Geography of Thought Revisited 201 the primary unit of consciousness. Instead, the sense of belongingness to a social relation may become so strong that it makes better sense to think of the relationship as the functional unit of conscious reflection.”34 Nisbett makes a different but no less striking point about how linguistic practices in Japanese and Korean reflect the Eastern notion that “. . . one is a different person when interacting with different people.”35 It makes sense to think that such a fluid, context-dependent self would have equally fluid, context-dependent traits. This is one conception of the selves and traits of East Asians that emerges from Nisbett’s treatment.36 But it is not the only conception available.

II.

BACK TO DORIS

What use does Doris make of empirical psychological studies of East Asians? In 200537 as well as in 2002,38 his main line of argument is this: 1. Many, though not all of these studies show that East Asians differ substantially from Westerners in their perceptions, causal attributions, and conceptions of the self and character. 2. These differences show that the Western conception of character is parochial. 3. This parochialness should cause us to rethink our commitment to the Western conception of character. A further claim is found in 200239 but not explicitly pursued in 200540: 4. Since situationism is the default position, should the Western conception of character prove untenable, empirically demonstrated psychological differences between East Asians and Westerners should push us toward situationism. So, Doris is content to suggest that psychological studies of East Asians point toward a diminution in the importance of the Western conception of character.41 In 2002,42 he sees this diminution as leading in the direction of his situationist alternative. He allows that the Western conception of character, though not of universal significance, could be locally important in some cultures: “It is possible, to be sure, that while East Asians can manage without heavy reference to a Western, globalist, conception of self and other, Westerners cannot; the predicament of culture, after all, is one not easily escaped.”43 He continues: “But the cultural variability places a certain rhetorical burden on virtue ethicists who would argue for this local indispensability; it is a burden, especially given the ideological ebbs and flows in and between contemporary cultures, that will not be an easy one to meet.”44

202 Nancy E. Snow Here, I advance three claims in response. The two easier contentions are that Doris is likely not in a position to advance (3) or (4). The more complex claim is that the Western and Eastern conceptions of traits as understood by Doris and Nisbett might be more similar than both are willing to allow.

A.

The Untenability of (3)

In (3), Doris urges us to rethink our commitment to the Western conception. Yet, if the social origins theory is true, the conception’s very parochialness makes it indispensable for us. Our habits of mind, our social structures and practices, even our philosophical conceptions were deeply shaped by our ancestors’ experience of the geography of Northern Europe. The values of the Western conception, handed down through generations, have become deeply ingrained in our forms of life. A remark from Markus and Kitayama illustrates the importance of conceptions of the self for our lives, as funneled through our cultures: “These construals of the self and others [Western and Eastern] are tied to the implicit, normative tasks that various cultures hold for what people should be doing in their lives.”45 Traits such as independence, individuality, equality, personal control, and the valuing of personal success and achievement are well suited to the normative tasks set by individualist societies, and traits such as harmony, interdependence, and the valuing of hierarchies and group membership rather than personal success are more suited to the normative tasks set by collectivist societies. What are the normative tasks that societies prescribe? Are they really that different in Eastern and Western societies? Though Markus and Kitayama do not expand upon the notion of ‘normative tasks,’ they cite a reference and give an example that provides clues as to what they mean by this concept.46 The reference is to Cantor and Kihlstrom, who describe life tasks as normative pursuits in which people engage with and toward which they strive.47 These tasks differ as one traverses the lifespan. They include succeeding at school, making friends, dating, getting married or forming a committed relationship, having a family and a job or career, civic involvement, and so on. Surely, the goals and activities identified as normative tasks do not differ much from society to society. Yet how they are interpreted and pursued can differ considerably. Consider Markus and Kitayama’s example.48 If a Western parent wants to induce her child to eat his meal, she will tell him to think of starving children in some underdeveloped, distant country. An Eastern parent will tell the child to think of the farmer who produced the rice—he worked hard to produce your food and will feel bad if you do not eat it. The Western child is reminded of privilege, waste, and his distinctiveness from less fortunate and distant others. The Eastern child is reminded of his connectedness to the farmer and his obligations to respect the farmer’s work. The Western values of individuality and distinctiveness shape the way the normative task of parenting is approached in the first case; the Eastern values of interrelatedness and interpersonal harmony shape it in the second.

The Geography of Thought Revisited 203 Given intercultural permeability, it would be simplistic to think that the shaping of normative tasks is not influenced by a range of values, some of which likely cross cultures.49 The importance of teaching children to share, for example, is a value that seems to span Eastern and Western societies. Yet, it seems equally simplistic to think that the fact that we are now aware that East Asians can do without the Western conception of character should lead us, as Westerners, to believe that we can do so as well, especially given the views of social scientists who apparently think otherwise—one of whom, Nisbett, Doris approvingly cites.

B.

The Untenability of (4)

In espousing (4), Doris is using psychological studies of East Asians to bolster his arguments against the Western conception of character and in favor of situationism. Doris thinks his reading of social psychology shows that behavior is influenced far more widely by situations than by traits. We might think we act on the basis of our traits, but in this we deceive ourselves. It is better to follow the course of East Asians and allow ourselves to admit that we are influenced by situational forces. Why not give up the notion that we have context-independent traits, since they are allegedly minor factors in producing behavior? Here is why not. Aside from the previous point, that such traits are not easily dispensable for Westerners given the social origins theory and the normative tasks our societies set for us, there is an important point to be noticed about how situations allegedly affect the behavior of Westerners as opposed to Easterners. In the social psychological studies cited by situationists, some situational factors apparently operate below the level of conscious awareness, such as finding a dime in a phone booth, being told we are late to give a talk, or smelling pleasant aromas. Others are more overt, such as being told by an authority figure to administer shocks as part of an experiment. In the situationist scheme, situational forces are often thought to produce behavior in opposition to traits that we value and think we do and would act upon in a variety of circumstances. These situational factors are frequently deemed trivial. By contrast, the situational forces at work in producing the behavior of East Asians are not thought trivial but are judged important enough to be integrated with traits to produce behavior. Thus, East Asians cultivate the trait of being in harmony with their group because they value the group and being a part of it. They cultivate courtesy and deference in various contexts because they value differences in social status and base their normative expectations for behavior on these differences. In short, the kinds of situational influences said to be operative on Easterners and Westerners differ. For Easterners, these situational influences reflect what they value and are integrated into flexible character traits. For Westerners, the kinds of situational influences that emerge in the studies cited by situationists do not reflect the publicly stated values of subjects (we can infer this from some of the occurrent and ex

204 Nancy E. Snow post-facto negative reactions of subjects to their behavior under experimental conditions), and go largely unnoticed and/or operate at cross-purposes with overtly valued character traits. Given the differences in awareness of and valuation of situational factors by Westerners as opposed to Easterners, as well as the social origins theory, and differences in how normative tasks are interpreted in individualist versus collectivist societies, Westerners have scant reason to abandon the Western conception of character.

C.

Possible Similarity of Eastern and Western Conceptions of Character

Are the Eastern and Western conceptions of character perhaps more similar than Doris allows? To see a possible similarity between the two conceptions, consider the ‘Western conception of character’ that is in play. It consists of several elements. The first is a set of traits that give the Western notion of character its content, such as individuality and independence.50 Presumably, Doris would not disagree with this content, as he writes of ‘our’ conception of character as the “. . . various more or less global conceptions of character that have been so prominent in . . . Western Philosophy.”51 However, he means something more by the ‘Western conception’ than a set of traits. He means to assert that the Western conception satisfies a set of purely formal conditions. These conditions are hallmarks of what he calls the ‘globalist’ conception of character.52 The globalist conception is given in three theses, two about the nature of traits and one about personality organization: (1) Consistency. Character and personality traits are reliably manifested in trait-relevant behavior across a diversity of trait-relevant eliciting conditions that may vary widely in their conduciveness to the manifestation of the trait in question. (2) Stability. Character and personality traits are reliably manifested in trait-relevant behaviors over iterated trials of similar trait-relevant eliciting conditions. (3) Evaluative integration. In a given character or personality the occurrence of a trait with a particular evaluative valence is probabilistically related to the occurrence of other traits with similar evaluative valences.53 An important implication of (1), consistency, is that the traits attributable to Westerners are sufficiently independent of situational influences to be able to be manifested in cross-situationally consistent behavior—that is, trait-produced behavior that spans a variety of situation-types. The traits attributable to Easterners are thought to be more situation-dependent. I see no reason why the three purely formal conditions of consistency, stability, and evaluative integration cannot apply to Eastern traits as well as to Western. Why think that consistency, for example, could not be true

The Geography of Thought Revisited 205 of Eastern as well as of Western traits? The Eastern trait of courtesy, for example, is highly context-dependent. It would be discourteous for Koreans to invite a professor to dinner using certain forms of the word ‘you’ and ‘dinner.’54 Given the nature of Asian cultures, it is only to be expected that forms of courtesy vary with context and are called for across different types of situations, including some in which expressing the trait is difficult. Forms of courtesy vary, for example, when inviting a professor to dinner as opposed to a friend and can be difficult to manifest when a student or worker should, ideally, behave courteously to an abusive professor or supervisor. Ideally, the Easterner who possesses the trait of courtesy with sufficient strength would respond appropriately in all situations in which courtesy is called for, even those not conducive to its manifestation. Practical wisdom seems called for, too, in order to have the discernment to know when and how courtesy is required. The point here is that the fact that a trait is situation-sensitive does not entail that it can be consistently manifested only in narrowly described types of situations. The trait of courtesy is sufficiently flexible to be able to be consistently manifested by its possessor (aided by practical wisdom) across a wide range of situation-types in which it is required. Doris might respond by saying that the traits of East Asians are local. But if so, they are not local in his sense, that in which traits are indexed to objectively describable features of situations.55 The features of situations must be meaningful to East Asians in quite nuanced ways in order to elicit the correct forms of courtesy required. East Asians must have rather finely honed powers of construal in order to be able to act appropriately in any given situation. Additionally, Doris would likely assert his more general claim that social psychology does not provide evidence of the kind of cross-situationally consistent behavior that is produced by global traits, and this shows that few people possess such traits.56 My view is that Doris looks to the wrong studies.57 CAPS traits, which are keyed to the subjective construals of their possessors, are capable of producing cross-situationally consistent behavior.58 I see no reason why the traits of East Asians cannot be understood as CAPS traits. Even if East Asians perceive and experience the world in ways that differ from Westerners, these differences would not preclude them from having CAPS traits. Indeed, perceptual and cognitive differences among Westerners and East Asians can readily be accommodated by the CAPS model, for CAPS is a social-cognitivist approach to personality. As with the social origins theory, social-cognitivism holds that habits of mind, including perception and attention, are influenced by social factors. CAPS traits are shaped in response to the repeated activation of cognitive-affective units by environmental stimuli, and are, in theory, flexible enough to be formed in response to the kinds of social stimuli experienced by East Asians as well as Westerners. Now consider stability. Given Doris’s reference to “similar trait-relevant eliciting conditions,” this formulation seems to refer to the stability of what he calls “local” traits.59 However, as with trait consistency, there is no reason

206 Nancy E. Snow to think that Easterners could not have stable traits that are either local or global. The salient difference between Eastern and Western traits does not lie in their degrees of consistency or stability but, instead, in the degree to which the traits are situation-sensitive and situation-dependent. Easterners could be on the whole more sensitive to situations calling for certain traits— for example, courtesy or group loyalty. The manifestation or expression of those traits is situation-dependent in the sense that it depends on the specific contours of the situation in which the trait is called for. But, prima facie, neither the situation-sensitivity nor the situation-dependency of the traits of Easterners prevents these traits from being either consistently manifested across different situation-types or stably expressed both within or across situation-types. Someone might object that this interpretation of the traits of Easterners implies a stable and individualistic rather than a fluid and interdependent self. I will return to this point in a moment. Finally, consider evaluative integration. According to the globalist conception, positive personality traits, such as kindness or generosity, should cluster together, as should negative personality traits, such as meanness and stinginess. Of course, evaluative integration is an ideal, but why should it not apply to Easterners as well as Westerners? Why not think that an ideal for East Asians would be to have traits that are positively valenced in their cultures, such as loyalty to one’s group, courtesy, and the desire for harmony, and that such positive traits should be clustered together to form an evaluatively integrated whole? Again, one might say that this presupposes a stable, highly individuated Western self as opposed to a fluid, interdependent Eastern one. Let us address the question about the nature of Eastern and Western selves and traits. Nisbett writes: “Should we assume that Asians have theories of human personality that are fundamentally different from those of Westerners? Do Asians believe that people differ from one another only very slightly? Or do they see differences, but in terms of traits that would seem odd or irrelevant to Westerners?”60 He continues, “Probably the answer to all of these questions is no.”61 Apparently backtracking from his position in the rest of the book, he describes his experience living in China in 1982 toward the end of the Cultural Revolution. He was easily able to discuss with Chinese friends the traits of other Chinese friends. Less anecdotally, he mentions research indicating that theories of personality do not differ substantially in the East and the West—researchers administering personality tests in English as well as in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have found evidence of the Big Five personality traits, though Nisbett adds that sometimes only four are identified.62 He also mentions the research of Kuo-shu Yang and Michael Bond, who have generated items for personality tests using descriptions found in local cultures.63 Based on these items, Fanny Cheung and colleagues have constructed a “Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory.” They administered this survey to large numbers of people in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland and found four factors, three of which corresponded roughly to three of the Big Five: extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. They described the

The Geography of Thought Revisited 207 fourth factor as the “Chinese tradition” factor: “. . . a construct that captures personality descriptions related to maintenance of interpersonal and inner harmony.”64 This research suggests that the selves and traits of Easterners and Westerners might not be as far apart in function and structure as indicated elsewhere in Nisbett, in Markus and Kitayama, and in other psychological studies of Westerners and East Asians.

III.

TOWARD A CONFUCIAN CONCEPTION OF CHARACTER

I hope to have shown that Doris cannot uncontroversially use studies of the psychology of East Asians to support either the move to rethink our commitment to the Western conception of character or to recommend situationism as an alternative to it. Moreover, the results of research into the comparative psychology of East Asians and Westerners are not settled.65 This research has implications for philosophical conceptions of selves, character, and traits. To conclude this essay, I draw on an array of resources to sketch a Confucian conception of character and its development. This sketch will allow me to make several points of interest in the debate about Asian conceptions of character. We should note two preliminary points. First, the Confucian conception of character is by no means irrelevant to the psychology and ways of life of Asians today. As Ames and Rosemont observe: . . . whatever we might mean by “Chineseness” today, some two and a half millennia after his death, is inseparable from the example of personal character that Confucius provided for posterity. And his influence did not end with China. All of the sinitic cultures—especially Korea, Japan, and Vietnam—have evolved around ways of living and thinking derived in significant measure from his ideas as set down by his disciples and others after his death—ideas that are by no means irrelevant to contemporary social, political, moral, and religious concerns.66 Second, we need to acknowledge that the Confucian conception of the person is often described in terms similar to those used by Nisbett and Markus and Kitayama. Ames and Rosemont note that the Chinese language reveals metaphysical assumptions that differ from those embedded in IndoEuropean languages.67 English and other Indo-European languages reflect commitments to a substance-attribute metaphysics, in terms of which we perceive things and the properties ascribable to them. Chinese expresses an experience of episodic events, relationality, and change. Relationality is intrinsic and not extrinsic. If A and B are related extrinsically, the relation can be dissolved and both A and B left intact. If they are related intrinsically, dissolving the relation will change both A and B, “. . . diminishing both parties in the degree that this particular relationship is important to

208 Nancy E. Snow them.”68 In the context of these assumptions, Ames and Rosemont aver the fluidity of the Chinese self.69 They claim, “For them [Confucians], growing up through the cultivation and articulation of relationships makes us different persons.”70 Again, “Persons are not perceived as superordinated individuals—as agents who stand independent of their actions—but are rather ongoing ‘events’ defined functionally by constitutive roles and relationships as they are performed within the context of their specific families and communities, that is through the observance of ritual propriety (li).”71 Underlying this picture of relationality and change are, Ames and Rosemont note, “regularities and continuities.”72 We notice regularities in nature; the seasons come and go in continuous cycles. Similarly, the trajectory of the life cycle is always the same: Plants, animals, and humans move from birth through growth and maturation to death and a return to the earth from whence they came. Ames and Rosemont claim “. . . our lives are neither arbitrary nor subject to chance or whim.”73 The more complex picture that emerges from their discussion is one of events that are, ideally, ordered in a larger cosmic context. In the simplest of terms, the aim of the human person is to achieve harmony (he) with all there is—the totality of being. The person does this by following the way (dao). To follow the dao and attain harmony, the individual must embark upon a course of self-cultivation through observance of li (ritual propriety). This is precisely what Confucius attempted to do and what he taught his disciples to attempt. To embark upon the path of self-cultivation, according to the Confucian scholar Tu Wei-ming,74 is to make an existential decision to commit oneself to learning (xue), where this means not only scholarship but increasing awareness of oneself and of the world.75 The way of learning is, in part, the process of cultivating one’s inner states by means of the observance of ritual propriety (li). The person who makes the choice to travel this path is to be distinguished from the xiaoren (petty person), who is not interested in learning. By contrast, the one who undertakes self-cultivation is urged to progress along three stages: those of the shi (apprentice), the junzi (gentleman or exemplary person), and the shengren (sage).76 Though the shi observes ritual practices, he is not yet ‘at one’ with them. The spirit, attitudes, and emotions meant to be evoked through ritual are not yet internalized. Internalization and cultivation of the appropriate mental states occurs at the stage of the junzi. Yet, the cultivation of inner states is but a part of the learning required of the junzi, for he must also ensure that his bodily movements, posture, demeanor, and so on, harmonize with and accurately reflect his inner attitudes.77 The third stage of this progression, that of the shengren, or sage, is rarely reached. In describing the shengren, Ames and Rosemont remark: In addition to possessing all of the qualities of the junzi, the shengren appears to see and feel custom, rituals, and traditions holistically, as defining and integrating as well the communities of the past, and of the future. This seeing and feeling of the shengren can be described as

The Geography of Thought Revisited 209 an awareness which gives one the capacity to go beyond the particular time and place in which we live, effecting a continuity not only with our contemporaries, but with those who have preceded us, and with those who will follow behind.78 The shengren, then, has cosmic significance. In his essay on the Chungyung (Zhongyong, or Confucian doctrine of the mean), Tu Wei-ming describes this process as an ever-deepening looking inward on the part of the person, a subjectivity that culminates in centrality, “. . . that state of mind wherein one is absolutely unperturbed by outside forces.”79 Centrality is the state of the inner self that precedes and grounds aroused feelings such as sorrow, anger, joy, grief, pleasure, and so forth. Centrality is necessary for harmony, which is “. . . the unfolding process of self-expression” that occurs when the aroused emotions are well-ordered and manifested in the appropriate degree.80 Several lessons emerge from this brief sketch. For one thing, the Confucian ideal of character and development goes well beyond the social origins theory and the fluid conceptions of the self-in-relation. Though these conceptions are present in Confucian thinking, they are situated within broader metaphysical and cosmological frameworks. Once these frameworks are brought into view, it is clear that the Confucian conception of self is profoundly developmental and teleological in the sense that achieving harmony with the totality of being is the aim of humanity. On this view, the self does not dissolve into fluidity and sets of shifting relations. Instead, the inner states of the self and their bodily expressions must be assiduously cultivated so that the person, even if manifested episodically in a series of events, harmonizes with the fields of which she is a part. To achieve this, something like the motivational self-sufficiency of character as described by the situationist philosopher Maria Merritt is needed.81 Merritt argues that motivational self-sufficiency is an Aristotelianinspired chimera; the most we can hope for is the kind of socially sustained character that Hume advocates.82 Confucianism, however, offers a third way, by using situations to develop motivational self-sufficiency of character. Slingerland argues for this position.83 At the stage of the junzi, the practitioner of li is exposed to a variety of situational influences intended to prompt and nurture virtuous response. Among them are exposure to music, musical form, ritual practices, and classical Confucian texts.84 Slingerland observes that the Confucian practice of “rectifying names” (zhengming) was intended to provide “. . . normatively desirable frames for behavior.”85 That is, the Confucian practice of calling things rightly or correctly provided ways of framing situations that then guided action. The repeated exposure to music, classic texts, the proper use of names, and ritual forms was, Slingerland argues, a form of chronic priming meant to shape and cultivate the “heart-mind” (xin) as “. . . the proper ‘ruler’ of the self, charged with moral decision making and the enforcement of t\hose decisions that rest on the

210 Nancy E. Snow self.”86 Essential to the cultivation of the xin is the development of virtue, or de, in the junzi. Foremost among the virtues, and informing ritual practice, are those of benevolence (ren) and righteousness (yi). Consequently, at this second stage of development, many situational factors are brought to bear on the development of the character of the would-be junzi, shaping his affect and cognitions (heart-mind) in ways intended to elicit virtuous response, and, eventually, through habituated practice, virtuous dispositions. These virtuous dispositions continue to inform and are shaped and honed through the ongoing practice of li. Slingerland suggests that the character formation of the junzi can be viewed as a “. . . kind of ‘time-delayed’ cognitive control that functioned by embedding higher-level desires and goals in lower-level emotional and sensory-motor systems . . .”87 This way of looking at Confucian virtue ethics, he contends, is consistent with recent empirical work in cognitive and developmental psychology.88 Slingerland’s idea is that situations are used in the service of developing the Confucian conception of character.89 However, if Tu Wei-ming and Ames and Rosemont are correct, the ultimate aim of self-cultivation is to create a sage or shengren, whose perfection of inner states will transcend situations and guide humanity on its moral course into the future. It is difficult to describe this character state, if not in terms of motivational selfsufficiency. Situationist philosophers could respond that even if situations can be used in character development, the shengren is too lofty an ideal. Like the Aristotelian megalopsychos, it is unattainable for creatures like us. Yet, Confucians think a significant stage on the way to sagehood, that of the junzi, can be attained, and that one can, in fact, attune one’s inner states to external forces through observance of li or ritual propriety. Moreover, Tu Wei-ming conceives of the choice to take this journey as an existential decision, implying a form of commitment or resolve on the part of the individual learner.90 Far from being a fluid self whose content is completely exhausted by the sets of relations in which he is embedded, the junzi seems to be at least a locus of inner states the assiduous cultivation of which provides him with not only motivation but wisdom—the motivation to harmonize with ritual and relationships in accordance with the dao, and the wisdom to know how to do this. Moreover, the junzi does this in a highly personalized way—as the specific locus of inner states, relations, and events, that is, person—that he is.91 The way of Confucius differs from that of Yan Hui or Xixia, though all travel the path of the junzi. The person, though fluid and harmonizing with changing relations and events in life, retains core commitments and motivations that keep him on the way of the junzi.

IV.

CONCLUSION

I have argued against Doris’s use of psychological studies of East Asians to support situationism.92 I’ve also argued that those studies do not offer a complete picture of the conception of character likely to be held by many East

The Geography of Thought Revisited 211 Asians. Grounded in a rich metaphysics and cosmology, Confucianism offers a conception of character and its development that uses situations to cultivate a form of motivational self-sufficiency in persons. On this account, persons, though ostensibly more fluid and relational than their Western counterparts, do not dissolve into the fabric of relationships but retain core commitments and motivational states that keep them in harmony with the dao. In Tu Weiming’s terms,93 centrality gives rise to harmony. Persons move stably but flexibly through change, always seeking to harmonize with the dao.94 NOTES 1. John M. Doris, “Replies: Evidence and Sensibility,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71, no. 3 (2005): 673–674; John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7, 105–106. 2. Doris, “Replies,”673. 3. Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (New York: Free Press, 2003). 4. Doris, “Replies,” 673. 5. Ibid., 673, n. 22. 6. Nisbett, Geography. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 34–37. 10. Ibid., 37 also allows that social practices can directly shape thinking habits. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Ibid., 18–19. 13. Ibid., 44–45. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 19. 16. Ibid., 34–37. 17. Ibid., 33. 18. Eric L. Hutton, “Character, Situationism, and Early Confucian Thought,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 37–58. 19. Nisbett, Geography. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 47–48; italics his. 22. Ibid., 48–49. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 49. 25. Ibid., 76. 26. Thanks to Margaret Walker for raising these questions. 27. Nisbett, Geography. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 82, 87. 30. Ibid., 33. 31. Ibid., 50. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 225; italics theirs. 34. Markus and Kitayama, “Culture,” 226; italics theirs.

212 Nancy E. Snow 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Nisbett, Geography, 53. Nisbett, Geography. Doris, “Replies,” 673–674. Doris, Character, 7, 105–106. Ibid., 105–106. Doris, “Replies,” 673–674. Ibid. Doris, Character, 105–106. Doris, “Replies,” 674. Ibid. Markus and Kitayama, “Culture,” 224. Ibid. Nancy Cantor and John F. Kihlstrom, Personality and Social Intelligence (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987), 169–171. Markus and Kitayama, “Culture,” 224. See Doris, “Replies,” 674. See Nisbett, Geography, 47–48. Doris, “Replies,” 674. Doris, Character, 22. Ibid.; italics his. Nisbett, Geography, 52–53. Doris, Character, 62. Ibid., 6. See Nancy E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010). See Walter Mischel, “Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality,” Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973): 252–283; Walter Mischel, “Personality Coherence and Dispositions in a Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS) Approach,” in The Coherence of Personality: Social-Cognitive Bases of Consistency, Variability, and Organization, ed. Daniel Cervone and Yuichi Shoda (New York: Guilford, 1999), 37–60; Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositons, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure,” Psychological Review 102, no. 2 (1995): 246–268. Doris, Character, 22; italics mine. Nisbett, Geography, 121. Ibid. Ibid., 121–122. Numerous psychological studies have identified five central personality traits called the “Big Five”: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism. See Snow, Virtue, 11–12. Nisbett, Geography, 122. Ibid.; see also Ho, Duan, and Tang in this volume. See the contribution of Ho, Duan, and Tang in this volume. Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 1–2. Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 20–26. Ibid., 24; see also Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Boston: Cheng and Tsui Company, 1998), 45. Ibid., 26–27. Ibid., 27; italics theirs. Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 29. But note their qualification: “We are certainly not suggesting that the Chinese did not experience substantial things. . . . We are certainly not claiming that China knew nothing of ‘things,’ and Greece, nothing of ‘events.’ . . . Rather does it appear to be a matter of

The Geography of Thought Revisited 213

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

emphasis, here event-oriented, there thing-oriented” (Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 34). Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 27. Ibid. Wei-ming, Humanity, 44–45. See also Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 59–60. Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 60–65. See also Deborah S. Mower, “Situationism and Confucian Virtue Ethics,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2013): 117ff for a discussion of the stages in the thought of the Confucian Xunzi. Wei-ming, Humanity, 44. Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 64. Tu Wei-ming, Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 20. Ibid. Maria Merritt, “Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000): 365–383. Ibid. Edward Slingerland, “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics,” Ethics 121 (2011): 390–419. The ideas in this paragraph draw on Nancy E. Snow, “How Habits Make Us Virtuous,” in Habits in Mind: Ethics and the Science of Virtue, ed. James Van Slyke, Gregory Peterson, Michael Spezio, Warren Brown, and Kevin Reimer (Forthcoming). Slingerland, “Situationist,” 412; Mower, “Situationism,” 117ff. Slingerland, “Situationist,” 412. Ibid., 416. Ibid. Ibid., 416–417. Slingerland, “Situationist.” Wei-ming, Humanity, 44. Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 5–7. Doris, “Replies”; Doris, Character. Wei-ming, Centrality, 20. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Milwaukee-Area Women in Philosophy conference, February 7, 2011, and at a session of the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy, held at the Central Division APA, March 31, 2011; I am grateful to the audiences for many helpful comments. Thanks are also due an anonymous reviewer at Routledge Press for helpful suggestions.

REFERENCES Ames, Roger T. and Henry Rosemont, Jr. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Cantor, Nancy and John F. Kihlstrom. Personality and Social Intelligence. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987. Doris, John M. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. “Replies: Evidence and Sensibility.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71, no. 3 (2005): 656–677. Hutton, Eric L. “Character, Situationism, and Early Confucian Thought.” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 37–58.

214 Nancy E. Snow Markus, Hazel Rose and Shinobu Kitayama. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–253. Merritt, Maria. “Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000): 365–383. Mischel, Walter. “Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality.” Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973): 252–283. ———. “Personality Coherence and Dispositions in a Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS) Approach.” In The Coherence of Personality: Social-Cognitive Bases of Consistency, Variability, and Organization, edited by Daniel Cervone and Yuichi Shoda, 37–60. New York: Guilford, 1999. Mischel, Walter and Yuichi Shoda. “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositons, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure.” Psychological Review 102, no. 2 (1995): 246–268. Mower, Deborah S. “Situationism and Confucian Virtue Ethics.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2013): 113–137. Nisbett, Richard E. The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why. New York: Free Press, 2003. Slingerland, Edward. “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics.” Ethics 121 (2011): 390–419. Snow, Nancy E. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010. ———. “How Habits Make Us Virtuous.” In Habits in Mind: Ethics and the Science of Virtue, edited by James Van Slyke, Gregory Peterson, Michael Spezio, Warren Brown, and Kevin Reimer. Forthcoming. Wei-ming, Tu. Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. ———. Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought. Boston: Cheng and Tsui Company, 1998.

11 The Psychology of Virtue and Happiness in Western and Asian Thought Samuel M. Y. Ho, Wenjie Duan, and Sandy C. M. Tang

I.

INTRODUCTION

The role of culture in psychology is intriguing and important, as culture shapes our behavior as much as the other way around. Yet culture has posed, and continues to pose, a challenge to psychological research, since it is a complex and dynamic construct. A further difficulty involving crosscultural studies of Chinese people is due to the multidimensional nature of Chinese culture. The fundamental issue may lie with the disagreement over the definition and conceptual framework of Chinese culture as well as the interpretations of certain cultural and/or cross-cultural variables.1

II. CHARACTERISTICS OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE CULTURE AND PHILOSOPHY The problem can be solved partially by identifying a cultural framework that is widely acceptable in China. Fan presented a classification of Chinese culture and identified 71 core cultural elements that were generally accepted by Chinese people.2 They were epitomized by four major schools of philosophical thought in China: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and I-Ching. To help readers grasp the main ideas, we present a brief review of the doctrines of these philosophical schools and the relationship between happiness and virtue for the respective schools based on our previous studies.3 Confucianism. Ren (仁), usually translated as ‘benevolence’ or ‘humaneness,’ is the basis of Confucian theory, which lays stress upon the relationship between two human beings.4 Basic relationships are maintained in a family context (e.g., the couple relationship and the parent-child relationship), then expand to the context of peer group, organization, community, wider society, and finally to the national level. The basic tenet of interpersonal relations in Confucianism exhorts individuals to undertake collective responsibility for the benefits of society as a whole. In the pursuit of social harmony, individuals would be committed to self-improvement and eventually attain the ideal moral character through self-actualization to

216 S.M.Y. Ho, W. Duan, and S.C.M. Tang achieve happiness.5 Hence, from a Confucian perspective, Chinese people are relationship-focused and are heavily influenced by social norms in defining their happiness. Taoism. The concept of Tao (道) is the center of Taoist philosophy. Tao, usually translated as ‘way’ or ‘path,’ goes beyond the confines of languages and is meant to be experienced rather than defined. Tao embodies the vitality of human bodies, and one can achieve vitality in life by living in balance and harmony with nature.6 It also signifies that happiness in Taoism refers not to some kind of lasting emotional state but to success in life.7 The concept of yin-yang in Taoism further suggests happiness is not static or unchanged: There is always something good in all bad things and vice versa; similarly, blessing is inevitably followed by misfortune and vice versa.8 Thus, in Taoism, the way to happiness lies in ceasing to strive and relishing every moment of life. It should be noted, however, that Taoism views human beings as socially isolated individuals who would ignore the moral order of society and follow only the Tao, or natural force. In this way, happiness in Taoism appears to lack both rational and relational dimensions. Buddhism. Buddhist philosophy is often referred to as a philosophy of self-transcendence, as it focuses on intrapersonal growth and disregards hedonism, power, and achievement.9 From a Buddhist standpoint, authentic happiness is eternal: It is above time and beyond the misery of everyday life and can only be found in the Western Paradise/ Pure Land after reaching nirvana (i.e., the ultimate liberation).10 To enjoy such happiness, people in this world must undergo austerities and cultivate detachment from thoughts and materialism. Specifically, Buddhists believe that enhanced intrapersonal intelligence can help individuals transcend sufferings in life to attain peace and liberation (i.e., nirvana). Therefore, the philosophy of Buddhism holds that future happiness depends on the inner qualities of individuals. I-Ching. The I-Ching (also Yi Jing or Book of Changes), inseparable from the philosophy of Taoism, is based on the yin-yang principle. ‘Change’ is the central theme of this classical Chinese philosophy text. It proposes that everything from the cosmos to human life is an ongoing cyclical process of change between good and bad, happiness and misery, and so on.11 Accordingly, the key to happiness is to harmonize with the changing nature of life. It implies that people need to allow changes to happen in the face of crisis or adversity. To facilitate inner transformation and bring forth new possibilities for change, individuals must keep the heart and the mind open. The I-Ching emphasizes the ability to adapt to situations as well as the role of hope in attaining a healthy and happy life. In short, the rich and diverse philosophical thoughts of traditional Chinese culture contribute significantly to the emergence and development of contemporary Chinese society. As should be clear, however, the virtue and happiness of Chinese people have been subject to varying degrees of influence of these different schools of thought, yet none alone can necessarily

Psychology of Virtue and Happiness 217 play a decisive role. The multifaceted and complex nature of culture implies that cultural characteristics should be carefully considered when defining psychological concepts, developing psychological measures, and interpreting observations.

III.

THE COMBINED EMIC-ETIC APPROACH

A prerequisite for valid cultural and/or cross-cultural studies across multicultural populations is to establish concept and measurement equivalence. A number of issues have been raised over the direct translation of standardized instruments for use in other languages and cultures, as this simple method does not take into account factors such as conceptual equivalence, metric equivalence, functional equivalence, and linguistic equivalence.12 These equivalence standards have been elaborated in our previous publications.13 In social and behavioral sciences, there are two long-standing approaches to understanding the role of culture in influencing individual behavior and beliefs: (1) the emic perspective of ethnographers, who strive to describe a given culture from “the native’s point of view,”14 and (2) the etic perspective of comparativists, who relate cultural practices to external factors that may be less salient to cultural “insiders.”15 As both etic and emic approaches have their respective strengths and limitations, the combined etic-emic approach has been proposed to develop cross-cultural instruments for research.16 The idea is to first identify the intercultural comparable, universal (etic) items, which can be measured in both indigenous and nonindigenous contexts. The locally relevant (emic) items are then carefully added to the already established etic items to form a combined instrument. This new instrument should then be evaluated on its own to examine its reliability and validity or by comparison with other etic instruments to demonstrate the uniqueness of its emic items. Throughout the entire development process, the conceptual equivalence, metric equivalence, functional equivalence, and linguistic equivalence of the instrument should be adequately addressed. Previous studies on cross-cultural research have demonstrated two advantages of the combined emic-etic approach. First, the etic items are comparable to other well-established Western instruments, whereas the emic items can maximize the ecological validity of the instrument locally.17 Second, findings of the combined etic-emic approach can be tested in other cultures, thereby leading to the possibility of developing a concept (e.g., happiness) broader in scope that is applicable to people of any culture.18 In the following sections, we will use some recent happiness and virtue studies conducted among Chinese populations to illustrate the aforementioned methodological and conceptual issues. We will also discuss the impact of China’s recent economic growth and major natural disasters on the happiness level of Chinese people.

218 S.M.Y. Ho, W. Duan, and S.C.M. Tang IV.

HAPPINESS

What constitutes happiness? Generally speaking, the two essential elements in the concept of happiness are: the current emotional state and the selfrealization state, which are termed ‘hedonic’ and ‘eudaimonic’ respectively.19 In the West, happiness is often defined in terms of the positive emotions a person experiences in the moment.20 In the psychology research literature, the notion of subjective well-being (SWB, i.e., a person’s cognitive and affective evaluation of his/her life) has been predominantly used to indicate ‘happiness.’21 While this hedonic view largely represents Western ideas, it is not at all common in Chinese culture. The notion of eudaimonic well-being— that is, leading a virtuous life and doing what is worth doing in life, would be more appropriate to Chinese people.22 Eudaimonic well-being involves self-actualization.23 As briefly discussed earlier, all major Chinese philosophical schools (except perhaps Taoism) advocate abandoning personal desire and engaging in activities and thoughts that are focused on and directed toward the fulfillment of others’ well-being. They also regard such realization of human potential as the way to happiness. Furthermore, people in collectivist cultures are more sensitive to social norms (i.e., the customary rules that govern behavior in groups and societies) in their pursuit of personal happiness than are people in individualist cultures, and this would in turn predispose them to take others’ wellbeing into consideration.24 Schimmack and colleagues further indicate that hedonic balance is a stronger predictor of life satisfaction in individualist cultures than in collectivist cultures.25 All these findings point to the need for future Chinese studies to reconsider the definition of happiness in existing research to include the eudaimonic component. Another cultural variable in happiness studies is how individuals construe and express happiness in a given culture. The yin-yang philosophy of Taoism and I-Ching proposes that both happiness and unhappiness are two sides of the same coin and are dialectical in relationship.26 This view of happiness/ unhappiness is best illustrated in the words of Lao-Tzu: “Misfortune is what happiness depends on; happiness is what misfortune underlies.”27 Accordingly, most individuals in Chinese culture are aware of the dangers hidden behind the happiness they experience and thus would refrain from pursuing happiness in excess. In addition, interpersonal and social harmony are preeminent considerations in collectivist cultures, so that Chinese people are encouraged to pay close attention to their relationships.28 This in turn tends to favor introverted traits in which Chinese people usually hold back the outward expression of positive emotions.29 It is worth noting that, for present day mainland Chinese, they prefer satisfaction from personal-extrinsic and competency values, as well as some social values.30 These results indicate that individuals in collectivist cultures construe authentic happiness by maintaining a dialectical balance (homeostasis). Therefore, when conducting cross-cultural studies, it is

Psychology of Virtue and Happiness 219 imperative to employ measures that can reveal authentic results in specific cultural contexts. Interpersonal relationship is also a cultural variable in happiness. Chinese people tend to evaluate their happiness level in terms of the happiness level of their significant others. This notion of ‘interpersonal’ happiness is illustrated in hexagram 58 (called Dui, meaning happiness or satisfaction) of I Ching, which is formed by two identical overlapping symbols, with each symbol representing a smiling face (Figure 11.1). This ancient symbol shows that happiness can be obtained either by cheering people up and freeing them from constraint or through expressing oneself openly and interacting with others.31 For instance, parents in China who consider themselves as contributing to the next generation report a high level of happiness despite their hardship.32 Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues found that individual satisfaction of the need for appreciation and respect does not strongly predict global life satisfaction among people in collectivist nations.33 In the East Asian cultural context, individual happiness is best predicted by relationship harmony and emotional support from others.34 Hence, the absence of an interpersonal element in the existing theory and inventory for happiness studies makes it difficult to carry out cross-cultural research in relationship-oriented nations like China. The aforementioned issues call for a new approach to cross-cultural studies of happiness in Chinese culture. In view of this, Ho and Cheung adopted a combined etic-emic approach to examine the interpersonal dimension of happiness in Chinese culture.35 They created the Chinese version of the Expanded Satisfaction with Life Scale (ESWLS) based on the original etic

Figure 11.1 Hexagram 58 of I Ching: Dui (Satisfaction; Happiness).

Figure 11.2

I am satisfied with life.

Two-Factor Structure of Happiness.

So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

Intrapersonal

The conditions of my life are excellent.

In most ways my family members’ lives are close to my ideal.

Happiness

So far I believe my family members have gotten the important things they want in life.

Interpersonal

The conditions of my family members’ lives are excellent.

Psychology of Virtue and Happiness 221 items from the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), a widely used happiness measure that focuses exclusively on self-appraisal conditions by adding in parallel another five other-oriented emic items (e.g., “The conditions of my family members’ lives are excellent”).36 By taking into account the happiness of significant others in overall happiness, this approach should yield a more accurate measure of happiness in Chinese people. This interpersonal dimension of happiness as measured by ESWLS entails the notion that individuals are motivated to strive for the greater well-being of others in their self-actualization process, and thus is more aligned with the eudaimonic model of happiness in contemporary Western psychology.37 We argue that despite their suffering (i.e., high negative emotions), people will report high overall satisfaction if they consider what they are doing is good for people they care for. The two-factor structure (self-oriented happiness and otheroriented happiness) of the ESWLS was acknowledged by three independent studies among Beijing and Hong Kong samples. A final six-item version of ESWLS was established to suit people in both Beijing (using Simplified Chinese) and Hong Kong (using Traditional Chinese). Figure 11.2 depicts the two-factor structure of happiness based on this final version of ESWLS. A smaller explained variance is observed in the SWLS than in the ESWLS, indicating that the ESWLS is a more appropriate measure of happiness in Chinese culture.38,39 According to this model, there are two distinct dimensions of happiness— namely, intrapersonal dimension (self-oriented happiness) and interpersonal dimension (other-oriented happiness). The items beneath each dimension represent the items in the final version of ESWLS. In summary, happiness in Chinese culture can be understood from a eudaimonic well-being perspective, with a distinct component of happiness focusing on the well-being of others. This concept has drawn on a variety of culturally based ideas ranging from traditional Chinese philosophy and folk wisdom to social norms and practices. Because of the other-oriented dimension within this eudaimonic model of happiness, Chinese people will report high levels of happiness despite their hardship if they consider what they are doing can contribute to the greater good of others and bring more happiness to others. Future studies should explore whether the two-factor structure of happiness observed in Chinese culture is universal.

V.

VIRTUE

Virtue has been the major focus of contemporary positive psychology in recent years.40 Virtue is defined as a property of the whole person and of the life that person leads, whereas character strengths (or subvirtues) are a family of positive psychological traits manifested in one’s thoughts, emotions,

222 S.M.Y. Ho, W. Duan, and S.C.M. Tang and behavior.41 In general, virtue is a common set of positive psychological traits manifested in one’s thoughts, emotions, and behavior that are beneficial to all human beings and are part of human nature. Reviews of the classical literature of religious and philosophical traditions in the world were conducted to identify traits important for a good life or for cultivating happiness. Data was used to establish a framework referred to as the Values in Action Classification to assist in virtue and strength research and application.42 The original classification includes six virtues with twenty-four character strengths: wisdom and knowledge (creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, perspective); courage (authenticity, bravery, perseverance, zest); humanity (kindness, love, social intelligence); justice (fairness, leadership, teamwork); temperance (forgiveness, modesty, prudence, self-regulation); and transcendence (appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, religiousness). A self-reporting English language questionnaire (Values in Action Inventory of Strength, VIA-IS) has been developed to measure these virtues and strengths.43 As the positive psychology movement gains momentum, research on virtues and character strengths has aroused wide international interest.44 More than seventeen translated versions of the VIA-IS are available, which have been used in at least fifteen countries (e.g., China, Spain, Japan, Germany, Denmark, South Korea, and Israel).45 Vast amounts of research show that the use of VIA strengths promotes positive mental health, positive behavior, positive emotions, and positive performance, and alleviates some psychosomatic symptoms.46 There is a solid philosophical foundation and framework of virtue and character strength in traditional Chinese culture.47 For example, in this quotation, “When walking in the company of other men, there must be one I can learn something from. I shall pick out his merits to follow and his shortcomings for reference to overcome my own,” Confucius advocates that we can always learn something from everyone, illustrating the character strength love of learning and open-mindedness.48 Lao-Tzu advocates the virtue transcendence in the quotation: “Use your own light, and return to the source of light. This is called practicing eternity.”49 However, unlike happiness, the virtues and character strengths of Chinese people have only recently become a subject of considerable research. More specifically, some character strengths identified in Western literature (e.g., hope) could play an important adaptive role in Chinese society. Ho and colleagues conducted a series of studies examining the role of hope (a character strength under the virtue of transcendence in Western theory) in a sample of Chinese subjects from Hong Kong.50 The findings suggest that hopefulness may predict psychological resilience after hereditary colorectal cancer genetic testing while interventions to increase the level of hope may be beneficial to psychological adjustment.51 Another retrospective crosssectional study reveals that hope and optimism are important indicators for posttraumatic growth in oral cavity cancer patients and that supportive

Psychology of Virtue and Happiness 223 psychological treatment strategies related to these two traits may be beneficial.52 A recent study of Duan and colleagues investigates the effectiveness of VIA strengths-based positive interventions in a sample of Chinese undergraduate students and reveals that this widely used paradigm in the West can be generalized to Chinese contexts.53 However, a preliminary study conducted in mainland China found evidence of acceptable construct validity of character strengths but not of virtues.54 Whether there is a universal set of virtues valued by all cultures as essential qualities for success has been questioned by Kubokawa and Ottaway, and the distinction between virtue and character strength (subvirtues) is not clear enough.55 Specifically, studies have revealed that different sets of virtues emerge from different cultures. For example, some cultures have five virtues they value, whereas other cultures only have four, or three commonly recognized virtues.56 A careful examination of the VIA-IS items suggests that some of the descriptions in the inventory pool may appear odd and incomprehensible from the mainland Chinese perspective and thus give rise to various concepts.57 For example, the item “When I hear people say something mean, I protest” (item 199 of the VIA-IS) cannot be well-embedded in Chinese social contexts, where the emphasis is always on harmony rather than uniqueness. The fact that the meaning of the same behavior or trait varies across contexts suggests that the absence of cross-culturally invariant concepts can potentially lead both virtue theory and research astray.58 To examine Chinese virtue concepts, the combined etic-emic approach was employed in a study conducted among a sample of Chinese undergraduate students.59 Using triangulation, which combines qualitative and quantitative methods and complements existing results from Western countries to offer a comprehensive picture of Chinese virtue concepts, a total of 144 items were removed from the original 240-item VIA-IS questionnaire. The final 96-item Chinese Virtues Questionnaire (CVQ-96) exhibits good psychometric characteristics and has a solid cultural basis.60 It is a framework of three virtues: relationship (32 items), vitality (40 items), and conscientiousness (24 items). Relationship reflects positive cognition, emotions, and behavior of interacting with other people, manifesting as affinity in the process of interpersonal relationships, and including kindness, teamwork, fairness, love and be loved, authenticity, leadership, forgiveness, and gratitude; vitality reflects positive qualities to the world/society, manifesting as life force in the process of social environment and social relations, including humor, curiosity, zest, creativity, perspective, hope, social intelligence, beauty, bravery, and belief; and conscientiousness reflects some intrapersonal traits, manifesting as psychokinesis in the process of individual regulations, including judgment, prudence, regulation, perseverance, learning, and modesty (Figure 11.3).61 The identification of the three-factor virtue structure has far-reaching impact on positive psychology research. An evidence-based study of the

224 S.M.Y. Ho, W. Duan, and S.C.M. Tang Relationship • A person’s love, concern, and gratitude toward others.

Vitality • A person’s curiosity and zest for creativity.

Conscientiousness • An intrapersonal virtue that describes people who persist in achieving goals and exhibit self-control.

Figure 11.3 The Three Core Virtues in Chinese.

three virtues shows a significant positive relationship between virtue and life satisfaction, and the findings are consistent in both Hong Kong and mainland China.62 An ongoing study further reveals that vitality could reduce perceived life stress, which can, in turn, reduce the psychological distress of individuals. There is ample evidence in the literature that demonstrates the effectiveness of strengths-based positive interventions in nonclinical settings.63 With increasing studies of Chinese virtue, we will continue to enrich our knowledge base of virtue with new concepts as well as expand the scope of applications of virtue in the circumstances of everyday life.

VI. THE EFFECTS OF EXTERNAL FACTORS ON HAPPINESS: ECONOMIC GROWTH AND ADVERSITY We have discussed earlier how cultural development in terms of traditional Chinese philosophy shapes Chinese people’s inner environment (e.g., perception and ways of thinking) and thereby influences their happiness. Do external circumstances also play a role in determining people’s affective states in Chinese culture? We will address this question by analyzing two phenomena: (1) economic growth in China and (2) the postdisaster adjustment of Chinese people.

Economic Growth and Happiness One of the most well-known propositions about happiness is, perhaps, the ‘formula’ of sustainable happiness of Lyubomirsky and colleagues.64 Accordingly, one’s happiness level is determined by three major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness (50%), happiness-relevant environmental factors (10%), and voluntary control (i.e., happiness-relevant activities and practices) (40%). An important message is that environmental factors contribute to a small percentage of sustainable happiness. Another interesting concept in the psychology of happiness is hedonic adaptation—that is,

Psychology of Virtue and Happiness 225 expectations and desires that rise in tandem would negate gains in happiness fostered by external shifts.65 Accordingly, when the environment becomes more favorable, people would become happier, but such positive change would gradually abate and return to the baseline over time. Both the formula of sustainable happiness and hedonic adaptation seem to suggest that happiness is less dependent on environmental factors, as indeed is the case in mainland China with respect to the rapid economic growth in recent years. China is one of the world’s fastest growing major economies, with growth rates averaging 10% over the last three decades, and it is the world’s second largest economy in nominal GDP and in purchasing power parity.66 Does more money make Chinese people happier? According to SWB surveys of thirty-seven countries (seventeen developed countries, nine developing countries, eleven transition countries, seventeen Latin American countries, and China) with time series ranging from twelve to thirty-four years, people with higher incomes are indeed, on average, happier at a given time; however, that is not the case over the long term.67 The most striking contradiction is China, where, despite profound economic success and improvement in living standards, not only has happiness not been enhanced but has plummeted over the period as a whole.68 In other words, when people’s income increases, they become more materialistic and more distant from authentic happiness. Furthermore, we reckon that hedonic adaptation also plays a role in the above phenomenon, in view of accumulating evidence on the significance of relative income comparisons and rising material aspirations in China in counteracting the effect of rising income.69

Adversity and Happiness Aside from unprecedented economic growth, China has suffered several major natural disasters in the last ten years, such as the 2003 SARS crisis, the 2008 Wen-Chuan earthquake, and the 2013 Lu-Shan earthquake, which could directly or indirectly affect the psychological well-being or happiness of Chinese people. On one hand, traumatic events undermine the sense of security and comfort in the daily lives of people, which is likely to decrease the overall happiness of survivors after disasters.70 On the other hand, the struggle with these highly challenging life circumstances may result in positive psychological change in survivors, which is termed ‘posttraumatic growth’ (PTG).71 Although originating in the United States, the concept of PTG is compatible with traditional Chinese philosophy and culture.72 Chinese philosophy maintains that any crisis is integrated by a threat and an opportunity. Based on the yin-yang model, the Chinese dialectical notion that good and bad are innate, inseparable aspects of life, illuminates possibilities of personal growth following adversity. From the Confucian perspective, life is fraught with adversity, so individuals should focus on process rather than outcome as well as derive meaning and purpose from stressful or traumatic experiences

226 S.M.Y. Ho, W. Duan, and S.C.M. Tang to make life enjoyable. The view of the universe and life as an endless cycle of transformation and becoming (in Taoism and I-Ching) or birth and death (in Buddhism) would imply that traumatic life events are the start of new growth. As these traditional values are still considered to be an important part of contemporary Chinese culture and associated behavior, PTG among Chinese people is currently an intrinsically attractive topic of study. PTG can be measured by the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI).73 An extensive body of research on a majority of participants of White/ Caucasian ethnicity found a five-factor structure (relating to others, new possibilities, personal strength, spiritual change, and appreciation of life) of the PTGI, which is valid among both nonclinical (e.g., undergraduate students and community adults) and clinical samples (e.g., breast cancer survivors and deployed soldiers).74 However, it is pertinent to note different factor structures of the PTGI obtained in Asian cultures, European culture, and Latin culture, challenging the universality of dimensions of PTG across cultures.75 In particular, a two-factor structure of the Chinese version of the PTGI, consisting of emic interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions, is found to be appropriate for Chinese populations instead of the five-factor structure of the original English version of the PTGI.76 It is worth noting that this intrapersonal-interpersonal factor structure of growth is uniquely observed among Chinese populations and is also found in the Chinese happiness construct.77 On the potential for eudaimonic happiness following tragic life events, PTG and its relationship with happiness in Chinese culture strongly warrants further investigation. The first critical step toward understanding this concept is to develop a culturally appropriate measure of PTG, and thereafter, to examine the mechanisms underlying PTG for model building and application. Many of the aforementioned studies do not appear to support the expectation that broad situational and demographic characteristics are strong predictors of the permanent happiness of Chinese people. China is a particularly interesting case, partly because of coevolving social and economic situations—for example, widening income gaps, rises in unemployment, and dissolving social safety nets amid blistering economic growth, and partly because of the alternative model of happiness and virtue found in Chinese research subjects.78 Key here is the idea that there is a yin-yang or dialectical conception of happiness among Chinese people. Accordingly, Chinese people believe that good things in the external environment are inevitably followed by misfortune and vice versa. Due to this belief, Chinese people tend to be cautious in good conditions and refrain from showing their happiness; similarly, when the external environment deteriorates, Chinese people would work harder to overcome adversity and show less unhappiness (negative emotion). This attitude is reflected in our research findings that conscientiousness is one of the key virtues valued by Chinese people. Furthermore, Chinese people would take into consideration the well-being of others in judgments of their own happiness. As a result, they would experience less unhappiness in bad times if they appraise that their adversities can bring

Psychology of Virtue and Happiness 227 benefits to their significant others. Consequently, external factors may exert less influence on their happiness. Thus, despite substantial benefits from economic growth, Chinese people may remain unsatisfied if their significant others do not benefit from the economy and society.

VII.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, we provided a brief literature review to explore the topic of happiness and virtue in traditional Chinese philosophy and culture. First, doctrines of the main pillars of Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and I-Ching, were discussed to enrich our understanding of happiness and virtue in Chinese culture as well as their relationship. The combined etic-emic approach was introduced as a way to address current issues in cross-cultural psychology, such as measure equivalence. Its principles and benefits were also outlined. We used the developmental process of the Expanded Satisfaction with Life Scale and the Chinese Virtues Questionnaires to illustrate issues in cross-cultural studies and solutions. Overall, these studies illustrate that, to Chinese people, happiness, as understood from the eudaimonic perspective, is of a dichotomous nature (self-oriented and otheroriented) and that interpersonal relationship, vitality, and conscientiousness are the most important virtues among Chinese people. Finally, several happiness studies on economic growth and major natural disasters that occurred in recent decades reveal that the relationship between external factors and happiness in China is complex and has deep social and cultural roots. We believe that the cultivation of Chinese virtue is the way to authentic happiness and that virtue-based activities can facilitate this path. In recent decades, happiness and virtue have become major areas of focus in psychology, especially with the emergence of positive psychology. Happiness and virtue research in China is in its infancy, and robust construct and method development is a critical step. As these concepts are embedded in cultures, cultural factors should be considered carefully before making great strides in their application. Future research should focus on the beneficial role of Chinese virtue and positive activities in life to enhance happiness. In summary, we conclude that: a) Eudaimonic well-being is an important but underresearched area in the study of happiness in Chinese populations. b) The well-being of significant others and social norms both play an important role in affecting Chinese people’s happiness. c) Consistent with propositions and findings in other nations, environmental factors may not have a significant impact on Chinese people’s chronic happiness levels. d) There are three key virtues (vitality, relationship, conscientiousness) in Chinese culture, and these virtues can play significant roles in determining the sustainable happiness of Chinese people.

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Part IV

Happiness

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12 Adventures in Assisted Living Well-Being and Situationist Psychology Daniel M. Haybron

I.

INTRODUCTION

Here is a familiar picture of how we act: We observe the situation, note the information that seems relevant, decide what to do, and do it. We do not always choose well, but we are usually at least prudent, and prudent enough that we do best when we enjoy the greatest possible freedom to shape our lives as we see fit. And whether we choose well or ill, it is we who choose: Save perhaps for the occasional lapse of willpower, we are in control of our choices, and those choices reflect our own wills. In recent decades, this commonsensical picture of human agency has come under fire from multiple directions. One body of literature has documented any number of cognitive biases that lead us systematically to make imprudent choices—more than commonsense has typically allowed and more certainly than mainstream economics has presumed.1 Another set of findings under the heading of situationist psychology has given rise to doubts about how far our actions really reflect our characters, as opposed to features of the situations in which we find ourselves. Simple experimental setups have found it remarkably easy to get people to do serious harm to innocents, for instance, and people’s willingness to help others in need can depend substantially on such trivial matters as being in a bit of a hurry, finding a dime, the noise of a lawnmower, the presence of other bystanders, and so forth.2 These are just a tiny sampling of a vast literature, by now fairly well-known, so I will not elaborate further here. Led mainly by the pioneering work of John Doris and Gilbert Harman, philosophers inspired by this research have taken it to raise deep problems for virtue ethics: If the moral life is less a matter of good character than good situations, then common ideals of virtue may not be realistic, and an ethical outlook that centers on the cultivation of good character may find itself with bleak prospects for success.3 The situationist challenge to virtue ethics has generated no small amount of controversy and indeed might be credited with substantially driving the rise of empirically informed ethics over the last decade or so. Whatever one thinks of the situationist critique of virtue ethics, one might at least be impressed by the evidence that situational influences play

242 Daniel M. Haybron a remarkably powerful role in shaping human behavior. And if situational influences can so easily cause ‘good people’ to do bad things—indeed, making the average person susceptible to killing an innocent person simply because an experimenter told her to—perhaps they can also induce ‘prudent people’ to do imprudent things, and for that matter get ‘imprudent people’ to do prudent things. It is this possibility I wish to canvass here—namely, that situational influences might play a large role in determining our prospects for happy, flourishing lives. In fact, the implications of situationist research may be weightier in the case of well-being than for virtue. Our discussion will have two parts. First, I will sketch some reasons for thinking that situational influences play a large role in determining the way we lead our lives, and there is little reason to think that such influences can be sharply diminished. We may be less in charge of what we do than we have tended to think. In fact, I will suggest that the case for widespread situational influence is stronger than even situationists have tended to recognize. Still, I will not claim to have conclusive evidence for this view; rather, it is meant to be a plausible conjecture—plausible enough to serve as a working hypothesis going forward. I will then consider the implications of this conjecture, if true, for views of well-being, focusing on two issues in particular: the plausibility of classical Aristotelian theories of well-being and the extent to which human welfare might be advanced, not simply by increasing our freedom but by putting ourselves in situations that constrain or shape our choices in certain ways. Perhaps good human living, even for healthy, competent adults, is some form of assisted living. II.

2.1.

THE SITUATIONIST CHALLENGE

Human Agency and Rational Control

Much of the debate has focused on problems of consistency raised by situationist research: Does human psychology lack sufficient consistency to underwrite characterological moral psychology? But following Doris and others in the recent literature, I would suggest that the situationist challenge is more helpfully framed as a problem, not of consistency, but of control: what the research fundamentally suggests is that we are not, and cannot be, fully in charge of our behavior.4 Rather, what we do is ineliminably shaped by contextual influences in ways that are not governed by rational processes. Call this the situational determination of behavior (SDB). We lack character, then, because we aren’t entirely in charge of what we do. This, in turn, problematizes a familiar ideal of human agency that underwrites not just popular varieties of virtue ethics but also—and more importantly for our purposes— popular ideals of well-being. To make this clear will take some explaining. That situations have numerous effects on human behavior is not an interesting suggestion. What’s significant about situationist research is what it says about how situations affect behavior: By and large, situationist findings

Adventures in Assisted Living 243 involve unconscious, automatic influences on behavior. It’s not that you find a dime and think, ‘well, since I just found a dime I’d better help that lady.’ Rather, for reasons partly unbeknownst to you, it just seems natural to offer assistance. Even where the stimuli are fairly obvious, as in the Milgram studies, the chief impetus to behave in certain ways is probably not conscious deliberation, and in that case, there is a clear sense of bafflement among some participants, who find it exceedingly difficult to understand why they should be going along with the proceedings. At this juncture, I’m drawing on a now-familiar distinction from dualprocess psychology between automatic and rational or controlled processes.5 Briefly and crudely, automatic (‘System 1,’ ‘nonrational’) processes tend to be fast, unconscious, effortless, and involuntary, whereas controlled (‘System 2,’ ‘rational’) processes tend to be slow, conscious, effortful, and voluntary. No doubt this binary parsing of psychological processes is oversimplified in various ways, but the crude distinction should be good enough for current purposes. Conscious deliberation is a paradigm controlled process, whereas situational influences tend to involve automatic processes. Distinguish two ways in which situations can affect behavior, apart from constraining it: information and influence. (I am employing these terms in a somewhat stylized sense that is narrower than common uses.) On the information model, situations affect us by informing our deliberations. You see that the road is blocked by a parade, for instance, and decide to take another route. In such cases, the impact of situations on behavior is governed or mediated by rational processes: You decide what to do about it. In a perfectly straightforward sense, you’re in charge of your response. On the influence model, by contrast, the situation induces a certain response from you automatically, usually without any awareness on your part. It does not inform your deliberations; rather, it bypasses your rational agency and determines, at least in part, how you will behave. A mildly pleasant odor fills the room, and you are subsequently more inclined to tell jokes and generally be agreeable, for reasons that escape you. Note that SDB is perfectly compatible with, and normally will involve, a large degree of rational or voluntary determination of behavior. It’s not that situations completely determine what we do, as if we were robots. The determination, at least normally, is only partial. I will not delve very far into the relevant mechanisms, but it will be helpful to distinguish a few possibilities. A particularly straightforward form of SDB would be fully automatic responses, like the startle response: You are programmed to respond to certain stimuli in certain ways. Of greater interest for our purposes are automatic mechanisms that bias our cognitive and behavioral responses given certain situational cues (e.g., the presence of other bystanders). In essence, your programming includes biases that are triggered by certain situations that influence but do not wholly determine your responses. Still more interesting are mechanisms for altering your programming to suit different circumstances. You go into different ‘modes’ in different

244 Daniel M. Haybron environments, for instance. Moods are a classic example here: A change of mood, say from serene to anxious, changes the way you respond to things in a variety of ways and is indeed tantamount to a temporary change of personality.6 It is plausible that we not only engage in mode-shifting but often, if not continually, alter our cognitive, affective, and behavioral dispositions to fit our circumstances; see, for instance, the literature on bicultural individuals discussed below. When landed in an unfamiliar cultural environment, say, it would make sense for your habits of thought, manner of speaking, facial expressions, emotional repertoire, and so on to shift, chameleon-like, to more closely match or complement those of the local crowd. And there is good evidence that we do just this: We tend, for instance, automatically to mirror the emotions of those around us and in a wide range of ways to mimic each others’ behaviors.7 In general, it is plausible that a range of what we might call automatic mechanisms for situational tuning operate on a more or less continuous basis, in essence adjusting our programming to make us better attuned to the situations in which we find ourselves.8 Because situationist findings generally conform to the influence model, they raise questions about a familiar view of human agency, which we might call Rational Control (RC). According to RC, human action is under the command of rational or controlled processes.9 This is not to deny a role for automaticity in RC; any sane view of human agency will allow that a great deal of psychological processing takes place automatically. Driving your car, for instance, involves any number of automatic calculations, adjustments, and so forth. You’d never get anywhere if you had to consciously work out every bit of the process. Rather, the idea is that controlled processes ultimately run the show, with automatic processes helping to execute reason’s commands. You’re driving to the store because you realized you needed milk and decided to head out for it; while driving, you encounter a parade and choose a different route. This chain of events is shot through with automaticity, as anyone should allow. But according to RC, your reasoning, deliberating, choosing self is ultimately in charge, like the captain of a ship, with automatic processes serving as crew. Thomas Nagel sets out this perspective nicely in the following passage: The huge submerged bulk of the mental iceberg, with its stores of memory and acquired skills that have become automatic . . . supplies people with the raw materials on which they can exercise their reason and decide what to think and what to do.10 Of course, few deny the existence of failures of rational control, the most obvious case being weakness of the will. The rational self must contend with powerful forces within—hunger, sexual desire—and sometimes those forces win out, causing us to act against our best judgment. The crew can sometimes be mutinous. But mutiny tends to stand out, so weakness of will

Adventures in Assisted Living 245 tends not to excite much worry about our basic capacity for autonomy: It happens, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. And the exceptions are not easily missed. It will be helpful to distinguish three variants of RC: strong, moderate, and weak. Strong RC posits some form of the ‘captain of the ship’ model we’ve been discussing. The great majority of human behavior is under the control of rational processes, if only indirectly. With a possibly significant but still peripheral range of exceptions, like weakness of will and irrationality, what we do reflects our own judgment and will. It is we who decide how we shall live, with situations informing but not strongly influencing our behavior (in the sense of these terms noted above). Automatic processes may be quite abundant—indeed, controlled processes may be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in some sense—but they will largely be subservient to controlled processes, at least when looking at the general character of how a person lives. This is the classical model of the human being as rational animal, reflected in economic theory, much of folk psychology, and much of the philosophical tradition. Moderate RC holds that a great deal, perhaps most, of our behavior is controlled by rational processes; yet automatic processes not governed by rational mechanisms play a large role in determining our behavior. So we are substantially if not mostly in control of our behavior, but nonrational processes play a substantial role in determining how we live. Our control is substantial, but limited. We might regard this as a ‘shared governance’ model of human agency. Finally, weak RC contends that rational control is the exception rather than the rule. Whereas conscious deliberation plays some role in behavior, for the most part, it is unconscious processes that run the show. Haidt’s “elephant and rider” and Kahneman’s reason-as-“supporting character” models of human agency appear to be contemporary variants of this view, which also corresponds to Suhler and Churchland’s notion of “frail control” (whether or not this view is actually held by those, like Doris, they attribute it to).11 In parallel fashion, we can distinguish three views about the extent of SDB: According to strong SDB, human behavior is largely and ineliminably determined by situational influences; what we do depends mainly on what situations we find ourselves in rather than on our deliberations or personalities. This is arguably the position taken by the classical situationist critique of personality psychology. Moderate SDB holds only that situational influences ineliminably play a substantial, or large, role in determining human behavior. Rational or other internal processes may still play the lion’s share of the role in determining how we live, but a lot of the story involves situational influence. Finally, weak SDB accepts the existence of situational influence but maintains that such influence plays only a small role in human life—significant, perhaps, in certain cases like Milgram situations, but on

246 Daniel M. Haybron the whole a peripheral part of the story of human behavior, and not particularly important in most practical contexts. Situationist research raises the possibility that failures of rational control are widespread and ineliminable, conforming to moderate or strong SDB and thus casting doubt on at least the strong form of RC.12 Rather than reason being the captain of the ship, the correct picture of human agency may be something closer to shared governance: The captain shares command with the crew, and with other ships besides. Worse, the relevant failures of rational control are largely hidden from view. You don’t even know your authority has been usurped and proceed with the illusion of being fully in command. You think you chose not to help that person on the street because it was dangerous, for instance, when it was mainly that you were in a crowd. Two points of clarification, beginning with the suggestion that situational influences are ‘ineliminable.’ By ‘ineliminable,’ I mean not that all situational influences are incorrigible. Just knowing about the Milgram experiment might enable you to resist a sufficiently similar situation in the future, and cultivating skills of emotional self-regulation, as meditators often do, might diminish the influence of situations on our moods. Rather, the claim is that the broad magnitude and extent of situational influence in the great majority of people’s lives is bound to conform roughly to either moderate or strong SDB, respectively, barring drastic measures like mass brain modification. I will not offer much in the way of argument for the idea that we cannot radically alter our susceptibility to SDB, but the notion should be plausible enough given the sorts of effects and mechanisms we are talking about. Susceptibility to situational influence appears to be a deep feature of human psychology. Note that even expert meditators, who seem about as resistant to situational influence as anyone, make extensive use of situational ‘scaffolding’ to facilitate self-regulation: monastic lifestyles including celibacy, the wearing of special garments, vows of poverty, living or participating in a community of like-minded individuals, and so forth.13 Concerning the notion of ‘failures’ of rational control, this is meant to cover far more ground than obvious cases of weakness of will, where the rational mind unsuccessfully tries to exert control over one’s behavior. Roughly, in failures of rational control, cognition and behavior—of sorts that are apt for rational control—are not governed or regulated by rational processes.14 What you think, feel, and do proceeds more or less independently of your judgment: The captain is not fully in charge of the ship. This is sometimes understood as being contrary to your judgment or values, but that need not be the case at all. Reason can fail to be in charge even when your actions accord with it, as when you do something good, but only because the situation induced you to act that way. Indeed, one reason widespread SDB might escape notice is just that situational influences so often mirror our values.

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2.2.

The Extent of SDB

All parties should agree that, at the very least, weak SDB obtains: Situational influences are real, and play a real role in driving some behavior. But can we sustain a stronger view—either moderate or strong SDB? Is it really widespread, and does it really impact our lives very much? It is difficult to reach firm conclusions on these points because researchers can’t very well scrutinize the etiology of participants’ entire behavioral histories. But the situational influences that have been documented can be utterly trivial and mundane, suggesting that such effects are, indeed, pervasive. Given that finding a dime or hearing a lawnmower makes a significant difference in helping behavior, for instance, it is plausible that many everyday events likewise influence many everyday behaviors. For there’s no reason to think there’s a special connection between dimes and altruism; more likely, it’s a connection between positive events and mood, which in turn modulates all manner of behavior, making us agreeable, helpful, and so forth.15 Just that effect, by itself, seems a good candidate for a widespread if not pervasive influence: Moods are usually if not always present, are often triggered more or less automatically by situational cues, and in turn automatically shape much of our cognition and behavior. In short, we should expect moderate SDB to obtain purely on the basis of mood effects. And of course, not all situational influences are plausibly mood-based, such as the effects of being in a group, not to mention many other social influences. For the purposes of this paper, we need claim nothing stronger than moderate SDB, and from here on out my discussion will focus on this proposition. And moderate SDB is entirely compatible with the idea that personality variables dominate situational influences and that rational control is the primary determinant of behavior. Similarly, there is good evidence for widespread irrationality in human behavior: People regularly make irrational choices. Yet, most behavior may nonetheless be, and probably is, perfectly rational; that you make lots of mistakes does not mean you mostly make mistakes. Notice that our concern here is not with sheer quantity or magnitude of situational influences on behavior but the normative significance of such influences. In particular, what matters for present purposes is the impact of situational influence on how well we fare and act over the course of our lifetimes. What appears psychologically to be a small effect could turn out practically to be quite important, say because it biases many choices in minor ways that, taken together, add up to a major difference in how well our lives turn out. Or it might bias just the right choices just enough. As Greek tragedies made plain long ago, it can take very little to turn a very good life into a very bad one.16 For further evidence that situational influences are rife in everyday life, and not simply in specific experimental settings, it is helpful to consider

248 Daniel M. Haybron some recent literatures that aren’t ordinarily labeled ‘situationist.’ I will briefly mention three that are already familiar to many readers from other contexts. Consider, first, the literature on “nudges” spurred by the work of Thaler and Sunstein.17 In that debate, it has generally been taken for granted that “nudges” are a pervasive fact of life; yet nudges just are a species of situational influence. A second line of research concerns the spread of behaviors and mental states through social networks. Christakis and Fowler, for example, have reported surprisingly strong “social contagion” effects involving obesity, divorce, smoking, happiness, unhappiness, loneliness, and cooperation among other phenomena.18 Plausibly, such effects operate largely automatically through situational influence. A third body of literature concerns the psychological impacts of exposure to natural scenery and environments, which appear to be extensive, varied, remarkably strong, and substantially consisting of situational influences.19 In a nutshell, the physical environment may have surprisingly strong impacts on our cognitive, affective, and physical functioning—indeed, effectively altering our personalities. Some of the more striking examples of SDB from everyday life involve people whose lives immerse them in two or more different cultures: biculturals, immigrants, and sojourners.20 Examples would include students whose occupations take them abroad for extended periods or people who have crossed social and class boundaries, such as an African-American physician who rose from poverty. It is a common experience to find sharp differences in how one finds it natural to think, feel, and act between the two cultures.21 Research on immigrants, for instance, reveals marked shifts in personality as people acclimate to new cultural environments.22 Moreover, this process can be, as in the case of emotional tendencies, independent of people’s attitudes toward acquiring the new culture.23 In one remarkable study, measures of self-esteem neatly tracked participants’ degree of exposure to Japanese versus Canadian culture, with nontraveling Japanese scoring lowest, European Canadians highest, and Japanese immigrants and sojourners to Canada in between.24 Indeed, just a seven-month trip to Canada induced a significant increase in measured self-esteem among Japanese students, whereas Canadian visitors to Japan exhibited decreased self-esteem. Other research on ‘frame switching’ and ‘code switching’ among bicultural individuals finds that primes for one or the other cultural background elicits different cognitive, affective, and personality profiles—a form of ‘mode-shifting.’25 It is improbable that these effects are fully governed by rational processes. For the most part, they are probably automatic, and indeed individuals are often surprised and sometimes dismayed by the changes that a given cultural context induces in them: making them more status-conscious, humorless, less careful with their health, and so forth. It may be helpful to reflect on a fictional case that highlights the familiarity of these phenomena. Given the nature of the point it is meant to illustrate, it runs fairly long, and I must beg the reader’s patience. Consider,

Adventures in Assisted Living 249 then, the case of Richard, who has lived in Phoenix for twenty years, having grown up in the small town of Beaufort, Mississippi. Were you to ask Richard about what he considers important in his life, he would offer a perfectly ordinary list: health, happiness, family and friends, enjoying life and living to the fullest, staying active, having interesting work, being a good person. An affluent attorney, Richard is well-positioned to fulfill all these values. Yet, things have not quite worked out that way. Since moving to Phoenix, he has grown overweight, engages in little physical activity, and spends most evenings alone, in front of the computer or TV set. The wife and kids can usually be found doing likewise, in other parts of the house. On weekends, he shops, fusses with his gadgets, and drives his children to various activities. Maybe once a month, he and his wife get together with friends; that’s about the extent of his social life. Otherwise, meals tend to involve takeout or fast food, consumed in the car or alone while watching TV or catching up on e-mail. With the family leading mostly separate lives, his marriage has grown distant and strained. Though well-compensated, Richard carries a lot of debt and has little in the way of savings. Like many of his acquaintances, he borrowed heavily to acquire a large house on a safe, quiet cul-de-sac, owns a pair of luxurious new SUVs, and by the time he reached the local standard, there wasn’t much left over for other things like saving for a rainy day, or college or retirement. Indeed, just filling their little palace with good-quality furniture was a challenge. Spending so much time around lawyers, Richard has become cynical and pessimistic, always quick to see the worm in the apple. For reasons he does not entirely fathom—if you asked him he’d say he’s reasonably happy—he has grown somewhat depressed, and like his wife, he takes medication for depression and anxiety. Then he returns home to Mississippi for an extended visit, and he comes to feel palpably how far he has gone astray. No wonder he’s medicated; his lifestyle has nothing to do with the things he actually cares about. Back in Phoenix, he resolves to get his priorities in order, spending more time with family and friends, eating better, exercising, being less self-centered, making better use of his leisure time. All of these things are possible, and he does make modest inroads here and there. But for the most part, his good intentions amount to naught—over the long haul, he tends to wind up doing what comes naturally, which is to say the lifestyle he’d been leading all along. It’s not that he decides it isn’t worth making better choices—calling his friends to arrange an outing, say. All that takes is picking up the phone. It’s just that, somehow, those choices tend not to happen without special effort. And in the long run, ‘special effort’ tends to lose. At last, Richard decides he needs a change of venue and persuades his wife to leave Phoenix and move to Beaufort. They buy a home in the wellpreserved downtown, just a short stroll from the small practice he has set up. They take regular walks and spend many evenings socializing with neighbors and old friends, often gathered on the front porch, and people

250 Daniel M. Haybron frequently drop in unannounced. As is the local custom, they now prepare most meals themselves. Dinners are taken together, as a family, and their marriage has grown closer and more affectionate. The children have the run of the neighborhood, and kids are in and out of each others’ homes most days. On weekends, Richard often fishes and hunts, or just goes out in his boat and enjoys the outdoors. He has taken up the piano, which he plays daily. Though the local cuisine is hardly ‘light,’ he is more physically active and the portions no longer super-sized, and he gradually sheds the extra pounds and returns to his old, healthy weight. But perhaps the most striking thing Richard notices is how much his personality had changed during his years in Phoenix. Indeed, some classmates at his reunion remarked that he seemed like a different person from the Richard they once knew. He sees how serious, humorless, and blandly inoffensive he’d become—when was the last time he played a prank on someone or told a dirty joke? And impatient, rushed, quick to get angry over little things. Not to mention self-absorbed—how often does he really give someone his full attention? And status-conscious, keen that people know of his successes. Partly due to his greater self-absorption, isolation, and the flavorless, corporate homogeneity of his social world in Phoenix, he had also grown more conservative and judgmental: less empathetic, less tolerant of difference. All of these trends reverse as he settles back into hometown life. The old sense of humor returns, he relaxes and relearns how to go with the flow, taking time to talk and just hang out, sometimes passing good stretches doing nothing. Now embedded in a social environment that resembles extended family more than suburban anonymity and retail smiles, where no one cares what you earn or what you’re doing that’s so important, his attention shifts away from himself and toward those around him. He sees a wider range of humanity and feels connected with a more diverse band of peers. He is as comfortable sharing martinis with a judge as tossing back cheap beers with a mechanic. Finally, the greatly increased time he spends outdoors, surrounded by stately trees draped in Spanish moss, has had a significant mellowing—and at the same time revitalizing—effect on him, and even at work he’s more focused, less distracted. At last, he feels something he’s not felt in many a year—he feels fully at home, in his element. He’s the Richard his friends used to know. I suspect there will be little dispute that Richard is doing much better in Beaufort than in Phoenix. And much of the difference pretty clearly owes not to conscious choice but to unconscious, automatic changes in the way he found it natural to think, feel, and act in the two environments. Indeed, his behavior in Phoenix systematically frustrated his values: He didn’t want to live that way, but he did anyway. Now this is just a made-up example, and there’s no hope of running a controlled experiment to test the credibility of the scenario as a whole; that’s in fact a major reason to trade in this sort of tale. But I suspect most readers

Adventures in Assisted Living 251 will recognize many elements of the case from their own experience and find it plausible that some variant of this story does in fact play out in many people’s lives. Indeed, it may be rather common for people to ‘go Phoenix’ and end up in some version of Richard’s bind. At any rate, if you think this a plausible tale, then you should presumably think that situational effects of similar magnitude—be they malign or benign—are quite widespread in human life, given that there’s no reason to think Richard is abnormally wired. It should seem plausible, for instance, that your own lifestyle owes much to situational influences. It should seem plausible, at the very least, that widespread SDB does in fact obtain, and that it plays a large role in human welfare. So here is where we stand: I hope to have made it plausible that (at least) moderate SDB obtains and has large impacts on human well-being. To a great extent, the choices we make in the pursuit of happiness are determined by situational factors, with the ‘rational self’ exhibiting only limited control. This is meant to be a plausible conjecture, suitable as a working hypothesis going forward. I do not claim to have assembled conclusive empirical evidence for this suggestion, nor is it clear how one could obtain such evidence. But it is at least worth taking seriously. Let’s consider what it would mean for thinking about the nature and pursuit of well-being. III.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF MODERATE SDB FOR WELL-BEING

3.1. Problems for Aristotelian Accounts of Well-Being Let’s take up the situationist critique of virtue ethics, specifically the case against what we may call the ‘classical Aristotelian’ account of virtue. On this account, virtuous actions must proceed from “a firm and unchangeable character.”26 The relevant character traits are quite broad, corresponding roughly to the commonsense taxonomy of virtues like justice, courage, generosity, and so forth. Indeed, to have one virtue, you must have them all. And the situationist objection, recall, is that we generally neither possess, nor are likely able to achieve, ‘globalist’ traits of this sort. Some defenders of virtue ethics have replied to claims that Aristotelian virtue is not generally a realistic aspiration for human beings by noting this suggestion is just fine by them and would have seemed plausible enough among many of the ancients: Virtue is indeed rare.27 We are, most of us, made of crooked and flimsy stuff. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to virtue or that we should worry if our ethical theory suggests we are unlikely to succeed. Virtue can be a useful practical ideal, even if merely an ideal that few if any of us will actually attain. We can at least try to get closer. This position is not altogether implausible. It isn’t obvious, at least, that unattainable ideals can’t be useful in helping us think about how to live

252 Daniel M. Haybron better. And maybe genuine virtue is indeed rare, if not nonexistent, depending on how high we set the bar. Be that as it may, I am more interested in the ramifications of this line for certain theories of well-being, notably Aristotelian views. Let us suppose, then, that Aristotelian virtue proves to be a rare thing in light of situationist findings. Perhaps this doesn’t trouble the Aristotelian account of virtue. But it should give pause when thinking about Aristotelian accounts of well-being. For on the classical Aristotelian account, well-being consists in a life of virtuous activity. Recall, now, that ‘virtuous activity,’ here, is activity that proceeds from just the sort of robust character traits that situationist research makes problematic. If such traits are rare, then so too is well-being. And if the virtuous agent doesn’t exist, then neither does anyone achieve well-being. To lead a happy life or to flourish, on this schema, requires that one be virtuous, in a more or less globalist sort of way. And yet, even some defenders of the Aristotelian approach seem willing to grant that virtue of this sort is rare. In which case we have a rather dismal view of human life: Well-being too is an extraordinary achievement. Indeed, the great majority of those leading what they and most others would deem enviable lives presumably fall short. Not being virtuous, their lives fail to go well for them. Maybe no one leads a happy life. Even if we grant the rarity of virtue, this seems a bitter pill to swallow. One might back off the ‘virtue is rare’ position and argue that virtue, and hence well-being, need not be an all-or-nothing affair: Virtue comes in degrees, and one might be virtuous even if not perfect.28 Aristotle himself distinguishes different levels of virtue, for example allowing that a life devoted to practical affairs might be eudaimon, even if only second-best to the life of contemplation. In addition, Aristotle clearly thinks it important for a good life that we live in the right sort of community and have the right sorts of friends, in a way that facilitates virtuous living. Good situations matter for Aristotle. Indeed, it does seem plausible, even on a classical Aristotelian view of character, that someone might count as virtuous despite various imperfections: occasionally being a bit thoughtless or insensitive, at times taking a bit too much dessert, sometimes misjudging the situation, and so forth. Nobody’s perfect, and it would be an odd theory that reserved virtue, and a happy life, solely for the ethically flawless. Aristotle presumably does not demand perfection of the virtuous, but he does appear to set a fairly high bar. Indeed, it seems he must because so many things must come together properly in the virtuous agent that if we lower the bar very much, the picture may no longer hang together. You must, for instance, be firmly disposed not just to do the right things for the right reasons, but to do them gladly and not reluctantly, as some Kantian exemplars of virtue do; otherwise, you are not virtuous but merely continent. You must also be directed firmly by reason, with a unified sense of what matters, so that you possess all the virtues. Yes, good habituation matters, as do good friends and a healthy community. But your disposition

Adventures in Assisted Living 253 to act rightly, now, must stem from your rational conviction that certain ways of living are better than others. It should not have to be propped up by extensive scaffolding—positive peer influences, say, or an environment cleansed of temptations. You should not, for instance, be but a radio show away from taking a machete to your neighbors. Your attentive, affectionate approach to relating with your family should not hang on which community you move to or which job you take. Your eating a diet that offers some prospect of a long life should not depend on what your friends and neighbors choose to eat. We are not talking about minor departures from practical wisdom: If moderate SDB obtains, then the great majority of us, perhaps all of us, may be vulnerable to major departures from virtue should we find ourselves in the wrong situations, and the putative virtues we do exhibit are substantially sustained by felicitous situations. The point is not that we aren’t robustly perfect; it’s that few of us are robustly disposed to live well. We aren’t virtuous, by classical Aristotelian standards, let alone perfect. And it is not clear, if we do not count as virtuous, how the Aristotelian view could count us as leading happy lives. Take someone who leads a long, prosperous, and fulfilling life filled with enjoyment, love, accomplishment, and beauty, honoring her obligations and going well beyond, dedicating her life to the service of others. She is remarkably considerate to those around her and brings joy to many. Deeply satisfied with her life, she dies peacefully, admired and loved by many. And yet, had she been presented with the right circumstances, she might have led a mediocre life. Perhaps she would even have acted badly: been an unfaithful spouse, or become self-absorbed and neglectful of others. On the classical Aristotelian view, it seems, she lacks genuine virtue. But she also, for that reason, could not have had a happy life. And given the inscrutability of the misdeeds she might have committed were circumstances different, it seems we could never have grounds for deeming her—or anyone else—virtuous, and hence flourishing, even if she were in fact both virtuous and thriving. We already knew that Aristotelian accounts of well-being were demanding, but little did we realize just how sternly they crack the whip. Perhaps Solon’s dictum should be revised: “Call no man happy, ever.” There are as well two deeper problems, and they cannot readily be managed by lowering the bar for virtue. First, the hypothesis of moderate SDB threatens Aristotle’s ideal of rational control. If moderate SDB obtains, then strong RC does not: To a great extent, human behavior is not under rational control. This is fairly apparent in the case of Richard, whose most important life decisions are substantially shaped by a constant barrage of nudges from his environment. He lives a radically different lifestyle in Beaufort and Phoenix, and not because he believes the circumstances call for different choices. He does so essentially because he is wired to respond differently to the environments, regardless of his own best judgment. Indeed, his personality automatically shifts to fit the different environs. The captain is not entirely in

254 Daniel M. Haybron charge of the ship. Moreover, there is no reason to expect that very many if any individuals could realistically liberate themselves from such influences; a life consistently guided by the individual’s reason may not generally, if ever, be feasible for human beings.29 The worry here is not that people aren’t virtuous enough to count as virtuous; it’s that Aristotle’s ideal of human agency, and in turn his ideal of human flourishing, seems incompatible with the way human beings actually function. The final difficulty seems to me the weightiest: The classical Aristotelian view rules out happy lives for many people, not because of how they’ve lived, but because of how they might have lived. Take our erstwhile saint from two paragraphs back: The reason she fails to flourish has nothing to do with what she’s actually done. The sins that mar her life are merely counterfactual. This is a very strange way to think about well-being. It is one thing to say that Stalin or Ted Bundy could not have had happy lives because they behaved so atrociously. But it is quite another to say that even a putative saint blessed with accomplishment and joy could not have a happy life because, had she been put in the right situation, she would have acted badly. Note that, while situationist findings highlight the problem, the difficulty arises quite independently of the situationist literature: Even if Aristotelian virtues ran rampant in the population, it would still seem wrong-headed to make well-being so dependent on counterfactual sins. Contrast this with the case of virtue: It is fairly ordinary to think that someone isn’t really so admirable if her good deeds could easily turn bad were the situation unfavorable. Assessing character is fundamentally about assessing dispositions, so this makes perfect sense. But assessments of well-being are more closely linked to what actually transpires, and Aristotelians themselves often like to point out that flourishing, on their view, is more like something you do than a state you attain: It is a matter of exercising your capacities in a full, richly human life. That idea has a great deal of appeal.30 The friendless sociopath, for instance, might seem to lead an impoverished life, partaking too little in the goods of sociality that most of us enjoy. But that plausible thought has a very different ring from the notion that someone with many good relationships has an impoverished life, or fails to live happily, because she would have become one of Hitler’s willing executioners had it come to that. In fact, that doesn’t seem right at all. These considerations not only cast doubt on the classical Aristotelian view of well-being; more generally, they give reason to doubt that well-being is fruitfully grounded in virtuous character: Wellbeing seems intuitively to track agents’ actual life histories, whereas virtue is concerned largely or wholly with their fundamental dispositions to respond to the various circumstance that life may present.31 I do not claim that all Aristotelian accounts of well-being are vulnerable to these arguments, as the moniker ‘Aristotelian’ can be used for a wide range of theories. It seems to me that recognizably Aristotelian theories of well-being might accommodate the foregoing points by allowing that virtuous activity may not be subserved by globalist character traits and may

Adventures in Assisted Living 255 only be partly under rational control. Perhaps one could act well, and thus flourish, even if one’s actions are partly sustained by benign situational influences, or would no longer be virtuous were the situation less benign.32 Whatever the status of Aristotelian theories, any account of well-being that is committed to globalism about traits, or strong RC, is going to be open to these sorts of objections insofar as moderate or strong SDB obtains—and perhaps even if not. A theory of well-being that requires a strong form of autonomy, for instance, is likely to be committed to strong RC and thus will be vulnerable to situationist critique. If we aren’t fully in control of our actions, then we aren’t, on some views of autonomy, fully autonomous. If human flourishing requires that sort of autonomy, then flourishing may be very scarce if not nonexistent. Let me close this section by noting an oddity in the idea that Aristotelian and related ideals of human flourishing might place our goal out of reach. A central part of their appeal is precisely that they mean to ground well-being in our natures, in what we are like: We flourish by fulfilling our natures, living as befits the sort of creatures we are. This notion loses a good bit of its allure, one would think, if the ideal for us is not something we can achieve— if, in essence, it is not in our nature to be able to fulfill our nature. Ideals of human flourishing should probably bear a closer relationship to what human beings are actually like.

3.2.

Contextualism about the Promotion of Well-Being

If pervasive situational influence is inevitable, then it may be crucial for human well-being that we live in good situations—situations that nudge us toward prudent, rather than imprudent, ways of living. Living well may be less a matter of individual effort and more a matter of environmental design than we thought.33 The question here concerns what we may call felicitation: the causation or promotion of well-being or happiness.34 And the suggestion is that, given the fact of SDB, optimal felicitation requires a context that influences choice in beneficial ways. Put a bit more broadly, human beings tend to fare best given a context that nonminimally constrains or shapes their choices in beneficial ways. In earlier work, I called this view contextualism about the promotion of well-being, or felicitation. Contextualism stands in contrast to individualism about felicitation. Individualism maintains that human beings tend to fare best when the shape of a life is, to the extent possible, determined by the individual who leads it. Individualism, that is, posits an ideal of maximal self-determination.35 This is an ideal of living in which the individual’s life is very much her own creation: She reflects on what’s important to her, sets her own priorities as she deems fit, has the freedom to mold her life accordingly, and succeeds in doing so. And she does all this autonomously, under the command of her inner (presumably rational) self. The captain running the ship. Yet,

256 Daniel M. Haybron if moderate or strong SDB obtains, then this ideal is simply unattainable: Human beings are not capable of this sort of autonomy. This individualistic ideal rests on a false view of human agency. Yet, if moderate or strong SDB obtains, then a good society will not merely be a free society where people have maximum latitude to pursue autonomously chosen ends. That sort of autonomy is a mirage: Such pursuits will invariably be determined, in part, by the social and physical context in which people live, and not simply by individuals’ independent judgment. Accordingly, a good society will need to shape people’s choices in ways that enhance, rather than detract from, their well-being. Not because such shaping is better than no shaping, but because any society will shape people’s choices one way or another. The question is whether it does so in a beneficial (e.g., Beaufort) or harmful (e.g., Phoenix) manner. Note that while I suggested above that situationist findings create problems for Aristotelian views of well-being, contextualist approaches to felicitation need not be at odds with Aristotelian political ideals. Indeed, Aristotle might have been a contextualist himself, given the emphasis he placed on living in the right sort of city for human flourishing. I will set this question aside for now.36 By itself, moderate SDB seems sufficient to motivate a contextualist approach to well-being; but in fact, there is a second, equally compelling line of evidence favoring the view: namely, the existence of systematic imprudence, underwritten by a wide range of cognitive biases. Human beings are systematically prone to make serious mistakes in the pursuit of their interests. These errors include assessments of past and present well-being, forecasts of future well-being, and failures to choose rationally given the information at hand. By now, the litany of biases is well-known—to name a few of very many: loss aversion, which makes us disproportionately averse to losses; lay rationalism, which causes us to favor ‘hard’ values like money over ‘soft’ values like enjoyment, friendship, and so forth; positive illusions, which make us unrealistically optimistic about the future and overly positive about our past and present; and the impact bias, in which we overestimate the impacts of events on our well-being.37 It is not hard to see the influence of such biases in people’s lives: foolish investments, low savings rates, high indebtedness, poor housing and career choices, and so on. Because the literature on these phenomena is well-known and I have covered it elsewhere, I will not discuss it at length here. Suffice it to say that if people are prone to systematic imprudence, then it will be desirable, at least prima facie, to live in environments that limit the harm done by these biases, by limiting or influencing our choices in beneficial ways. I have defined contextualism and individualism as ecological claims about the sorts of environments that best serve human welfare. But there is really a cluster of related distinctions here, and other formulations of the contrast may be more fruitful, at least for certain purposes. For example, we might frame these views as practical claims about how we ought to

Adventures in Assisted Living 257 promote well-being, or what sorts of policies will be most effective in promoting well-being. Individualism, for instance, might claim that we should aim for maximal self-determination. Whether the ideal is attainable or not, we should try to approximate it as much as possible. This claim holds considerable interest for political philosophy, since it indicates that policy, insofar as it aims to make people better off, should try to maximize freedom, both maximizing individuals’ capacity for autonomy and minimizing bounds and burdens on choice, approximating as nearly as possible a condition of unbounded and unburdened choice. Whereas a practical variant of contextualism might counsel promoting well-being in ways other than advancing individual freedom, for instance preferring urban planning schemes that conduce to prudent choices, say by encouraging walking and interaction with neighbors. The ecological and practical doctrines concern distinct questions, since efforts to foster beneficial contexts might be ineffective or impermissible, say because they violate individual rights. In principle, contextualism in the ecological sense could fail to have any implications for practice. I will not address this possibility in any depth here, but it seems profoundly improbable. Would it invariably be futile, or somehow immoral, for you and I to work together to build better communities that nudge people—including ourselves—to lead healthier and more fulfilling lives? Particularly given that existing arrangements are already nudging us in manifold ways to live in certain ways, not always benign. Would it inevitably be pointless or wrong for governments, who already make many urban planning, transportation, economic, and other ‘lifestyle infrastructure’ decisions that determine the sorts of situational influences we will face, to take account of those influences and try to make choices that foster positive, rather than negative, influences? I will leave it to others to make that case and will simply assume here that contextualism is not practically inert. One likely practical upshot of contextualism is to favor a greater role for well-being policy: If policy is going to foster contexts that influence choice in beneficial instead of harmful ways, it will need to attend directly to the well-being impacts of social arrangements. Individualists, by contrast, tend to reject well-being policy in favor of indirect means of promoting welfare, via freedoms and resources: enhancing individuals’ powers of self-determination. This is actually quite a deep shift of focus. For much of the last century, debate about the public interest has tended to center on formal questions of how to improve people’s ability to get what they want, with relatively little in the way of substantive debate about what is actually good for us. Other than, that is, regular hand-wringing about why so many people are lonely, depressed, anxious. . . . The doubts rarely get beyond hand-wringing, however, because questions of human happiness and flourishing are largely off the table. If people have a decent education and economic prospects, then any unhappiness they might experience is their own problem. After all, if they wanted something different, they’d

258 Daniel M. Haybron choose it. But of course the preferences people express in the marketplace are themselves shaped very strongly by the social and physical context they find themselves in, as we saw in the case of Richard. You can give the people what they want, in the crude market sense, while making a mockery of the things they value: their happiness, their relationships, their sense of meaning in life. If we want to do better, we need actually to talk about the things that really matter to us and to consider explicitly how our policies affect those things.

IV.

CONCLUSION

I have tried to extend the situationist challenge in moral psychology to the prudential domain, arguing that situationist findings in social psychology put pressure on strong views about the extent to which human beings exhibit rational control over their behavior, and that this in turn raises doubts about classical Aristotelian accounts of well-being—doubts that, to some extent, should worry us independently of the research. More importantly, perhaps, they suggest that the strongly individualistic tendencies among moderns about the promotion of well-being may be unwarranted. To a greater extent than is widely recognized, at least in Western democracies, human wellbeing is a matter of finding situations that shape our choices in certain ways: To some extent, constraints and nudges are good for us. We may seem to have landed in a fairly dismal spot, with autonomy an illusion and virtue a rarity indeed. Have we reached a pessimistic conclusion? It may seem so but only, I think, if we insist on certain ideals of virtue and autonomy. In fact, SDB may simply point to a different set of ideals. Indeed, the views defended in this paper may not be particularly radical, or even unusual, from a broader perspective. Arguably, contextualist approaches to well-being are standard in non-Western cultures, and it may indeed be individualism, and the ideal of strong RC, that are anomalous from a broader world-historical viewpoint—not so much human norms as peculiarities of “WEIRD” liberal democracies in Europe and North America. (WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.38) Since, as noted above, it is less plausible that we should abandon liberal notions of individual rights and liberties, this suggestion raises the possibility of a ‘globalized’ ethics, combining insights that are characteristic of both Western and non-Western cultures: an individualistic morality taken together with a nonindividualistic, contextualist view of human flourishing. We secure human flourishing together, in recognition of our interdependence, but we also take seriously each others’ status as individuals whose wills, even if not independent, must be respected. To make good on these speculations, however, will require, among other things, a positive account of human agency. Which is to say, a good deal more discussion.39

Adventures in Assisted Living 259 NOTES 1. See, for example, D. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2006); D. M. Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 2. For discussions of this literature, see, for example, L. Ross and R. E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991); J. Doris, Lack of Character (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); A. Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); M. Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); N. E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010); R. M. Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); C. Miller, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 3. See, for example, Doris, Lack of Character; G. Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1999, 315–331; J. Doris and S. Stich, “Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta, April 19, 2006, http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/moral-psych-emp/; M. Merritt et al., “Character,” in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. M. Doris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); For an earlier treatment, see O. Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 4. J. M. Doris, “Skepticism about Persons,” Philosophical Issues 19, no. 1 (2009): 57–91; J. M. Doris, Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Skepticism, and Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); S. Vazire and J. M. Doris, “Personality and Personal Control,” Journal of Research in Personality 43, no. 2 (2009): 274–275; C. L. Suhler and P. S. Churchland, “Control: Conscious and Otherwise,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 8 (2009): 341–347. The latter paper attempts to rebut doubts about control, but the evidence cited there seems entirely compatible with the views defended here. 5. See, for example, J. A. Bargh and T. L. Chartrand, “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” American Psychologist 54, no. 7 (1999): 462–479; Kahneman, Thinking. 6. For discussion, see D. M. Haybron, “On Being Happy or Unhappy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71, no. 2 (2005): 287–317; Haybron, The Pursuit; D. M. Haybron, “The Value of Positive Emotion: Philosophical Doubts and Reassurances,” in The Dark and Light Sides of Positive Emotion, ed. J. Gruber and J. Moskowitz (New York: Oxford, forthcoming); W. N. Morris, “The Mood System,” in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1999), 169–189. 7. Mimicry and emotional contagion: T. L. Chartrand and J. L. Lakin, “The Antecedents and Consequences of Human Behavioral Mimicry,” Annual Review of Psychology 64, no. 1 (2013): 285–308; E. Hatfield et al., “Emotional Contagion,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 2, no. 3 (1993): 96–99. For more general discussions of social cognition, see C. D. Frith and U. Frith, “Mechanisms of Social Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 63, no. 1 (2012): 287–313; J. A. Bargh et al., “Automaticity in Social-Cognitive Processes,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 12 (2012): 593–605. By and large, the literature focuses on social tuning rather than

260 Daniel M. Haybron

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

adjustment to the physical environment, but see the references below on nature exposure and the built environment. An intriguing possibility is that an important dimension of emotional wellbeing or happiness, which I have called attunement, crucially involves successful tuning of this sort (Haybron, The Pursuit). Note that rational processes need not be rational in the normative sense: They can be error-prone and hence irrational at times. T. Nagel, “David Brooks’s Theory of Human Nature,” New York Times, March 11, 2011. J. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Kahneman, Thinking; Suhler and Churchland, “Control;” R. M. Raafat et al., “Herding in Humans,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 10 (2009): 420– 428 may also fall into this category, depending on how far the ‘herd’ model of human agency is supposed to extend. Note that failures of rational control need not involve situational influence and can be wholly endogenous. SDB is thus only one potential threat to RC. I borrow the scaffolding metaphor from J. Heath and J. Anderson, “Procrastination and the Extended Will,” The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination, 2010, 233–253. I am being loose here, but the qualification is meant to allow that many primitive processes are not even candidates for intentional direction, so the absence of rational control cannot sensibly be deemed a ‘failure.’ A more precise treatment would also restrict the notion of control to more or less direct or proximate control, as opposed to distal forms of control that bypass the individual’s agency—for example, locking the cupboards to maintain one’s diet. Following a common practice in this literature, I tend to focus on a few results like the dime-finding study for convenience. Any single study, of course, may turn out to be flawed, and indeed there is some question about the dime result, a point addressed in Doris, Lack of Character. But very little hangs on any one study; there are many studies reporting similar findings. Even dime-finding has shown like effects in other studies (e.g., of life satisfaction) (N. Schwarz and F. Strack, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications,” in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1999), 61–84. The basic effects discussed here, including mood effects, are well-established. Haybron, The Pursuit, 230. R. H. Thaler and C. R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). For example, N. Christakis et al., Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009); N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler, “Social Contagion Theory: Examining Dynamic Social Networks and Human Behavior,” Statistics in Medicine 32, no. 4 (2012): 556–577. For discussion and references, see D. M. Haybron, “Central Park: Nature, Context, and Human Wellbeing,” International Journal of Wellbeing 1, no. 2 (2011): 235–254; D. E. Bowler et al., “A Systematic Review of Evidence for the Added Benefits to Health of Exposure to Natural Environments,” BMC Public Health 10, no. 1 (2010): 1–10. T. LaFromboise et al., “Psychological Impact of Biculturalism: Evidence and Theory,” Psychological Bulletin 114, no. 3 (1993): 395. I discuss my own experiences along these lines in Haybron, The Pursuit, xiii-xiv.

Adventures in Assisted Living 261 22. D. Gungor et al., “Acculturation of Personality: A Three-Culture Study of Japanese, Japanese Americans, and European Americans,” Journal of CrossCultural Psychology 44, no. 5 (2013): 701–718. 23. J. De Leersnyder et al., “Where Do My Emotions Belong? A Study of Immigrants’ Emotional Acculturation,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37, no. 4 (2011): 451–463. 24. S. J. Heine and D. R. Lehman, “Move the Body, Change the Self: Acculturative Effects on the Self-Concept,” Psychological Foundations of Culture, 2004, 305–331. 25. For example, Y.-y. Hong et al., “Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition,” American Psychologist 55, no. 7 (2000): 709–720; M. Ross et al., “Language and the Bicultural Self,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28, no. 8 (2002): 1040–1050; M. Verkuyten and K. Pouliasi, “Biculturalism Among Older Children: Cultural Frame Switching, Attributions, Self-Identification, and Attitudes,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 33, no. 6 (2002): 596–609; N. Ramírez-Esparza et al., “Do Bilinguals Have Two Personalities? A Special Case of Cultural Frame Switching,” Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 2 (2006): 99–120. 26. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1105a27–b1. 27. For example, J. J. Kupperman, “Virtue in Virtue Ethics,” The Journal of Ethics 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 243–255; K. Kristjánsson, “An Aristotelian Critique of Situationism,” Philosophy 83, no. 1 (2008): 55–76; J. Montmarquet, “Moral Character and Social Science Research,” Philosophy 78, no. 3 (2003): 355–368. 28. For example, N. K. Badhwar, “The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits,” The Journal of Ethics 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 257–289; I am grateful to Franco V. Trivigno for pressing me on this point. 29. Might reason exert sufficient control by choosing good situations, as when Richard moves to Beaufort? Not likely: Presumably the classical Aristotelian will generally want a closer relationship between rational agency and behavior than that. Even if some use of situational scaffolding to nudge oneself toward greater virtue would be acceptable to Aristotle—see, for example, his views of friendship (M. Merritt, “Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3, no. 4 (2000): 365–383; M. W. Merritt, “Aristotelean Virtue and the Interpersonal Aspect of Ethical Character,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6, no. 1 (2009): 23–49)—such methods should presumably remain a marginal part of the story. Consider, at the limit, that one way to enact such a strategy would be to make oneself the puppet of a machine that perfectly tracks one’s values. 30. As I discuss in D. M. Haybron, Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford, 2013). 31. For further argument against the identification of well-being and virtue, see D. M. Haybron, “Well-Being and Virtue,” Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 2, no. 2 (2007); Haybron, The Pursuit. The qualifier ‘fundamental’ is meant to allow that our life histories can have dispositional elements too (e.g., when one becomes emotionally fragile after a death in the family). This is a bit rough but should suffice for current purposes. 32. See, for example, Merritt, “Virtue Ethics” and Merritt, “Aristotelean Virtue,” though Merritt frames her account as Humean, in contrast with the Aristotelian view. 33. A number of commentators have drawn on the situationist literature to stress the importance of choosing or creating good situations. For example, Doris,

262 Daniel M. Haybron

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

Lack of Character; Doris, Talking to Ourselves; Merritt, “Virtue Ethics”; Alfano, Character; G. Harman, “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100, no. 1 (2000): 223–226. The term is modified from J. F. Helliwell et al., “Felicitators,” International Journal of Wellbeing 1, no. 2 (2011): 193–306. See also Haybron, The Pursuit; Haybron, “Central Park.” Strictly, selfdetermination is understood narrowly here, as determination by an inner self, as opposed to a self more broadly or communally defined. In the contemporary literature, contextualists may include most advocates of happiness or well-being policy, such as E. Diener et al., Well-Being for Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons From a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005); J. E. Stiglitz et al., “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” 2009. See also B. Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); J. Haidt et al., “Hive Psychology, Happiness, and Public Policy,” The Journal of Legal Studies 37, no. s2 (2008): S133–S156; J. D. Trout, The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society (New York: Viking Press, 2009); J. Anderson, “Autonomy Gaps as a Social Pathology: Ideologiekritik Beyond Paternalism,” in Sozialphilosophie und Kritik, ed. R. Forst, M. Hartmann, R. Jaeggi, and M. Saar (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009); Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge; P. Ubel, Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature is at Odds with Economics—and Why it Matters (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009). The authors cited in Note 33 focus on virtue rather than well-being but would likely be sympathetic to the contextualist position. For references, see the sources cited in Note 1. J. Henrich et al., “The Weirdest People in the World,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (2010): 61–83. For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this material, I want to thank Mark Alfano, John Doris, Nancy E. Snow, and Franco V. Trivigno, as well as audiences at the Morality and the Cognitive Sciences Conference in Riga, Latvia; the APA Central Division meeting in Minneapolis; the University of Miami; and the Moral Psychology Summer School, Barchem, Netherlands.

REFERENCES Adams, R. M. A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Alfano, M. Character as Moral Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Anderson, J. “Autonomy Gaps as a Social Pathology: Ideologiekritik Beyond Paternalism.” In Sozialphilosophie und Kritik, edited by R. Forst, M. Hartmann, R. Jaeggi, and M. Saar. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. Appiah, A. Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Badhwar, N. K. “The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits.” The Journal of Ethics 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 257–289. Bargh, J. A. and T. L. Chartrand. “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.” American Psychologist 54, no. 7 (1999): 462–479. Bargh, J. A., K. L. Schwader, S. E. Hailey, R. L. Dyer and E. J. Boothby. “Automaticity in Social-Cognitive Processes.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (2012): 593–605.

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264 Daniel M. Haybron Heine, S. J. and D. R. Lehman. “Move the Body, Change the Self: Acculturative Effects on the Self-Concept.” Psychological Foundations of Culture, 2004, 305–331. Helliwell, J. F., D. Weijers, N. Powdthavee and A. Jarden, eds. “Felicitators.” International Journal of Wellbeing 1, no. 2 (2011): 193–306. Henrich, J., S. J. Heine and A. Norenzayan. “The Weirdest People in the World.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (2010): 61–83. Hong, Y.-Y., M. W. Morris, C.-Y. Chiu and V. Benet-Martínez. “Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition.” American Psychologist 55, no. 7 (2000): 709–720. Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Kristjánsson, K. “An Aristotelian Critique of Situationism.” Philosophy 83, no. 1 (2008): 55–76. Kupperman, J. J. “Virtue in Virtue Ethics.” The Journal of Ethics 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 243–255. LaFromboise, T., H. L. Coleman and J. Gerton. “Psychological Impact of Biculturalism: Evidence and Theory.” Psychological Bulletin 114, no. 3 (1993): 395. Layard, R. Happiness: Lessons From a New Science. New York: Penguin, 2005. Merritt, M. “Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3, no. 4 (2000): 365–383. ———. “Aristotelean Virtue and the Interpersonal Aspect of Ethical Character.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6, no. 1 (2009): 23–49. Merritt, M., J. Doris and G. Harman. “Character.” In The Moral Psychology Handbook, edited by J. M. Doris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Miller, C. Moral Character: An Empirical Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 355–401. Montmarquet, J. “Moral Character and Social Science Research.” Philosophy 78, no. 3 (2003): 355–368. Morris, W. N. “The Mood System.” In Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz, 169–189. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1999. Nagel, T. “David Brooks’s Theory of Human Nature.” New York Times. March 11, 2011. Raafat, R. M., N. Chater and C. D. Frith. “Herding in Humans.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 10 (2009): 420–428. Ramírez-Esparza, N., S. D. Gosling, V. Benet-Martínez, J. P. Potter and J. W. Pennebaker. “Do Bilinguals Have Two Personalities? A Special Case of Cultural Frame Switching.” Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 2 (2006): 99–120. Ross, L. and R. E. Nisbett. The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991. Ross, M., W. Q. E. Xun and A. E. Wilson. “Language and the Bicultural Self.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28, no. 8 (2002): 1040–1050. Schwartz, B. The Paradox of Choice. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Schwarz, N. and F. Strack, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications.” In Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz, 61–84. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1999. Snow, N. E. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010. Stiglitz, J. E., A. Sen and J.-P. Fitoussi. “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.” 2009. Suhler, C. L. and P. S. Churchland. “Control: Conscious and Otherwise.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 8 (2009): 341–347.

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13 Aristotelian Well-Being for the Modern World: Taking the Capabilities Approach to the Next Level of Specificity Howard J. Curzer I.

INTRODUCTION

The contemporary discussion of well-being pays homage to Aristotle as a founder of the field and accepts many of his individual claims yet neglects his overall account of well-being. Perhaps this is because Aristotle underemphasizes the role of factors beyond a person’s control in moral development (e.g., heredity, upbringing, sociopolitical environment) in order to focus on how individuals can act well, and then seems to end up with implausible claims. Conversely, the Capabilities Approach (CA) is a currently respected, Aristotelian research program that focuses on the role of factors beyond a person’s control in moral development, and makes eminently plausible claims, but provides only a part of an account of well-being.1 I shall sketch CA, highlighting its incompleteness and its points of disagreement with Aristotle’s account as usually interpreted. Then I shall develop and defend a plausible version of Aristotle’s account. I shall exploit the fact that Aristotle’s account of well-being and CA complement each other by combining them. Finally, I shall point out the extent to which this combined account is supported by common sense and the current social science research, and indicate what remains to be done.

II.

CAPABILITIES APPROACH

Governments, NGOs, philanthropists, and others need ways of assessing well-being and justice. Although it is relatively new, CA is already beginning to replace the Gross Domestic Product as the standard way of evaluating the success of developing nations and even industrialized nations in improving the well-being of their citizens and the justice of their societies.2 The parents of CA are Martha Nussbaum and Amarta Sen. They begin with the observation that intrinsically desirable goods are plural and incommensurable. Human life may be fruitfully described as sets of situations, which I shall call spheres, corresponding to these several goods. Since many situations involve multiple goods, the spheres overlap

Aristotelian Well-Being 267 considerably. Nussbaum and Sen maintain that a person’s degree of wellbeing is a function of at least three things within each sphere: (a) internal capabilities (intrinsic abilities to perform certain acts if the opportunities to do them are available), (b) combined capabilities (internal capabilities plus the availability of opportunities to perform the associated acts), and (c) functionings (actually performing these acts). As a first approximation, the path to well-being may be pictured as a ladder. People reach the first level when their own abilities are significantly developed. They reach the second level when they also face no significant external obstacles to the exercise of all of their own abilities. (Roughly speaking, their levels of health, education, resources, and political freedom are high enough so that exercise of their abilities is a live option.) The third level is the actual use of these capabilities. Like most parents, Nussbaum and Sen have somewhat different views of their child’s nature and future. Sen’s version of CA is socially relativistic. He leaves it open to each society to identify its own way of dividing human life into different spheres. By contrast, Nussbaum’s version of CA follows Aristotle in using an account of human nature to specify spheres of human life. Well-being requires achieving threshold levels of capacities within these spheres.3 Roughly speaking, Sen aims to use CA to measure how well each society meets its own standards, whereas Nussbaum aims to measure how well each society meets objective standards. By ‘CA,’ I shall mean Nussbaum’s version of CA in what follows. Table 13.1 Nussbaum’s Spheres (1) life itself

(5) emotions

(8) other species, the natural environment

(2) bodily health

(6) practical reason

(9) play

(3) bodily integrity, safety

(7A) affiliation: social (10A) the political environment, interaction and rights to political relationships participation

(4) senses, imagination, (7B) affiliation: and thought (roughly respect and theoretical reason) self-respect

III.

(10B) the material environment, property and worker rights

ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS COMPARED WITH THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH

Like several contemporary thinkers, Aristotle distinguishes among three related concepts: (a) a happy life (eudaimōn bios), (b) its central component namely well-being (eudaimonia) which makes the happy life happy, and (c) a state of mind often associated with well-being namely pleasure (hēdonē).4 These are linked but not constantly conjoined.

268 Howard J. Curzer A happy life is not a life in which every aspect is perfect, or even positive. But it contains some (possibly compound) component that, when appropriate background conditions are met, is good enough to make the life happy, overall. This component is well-being. Note that the background conditions are not themselves happiness-making; they merely allow well-being to produce a happy life. When present, they may be taken for granted like the ability to talk, but without these background conditions, even a life containing well-being will not be a happy life. Some people identify well-being with pleasure, other people think wealth constitutes well-being, yet others believe honor to be well-being, and so forth. Aristotle argues that there are two sorts of well-being: contemplation and morally virtuous activity (VA). On Aristotle’s view, a life may contain much pleasure but little well-being, and such a life will probably not be happy. I say ‘probably’ because Aristotle thinks that empirical claims about organisms, including people, are seldom exceptionless. So although almost everyone needs well-being in order to lead a happy life, a few people may lead happy lives without the well-being component. According to Aristotle, virtuous people gain two sorts of pleasure from the successful performance of virtuous acts: a warm glow from having done what they believe to be right, and the characteristic pleasure of the acts (e.g., the yumminess of a moderate amount of cheesecake, the fulfillment of seeing one’s generosity enable someone to flourish). This distinction helps to explain Aristotle’s remark, “It is not the case, then, with all the virtues that the exercise of them is pleasant, except in so far as it reaches its end.”5 I take him to mean that if a virtuous act succeeds, the two pleasures outweigh any pain incurred along the way. The exercise of virtue is pleasant if “it reaches its end.” However, if the act is impeded so that it fails to reach its end (the cheesecake is tasteless, the beneficiary squanders one’s aid), then the characteristic pleasure is replaced by pain, which may outweigh the warm glow. Thus, VA (one sort of well-being) is not always pleasant. To summarize, well-being is usually necessary but not sufficient for a happy life. People may experience net pleasure without well-being or vice versa. Aristotle and Nussbaum agree about many things. Their points of agreement enable them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against most of the other accounts of well-being currently on the table. Both propose collections of several spheres associated with incommensurable values. Well-being is not a single, simple thing like the feeling of pleasure. Thus, Aristotle and Nussbaum stand together against reductionist, hedonistic accounts. Both take their collections of goods and spheres to be objective facts. Well-being is not a subjective thing. Thus, Aristotle and Nussbaum stand together against desire-satisfaction accounts. In particular, both recognize that some people have limited or self-destructive desires, even upon reflection. These people need consciousness-raising and counseling. Thus, Aristotle and Nussbaum stand against freedom-intoxicated libertarians who maintain that any free

Aristotelian Well-Being 269 choice is a good choice, and against rational choice theorists who maintain that persons always know best how to achieve their own well-being. Both use human nature as an organizing architectonic for their collections of spheres. Thus, they reject unsystematic list-accounts of well-being. Both maintain that persons must exercise as well as gain capabilities within each sphere to achieve well-being.6 Well-being is not just having, thinking, or feeling; functioning is also necessary. Thus, Aristotle and Nussbaum stand together against those philosophers and theologians who think that wellbeing is a state of mind, such as inner peace or the right attitude toward God. Both agree that significant luck is necessary for well-being to produce a happy life. Thus, both Aristotle and Nussbaum reject the counterintuitive view that a happy life is available to everyone—that happiness is completely up to us. Despite these points of agreement, Aristotle’s account of well-being differs significantly from CA. First, their lists of spheres are very different. Exactly what Aristotle’s spheres are, and whether Aristotle’s list is supposed to be complete or representative, is controversial. I take Aristotle to be attempting to list the most important spheres but not providing a complete list. Table 13.2 Aristotle’s Spheres and Corresponding Virtues SPHERE

VIRTUE

SPHERE

VIRTUE

physical safety

courage

wit

sensual pleasure

temperance

wealth and monetary goods self-respect

liberality and magnificence proper pride

striving for accomplishment insults and injuries to oneself and one’s friends

appropriate ambition good-temper

humorous put-downs description of oneself to others ideas and proposals of others one’s own wrongdoing scarce goods

truthfulness friendliness shamei general, particular, and poetic justiceii

i Shame (aidōs) is a disposition to feel and act upon painful feelings of repugnance, not only towards past failings, but also contemplated future bad actions. ii The difference between general justice (hole dikaiosune) and particular justice (kata meros dikaiosune) is contested. Poetic justice (nemesis) is the disposition to be pained by undeserved good and bad fortune and pleased by deserved good and bad fortune.

Aristotle’s spheres could be expressed in more fine-grained ways. For example, the sphere of sensual pleasure could be subdivided into spheres of food, drink, sex, and other sensual pleasures. The sphere of wealth and monetary goods could be subdivided into spheres of monetary giving (benevolence),

270 Howard J. Curzer taking (gratitude), spending (proper purchasing), and earning (entrepreneurship), although I take giving to be primary, and the other three activities in this sphere to be performed so that one can give to others properly. Conversely, Aristotle’s list of spheres could be expressed in less fine-grained ways. The sphere of scarce goods is a super-sphere encompassing substantial parts of most of the other spheres. For example, in interpersonal situations of risk, physical safety is a scarce good. One’s actions may be just or unjust, as well as courageous, cowardly, or rash. Retaliation and forgiveness may be just or unjust, as well as irascible, unirascible, or good-tempered. Similarly, a super-sphere of honor might include assessing one’s own worthiness for honor (proper pride), responding to dishonoring insults and injuries (goodtemper), and claiming the honor one deserves (truthfulness). Some manifest virtues seem to be missing from Aristotle’s list, but these are arguably distributed throughout several of Aristotle’s virtues. Rather than listing honesty as a separate virtue, for example, Aristotle takes honesty about safety to be part of courage, honesty about sensual pleasure to be part of temperance, honesty about oneself to be truthfulness, and so forth. There is some agreement between Aristotle’s list of spheres and CA’s list. Three of CA’s spheres—(1) life itself, (2) bodily health, and (3) bodily integrity—constitute aspects of the Aristotelian sphere of physical safety. The CA sphere of (4) sensation, imagination, and thought is split. In one way, sensation constitutes the Aristotelian sphere of sensual pleasure. As intellectual abilities, sensation, imagination, and thought pertain primarily to Aristotle’s contemplative life. To some extent, all of Aristotle’s virtues involve not only (4) sensation, imagination, and thought, but also (5) emotions, and (6) practical reason. Aristotle does not consider these to be spheres but rather abilities used in every sphere. In a different way, all of Aristotle’s spheres involve (7A) social affiliation—particularly humorous put downs, description of oneself to others, and responding to the ideas of others. CA’s sphere of (7B) respect in affiliation includes the Aristotelian spheres of proper pride and good-temper. Aristotle is aware of the importance of (9) play, but he considers it to be a necessary condition of success for every sphere.7 For Aristotle, (8) and (10A&B) some control over one’s natural, political, and material environments are background conditions for the exercise of any capacity. Overall, CA says little with which Aristotle could not agree, but CA’s focus is different. Whereas Aristotle mentions the need for natural endowments, good upbringing, and the goods of fortune (money, health, respect, good-looks, friendships, etc.) without much elaboration, CA describes these necessary conditions in detail. Aristotle considers each of his spheres to involve several abilities, but CA breaks these abilities into separate spheres of (4) senses, imagination, and thought, (5) emotions, (6) practical reason in order to highlight the need for and to facilitate the individual study and measurement of each of these preconditions of functionings. Similarly, CA foregrounds (9) play and (8) (10A&B) control over one’s environments. Sen is less specific than Nussbaum; he leaves it open to different societies to identify alternative sets of spheres. Contrariwise, Aristotle is more specific;

Aristotelian Well-Being 271 he not only specifies spheres, but he also provides thick accounts of the virtues (i.e., descriptions of what counts as getting it right within each sphere). A crucial difference is that CA ignores Aristotle’s claim that one must exercise essential human capabilities appropriately. For Aristotle, in order to achieve well-being, one must not only function, but function well. Aristotle thinks that there are two sorts of well-being (contemplation and VA) because there are two general ways to function well. Aristotle says little about contemplation, so whatever any interpreter says is speculative. But Aristotle says a great deal about VA. VA requires several things. First, one must do the right thing. Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean provides a first approximation of what constitutes appropriate action. VA lies between excessive and deficient action. Now, in principle, the doctrine of the mean, alone, cannot specify which acts and passions are virtuous, for the mean is relative to the facts of each situation, and controversial cases are numerous. In practice, however, the mean can provide significant guidance. Some options are clearly extreme. Donating nothing to others is insufficient for millionaires, retaliating for a minor slight by ‘going postal’ is excessive, and so on. Indeed, much less extreme acts can also be ruled out easily in particular cases. When my wife admonishes me to drink moderately at a party, I know exactly how many glasses of wine she means. Precisely how persons should determine which acts are right is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that a person must use two sorts of practical reasoning to choose right acts in the right way. Proper choosing involves combining a very vague right rule (orthos logos) with one’s perception of each situation in order to determine what to do in that situation. This rule/case practical reasoning is the practical syllogism. One must also act for the right motive. VA requires having the right goals, choosing on the basis of these goals, and acting according to one’s choice. Going through all of the right motions is insufficient; one must choose these acts, choose them because they have a reasonable chance of accomplishing the right goals, and because they are right. This is means/ends practical reasoning. Third, not only one’s choice and actions but also one’s desires and passions must be right. VA includes the right accompanying mental states. People who are tempted by bad desires and passions, and kept in line solely by fear of punishment or hope of reward, are not engaging in VA. Again, the doctrine of the mean provides a rough guide to appropriate passions and desires. Fourth, these right actions, passions, and so forth must not be flukes; they must issue from the right states of character—that is, the virtues. Well-being consists not merely in activity in accordance with virtue, but in activity from virtue. VA is right action guided and motivated by right perception, reason, desire, and passion reliably issuing from a firm character. Listing these components of VA separately may suggest that they are separate; let me inoculate against this misimpression. First, perception, reason, and action are intertwined. Practical reasoning is not disembodied armchair thinking. It is not simply working out the steps necessary to build a bridge. Rather, it is the thinking portion of the activity of bridge building. As Aristotle might

272 Howard J. Curzer say, the thought and the physical motions are separable only in thought. Second, thinking permeates passion and desire. They are not brute urges; rather, they are structured by, and intertwined with, thought. Anger at an insult, for example, requires understanding that, and how, one has been insulted. Aristotle says that VA does not include luck, but it cannot make life happy without the right sort and amount of luck. By ‘luck,’ I include not only natural endowments, good upbringing, and the goods of fortune, but also adequate role models, absence of life-marring moral dilemmas, an environment within which good actions typically pay off for the agent, and a sufficient span of time to render a life happy. These are background conditions. VA can make life happy only if embedded in a life that is not hopelessly ruined by bad luck. To summarize, Aristotle allows two sorts of well-being. Contemplation is theoretical reasoning. VA consists of medial actions within the spheres listed above, thoroughly integrated with appropriate perceptions, reasoning, motives, desires, and passions. Both contemplation and VA require enough luck and enough time. Now there are two excellent reasons why CA does not accept all of Aristotle’s account. The first is that CA was developed for a different reason. Aristotle’s account tells individuals how to live, and how a government committed to making people happy ought to be evaluated. By contrast, CA just describes the conditions for achieving a happy life, and therefore what governments committed to political liberalism should do to facilitate the pursuit of happiness. Political liberalism says that governments should not be in the business of making their people live well because governments should not privilege some thick conceptions of the good over others. Rather, governments should make it possible for people to live well. There are many reasons to accept political liberalism; one important reason is that actions must be freely chosen rather than imposed or indoctrinated in order to yield well-being.8 Life, liberty, and (the ability to undertake) the pursuit of a happy life are the rights a state should guarantee; states should not, and cannot guarantee a happy life. Accepting Aristotle’s spheres, and especially his view that one must act appropriately within each sphere, would violate liberal neutrality. People may experience bad luck, have bad attitudes, or make bad decisions, and (if these are well-defined) this is not the fault of government. Thus, CA is a standard for liberal government action rather than a way of instructing and assessing individuals. Since I too accept political liberalism, my project is not to correct CA as an account of what governments should do. My focus is on the individual. I aim to produce a theory of well-being by combining CA with Aristotle’s value-laden account.9 CA declines to follow Aristotle all of the way for a second reason, too. While Aristotle’s method of investigation of well-being is widely appreciated and appropriated today, contemporary philosophers are unenthusiastic about his results. Perhaps this is because the results commonly attributed to Aristotle are absurd. Contemporary interpreters take Aristotle to claim that with a modicum of money, health, security, and so forth (i) contemplators

Aristotelian Well-Being 273 are the happiest people, (ii) virtuous people are less happy, and (iii) everyone else is unhappy. However, we all know that (i) clear-thinkers and academics pondering at full-throttle often lead wretched lives, (ii) numerous moral saints are also miserable, and (iii) everyone else, including the wicked, can prosper and enjoy life.

IV.

A PLAUSIBLE ARISTOTLE

I maintain that a charitably interpreted Aristotle will provide an account of well-being worth taking seriously. The implausible results attributed to Aristotle by the contemporary interpretations are reasons to reject the contemporary interpretations rather than to reject Aristotle’s account. Of course, whether mine is a correct interpretation of Aristotle is a question of interest primarily to historians of ideas.10 The question germane to this article is whether the view of well-being I attribute to Aristotle yields the correct view of well-being when combined with CA. I shall not endorse all of Aristotle’s claims. For example, Aristotle’s implicit claim that there are only two sorts of happy lives will not be defended. But in this section, I shall flesh out Aristotle’s account in ways that will make it reasonably attractive, and then I respond to the above challenges in the next section. (α) As I mentioned above, Aristotle believes that because of the enormous variation within human life, empirical claims about the actions of people are not universally true. At best they are true ‘for the most part.’11 (β) Contemplation is theoretical rather than practical reasoning, trying to comprehend rather than to accomplish. Beyond that, Aristotle is notoriously vague about what he means by “contemplation” and “the contemplative life,” leaving interpreters a relatively free hand. I suggest that contemplation need not be either successful or professional. People leading the contemplative life must contemplate a lot and enjoy it, but they need not come to the right conclusions, or any conclusions, for that matter. Nor need they earn their living by thinking. Contemplators are thoughtful people, but they are not necessarily clear thinkers or academics. Conversely, some clear thinkers and academics think only when pushed. They are not contemplators. (γ) I take contemplation’s objects to include not only esoteric objects, such as metaphysics and theology, but also the objects of everyday life. Qua contemplators, people can take an interest in, and try to understand mundane things. This allows diffuse intellectual activity to count as contemplation. Concentrating single-mindedly upon God’s nature is a sort of contemplation. But so is vaguely wondering about the flowers. (δ) Virtues are not guarantees of well-being. Some virtuous people are unable to engage in VA. People need physically risky situations in order to perform courageous acts, situations involving sensual pleasure in order to perform temperate acts, a modicum of money to perform liberal acts, and so forth. Even people who engage in VA do not necessarily lead happy lives, for luck is a background condition. As I mentioned above, when VA

274 Howard J. Curzer fails to achieve its goal, it may be overall painful. A parallel, though different point is that if a virtuous life fails to achieve its core goals, it may end up unhappy, not because it lacks sufficient pleasure but just because one of the necessary sorts of luck is sufficient success in achieving one’s core goals in life. (ε) Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean is probably his most famous claim about ethics. It says that each virtue is bracketed by two vices: a vice characterized by habits of excessive passions and actions, and another vice characterized by deficient habits. (ζ) As I interpret him, Aristotle eschews idealization. If perfectionism means that one must never cease striving for perfection, then Aristotle is not a perfectionist. Instead, his view is that to be virtuous one must merely be adequate. C is a passing grade. Once over the good-enough threshold, people need not struggle and sacrifice to engage in more or better VA, for that will not generally make people happier, or more likely to be happy. (η) Although Aristotle claims that people who have one proper virtue have them all, when he talks about virtuous people, he allows that they may be unevenly virtuous.12 A person may have some, though not all of the virtues. For example, “Some who in the dangers of war are cowards are liberal and are confident in face of the loss of money.”13 Unevenly virtuous people act virtuously in some spheres.14 VA is not limited to people with the complete package of virtues.15 V.

CHALLENGES

(i) Many academics and clear thinkers are less happy than many nonacademics and fuzzy thinkers. Because (α) general claims about people are not exceptionless, when Aristotle says that contemplators are the happiest people, he is really claiming that most contemplators lead happier lives than most noncontemplators. Thus, a few miserable contemplators and blissful noncontemplators would not refute him. If there were only a few, further argument would be unnecessary. However, it seems that there are many miserable contemplators and blissful noncontemplators. Lots of fuzzy thinkers and nonacademics are happy. Conversely, it must be admitted that thinking gives many clear thinkers and academics no happiness. But because (β) the class of contemplators and the class of clear thinkers and academics are different, the existence of wretched clear thinkers and academics does not imply that there are wretched contemplators. Aristotle’s claim that people leading the contemplative life are happier than people leading the ethical life would be particularly problematic if Aristotle was urging people to shirk VA so as to increase contemplation. But both Aristotle’s focus on VA and the principle of charity prohibit the attribution of this repugnant recommendation to Aristotle. The mistake is taking ‘contemplation’

Aristotelian Well-Being 275 to mean intense intellectual activity concentrated upon esoteric topics. In a life focused on such activity, the time and energy available for VA would indeed be limited, and hard choices between contemplation and VA would arise. But because (γ) contemplation can also focus on everyday objects, and thus accompany VA, Aristotle is not urging people to reduce their VA in order to increase their contemplation. He is free to define the contemplative life as just a particularly reflective version of the ethical life. Aristotle’s thesis that contemplators are happier than ethical noncontemplators turns out to be the thesis that thoughtful, ethical people are happier than thoughtless, ethical people. Contemplative and ethical people perform the same acts stemming from the same appropriate passions, desires, and practical reasoning. The difference is that contemplative people contemplate while engaging in VA, and also in their spare time, because trying to understand things is what makes them happy.16 They act well, but their well-being (the activity which makes their lives happy) is contemplating the world. By contrast, ethical people do the same things without much theoretical reasoning.17 Their well-being is VA itself. What makes their lives happy is changing the world. Many contemplators lead unhappy lives. Many noncontemplators lead happy lives. Unhappy contemplators and happy noncontemplators seem to be counterexamples to Aristotle’s account. Since Aristotelian contemplators are morally virtuous people on my interpretation, the rebuttal of these challenges will be accomplished in the next two subsections.

(ii) Many moral saints lead unhappy lives. Because (δ) certain sorts and amounts of luck are background conditions for a happy life, unlucky, virtuous people leading miserable lives do not disprove Aristotle’s claim. Moreover as before, (α) since Aristotle denies that general claims about people are universal, even a few lucky, miserable, virtuous people would not refute him. However, it seems that there are more than a few lucky, yet unhappy moral saints. Worse yet, it seems that saintly acts are not conducive to well-being. I shall address these objections through illustrative cases. Haybron takes Aristotle to be a sort of perfectionist. He attributes to Aristotle the view that leading a virtuous life consists in trying to approximate an ideal person. Haybron objects that striving to perfect themselves leads people to act in ways that reduce their own happiness. He offers two detailed examples. Angela postpones a longed-for, relaxed retirement in order to perform a stressful, high-level diplomatic task that saves many lives. Frank adopts an autistic child with cerebral palsy who is difficult and not particularly rewarding. Both Angela and Frank seem to constitute counterexamples to the thesis that VA is well-being, for their choice to lead

276 Howard J. Curzer exceptionally virtuous lives reduces the happiness of their lives.18 Swanton also offers seeming counterexamples. An aid-worker in a jungle helps many people but ruins her health and dies prematurely without compensating psychological benefits. A bipolar artist struggles and fails to achieve recognition for her art, eventually committing suicide. An activist struggles and fails to raise the public’s awareness of an impending environmental disaster, eventually dying in despair.19 All three seem to be instances of VA making lives less happy. None of these cases actually constitute counterexamples to Aristotle’s account of well-being. To begin with the easiest case, no matter how integral it is to her art, the mental illness that drives Swanton’s artist to suicide is no Aristotelian virtue. Unhappy, virtuous people such as Swanton’s activist who fail to accomplish their goal in life are not counterexamples to Aristotle’s account because (δ) luck in accomplishment is a background condition. Finally, Swanton’s aid-worker may be widely admired, but that does not mean that her acts are virtuous according to Aristotle. He is not a cultural relativist. More fundamentally, to evaluate the aid worker case (and perhaps the artist and activist cases, too) we must distinguish moral saints from Aristotelian virtuous people, just as it was earlier necessary to distinguish academics from Aristotelian contemplators. The term ‘moral saints’ commonly refers to people who perform prodigiously good acts, people who are extremely self-sacrificing, extremely humble, or extremely forgiving, and so forth. Contemporary culture may extol such people, but (ε) Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean implies that they are vicious (or even mentally ill) rather than virtuous. The aid-worker may be a moral saint, but she is not an Aristotelian virtuous person, so her unhappiness is not evidence against Aristotle’s claims. Furthermore, because (ζ) virtue is a threshold concept for Aristotle, if Angela and Frank were already virtuous, it was not Aristotelian virtues that led them to make choices that reduced their well-being. Acts that take people beyond the good-enough-for-virtue threshold are supererogatory (unless they take people beyond moderation, in which case they are vicious). Such acts may make people such as Angela and Frank unhappy, but they pose no threat to Aristotle’s claim.

(iii) Many people who are not moral saints lead happy lives. Like the previous challenges, this one is based upon a misconception about virtuous people. Once again, (α) a few happy nonmoral saints do not refute Aristotle.20 Moreover, if ‘moral saint’ refers to an all-around virtuous person with perfect character traits, then Aristotle’s claim is not restricted to moral saints. Because (ζ) Aristotle considers virtue to be a threshold concept, an imperfect disposition may nevertheless be a virtue. A person with all of the virtues may have numerous character flaws. Moreover, (η) people with only some of the virtues can engage in VA. Thus, many people who are not moral

Aristotelian Well-Being 277 saints (because some of their virtues are imperfect and/or they have only some of the virtues) are virtuous people. Such people may lead happy lives without constituting counterexamples to Aristotle’s view. Overall, Aristotle’s claim that contemplation and VA are the only sorts of well-being does not limit the happy life to a tiny group of people. Many people, though not all academics and clear-thinkers, contemplate. Many people, though not all moral saints, engage in VA. But luck is a background condition typically necessary for well-being to yield a happy life. Thus, neither the misery of some academics and moral saints nor the delight of some sinners and unsophisticated musers constitute counterexamples to Aristotle’s account of well-being.

VI.

SYNTHESIS

CA might be combined with Aristotle’s ethics in various ways. I shall call the following combination a Synthesis of the Capabilities Approach and Aristotle’s Ethics (SCAARE). It has two branches: spheres and ladders. According to SCAARE, the spheres of human life include (A) physical safety (particularly risks to life, bodily health, and bodily integrity), (B) sensual pleasure (particularly food, drink, and sex), (C) wealth and monetary goods (particularly giving to others), (D) accomplishment, (E) respect (including Aristotle’s spheres of self-respect, insults and injuries, and description of oneself to others), (F) affiliation (including Aristotle’s spheres of humorous put downs and responding to the ideas of others), (G) one’s own wrongdoing, (H) scarce goods, and (I) play. According to SCAARE, a person’s level of well-being depends upon six steps within each sphere. People must develop sufficient (a) internal capabilities and (b) combined capabilities, and (c) exercise these capabilities sufficiently. Additionally, (d) they must choose their actions well—that is, in the right way and for the right motive. They must also (e) exercise their combined capabilities well. That is, they must not only choose but also perform good actions. Finally, (f) they must desire and feel well. Their desires and passions must be sufficiently good. Well-being is a function of one’s level and duration of VA. These can be understood as steps on a moral development ladder. The internal capabilities are innate prerequisites that have been developed through nurturing. Gaining the combined capabilities means that a person has had sufficient luck to get to the point of being able to function, to have agency. A person may then function without any views about what is right, or with vague, incoherent, or false views. That is, a functioning person might be confused or vicious. Thus, the move to incontinence may be an advance, since the incontinent have a reasonable grasp of right and wrong. People who advance to the point of functioning well through right reasoning despite wrong passions and desires are continent. People who act rightly through right reasoning and right passions and desires are engaging in VA. If VA persists long enough, and in enough spheres, then this is well-being, and the people are virtuous.21 Thus, well-being consists in filling enough columns in the following chart.

LADDER

confusion or vice

agency

(c) functioning (acting)

(b) combined capabilities

(a) internal capabilities

incontinence

(d) reasoning well

(e) functioning continence (acting) well

(A) physical safety

(B) sensual pleasure

Well-Being According to SCAARE

(f) feeling and virtue desiring well

Table 13.3

(C) wealth

(D) accomplishment

(E) respect

SPHERES (F) affiliation

(G) wrongdoing

(H) scarce goods

(I) play

Aristotelian Well-Being 279 Now that I have sketched SCAARE, let me situate it with respect to its competitors. Contemporary social science researchers investigating wellbeing generally divide into two camps. Researchers in the hedonia camp take well-being to consist of life-satisfaction, positive mood, and absence of negative mood.22 This combination is called subjective well-being (SWB). Researchers in the eudaimonia camp reject the claim that what makes a person happy is how he or she feels, regardless of whether and how that feeling is grounded in reality. Many of these researchers accept that SWB is a component of well-being but maintain that there are other components.23 Among researchers in the eudaimonia camp, there is no consensus on the components of well-being. Proposals include various combinations of SWB, autonomy, competence, relatedness to others, self-respect, self-realization, vitality, and meaningfulness.24 SCAARE falls in the eudaimonia camp. It differs from other accounts in that camp by being considerably closer to Aristotle, and by denying that SWB is a major part of well-being. SWB is obviously a major part of a happy life; how could it not be a major part of well-being? Haybron accuses Aristotle of not fitting pleasure and other positive psychological states appropriately into his account of well-being.25 But Haybron conflates causal role and importance. The pleasure a virtuous person takes in performing virtuous acts (both the warm glow and the characteristic pleasure) is a substantial part of the happy life, but it is not what makes the life happy. Rather, it is a bonus—icing on the cake of happiness. It makes life happier, and it is a consequence of VA, which is what makes the life happy. Similarly, SCAARE acknowledges that SWB enhances happiness, but denies that SWB plays a central role in making the happy life happy. SWB is primarily a product rather than a component of well-being.26 Is SCAARE correct? A thorough argument for SCAARE will presumably appeal to both common sense and social science. However, both appeals have their problems, and other caveats must also be mentioned. First, common sense is notoriously confused about well-being and the happy life. Second, the results of available research are suggestive rather than conclusive. At best, they show that VA is conducive to things that are, in turn, conducive to a happy life. Third, as I have sketched it, SCAARE makes crucial use of vague terms such as ‘enough.’ Fourth, people are poor at assessing their own level of well-being.27 Fifth, increasing some components of well-being may decrease other components and thus cause a net decrease in a person’s wellbeing. In particular, because of complicated interactions among the capabilities and functionings of different spheres, a person’s overall well-being may decrease when his or her capabilities and/or functionings within a sphere have increased. A gain in one sphere may cause a loss in several others. Sixth, seriously damaged and/or disadvantaged people may be harmed by VA and benefited by nonvirtuous activities.28 Well-being is defined as the central element of the happy life, the element that makes the happy life happy. So an argument for SCAARE must show

280 Howard J. Curzer that VA is what makes a person’s life happy. This claim consists of forty-six subclaims: Each step up the ladder in each sphere contributes to the happiness of most people’s lives (9 x 5 = 45 claims), plus the claim that gaining the sixth level in several spheres generally suffices for producing a happy life. I am not going to be able to argue for all of this, so this paper will be partially programmatic. But I can make a start. Suppose for a moment that (e) acting well contributes to a happy life in each sphere. I begin with the easiest case. The CA literature and common sense agree that gaining the internal and combined capabilities and exercising them makes people happier. Moving up to agency—from level (a) to level (b)— clearly removes barriers to leading a happy life, as does moving from level (b) to level (c). Is a person who has the right principles and motives but does not act upon them happier than a person who lacks these principles and motives? The former person is closer to virtue, and therefore more likely to lead a happy life eventually, but is also more beset with guilt and has a lower level of selfesteem. It is not obvious that moving from confusion or vice to incontinence— from level (c) to level (d)—improves one’s happiness. Consider three sorts of people who lack the right principles and motives. (i) Some frequently and forthrightly act upon the wrong principles and motives. These people are obviously vicious. They lie when convenient, throw tantrums when crossed, steal when they can get away with it, and so forth. Assuming that (e) acting well contributes to a happy life, it follows that these people are worsening their lives. (ii) Others are phonies. They try to appear virtuous and often do the right thing, but they act wrongly at crucial points. For example, Joe pretends to be his roommate’s friend, but seduces his roommate’s fiancé and moves out without paying his share of the bills when the opportunities arise. Tentatively, I suggest that such people also worsen their lives because over time others will recognize them as fakers and because living a lie will create cognitive dissonance. (iii) Finally, some people engage in self-deception; they think that they accept the right principles, but they actually accept and act upon the wrong ones. For example, Jane sincerely believes that she is her roommate’s friend, but will betray her roommate and then rationalize if an opportunity arises. Such people are hard to recognize, and they avoid cognitive dissonance. I cannot show that moving from this state of character to incontinence improves one’s happiness. Continent and incontinent people agree about what they should do. Continent people force themselves to do it and gain the pleasure of pride; incontinent people fail and feel the pain of guilt and loss of self-esteem.29 Moreover, continent people achieve their core goals, but incontinent people repeatedly fail. This is an important difference because the achievement of one’s core goals is a necessary condition of happiness. Thus, moving from incontinence to continence—from level (d) to level (e)—brings one closer to a happy life. The lives of continent people are close to happy, for they have the right principles and do the right things. But unlike virtuous people, the passions

Aristotelian Well-Being 281 and desires of continent people are out of line. Continent people are conflicted—at war with themselves. Conflict within one’s psyche obviously detracts from the happiness of one’s life, for struggling against one’s passions and desires is painful. Thus, virtuous people lead a happier life than continent people, other things equal. Moving from level (e) to level (f) by bringing one’s passions and desires into line with one’s reasons and actions constitutes progress toward a happy life. The remaining task is to show that my initial supposition is true—that (e) good functioning contributes to the happy life.30 Recall that good functioning has been defined as acting moderately. There is a lot of evidence that helping others, expressing gratitude, listening open-mindedly, and so forth increase SWB when performed in moderation.31 It follows that performing these activities minimally rather than moderately is less conducive to leading a happy life. What remains to be shown is that performing these activities in moderation is more conducive to leading a happy life than taking them to excess. Consider the individual components of this task. (A) Courageous acts (i.e., taking physical risks when they are worth taking) seem generally to be conducive to leading a happy life. People who take risks even when they are not worth taking obviously compromise their life and/or health, so being less concerned with safety than a courageous person is not conducive to leading a happy life. But what about people who decline to take risks worth taking? On the one hand, they miss out on opportunities, but on the other hand, they gain extra safety. It is unclear whether people who are extremely concerned with safety are happier or less happy than people who take moderate risks. (B) Suppose intemperate acts are defined as unhealthy enjoyment of sensual pleasures. Moderate enjoyment will be conducive to a healthy and happy life and deficient enjoyment less conducive.32 However, it is not obvious what to say about extreme enjoyment of these things. Does extra pleasure compensate for risk or degradation of health? Is sex while driving at highway speeds worth the elevated risk of accident, for example? (C) Suppose economic generosity consists in helping deserving others when doing so would not be much trouble, risk, or cost. So defined, generosity significantly increases the health and happiness of the donor.33 Stinginess is worse than moderate giving. But is excessive giving worse? Are people who give to both the deserving and undeserving, and/or who help others at great trouble, risk, or cost to themselves less happy than people who give moderately? Can one be generous to a fault? (D) Striving to actualize one’s potential is conducive to leading a happy life.34 Not striving is clearly worse. But is there such a thing as striving too much? Can one be too ambitious for one’s own good? (E) Clearly, one must get past injuries and insults by forgiving some people. Not forgiving sincerely repentant, moderate wrongdoers allows resentment to fester.35 But is extreme forgiving (forgiving unapologetic wrongdoers or atrocity-committers, for example) less conducive to leading a happy life than moderate forgiveness? (F) Nothing predicts a happy life better than having a network of relatives, friends, and acquaintances.36 To make and keep such

282 Howard J. Curzer a network, one must be personable. In particular, one cannot respond negatively to all of the ideas and projects of others. But is there such a thing as too compliant? (G) Similarly, one must be fair; in particular, one must be reasonably good about giving others their due. But is there such a thing as too scrupulous? (H) Shame is a motivator that keeps one morally on track. If good functioning in the other spheres is conducive to leading a happy life, then shame will be, too. (I) Since positive and negative affect are independent variables,37 it should come as no surprise that well-being is not obtained merely by reducing the number of depressing things in a person’s life. People must also play. Playfulness in adults is positively associated with several indicators of a happy life, so playfulness in moderation is better than having too little fun. But is extreme playfulness (i.e., playing so much that it prevents the performance of other VA) less conducive to leading a happy life? Or is it sometimes better to sacrifice other VA in order to increase play? Overall, what remains to be done is to show that moderation pays better than excess. Are the Aristotelian virtues of courage, temperance, and so forth more conducive to a happy life than being extremely daring, sensual, generous, ambitious, forgiving, compliant, self-sacrificing, humble, and playful?

VII.

CONCLUSION

Although CA is a respected, up-and-running Aristotelian research program, it is not a full account of well-being. CA proposes a list of spheres partially based upon human nature, and maintains that well-being requires the development of internal and combined capabilities. Aristotle does this too, although his spheres are somewhat different, and his account of the capacities and luck is much less developed. But he goes further. He maintains that exercising these capabilities well enough is well-being. His account of wellbeing is complex and contested, but can be rendered plausible. Combining CA’s list of spheres with Aristotle’s list and CA’s preconditions of well-being with Aristotle’s account of well-being yields a fleshed-out account of wellbeing—namely SCAARE. SCAARE is compatible with common sense and partially supported by contemporary social science research.38 NOTES 1. For a very readable summary of CA plus a list of recent works by Sen, Nussbaum, and others concerning CA, see Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2. For example, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress [Sarkozy Commission Report], 2009, www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/ documents/rapport_anglais.pdf.

Aristotelian Well-Being 283 3. Nussbaum, Capabilities, 33–34. 4. Eudaimonia is typically translated ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing,’ but contemporary thinkers use ‘happiness’ in various ways, and ‘flourishing’ not at all. For example, Haybron uses the term ‘happiness’ to refer to a psychological entity, a mental state, and he uses the term ‘well-being’ to refer to what is ultimately good for a person, what makes a person’s life go well; Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5–6, 29–30. I shall use the term ‘well-being’ in order to better mesh with the current discussions. 5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, trans. David Ross., ed. Jonathan Barnes, 1729–1867 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1117b15–16. 6. For lists of recent accounts of these sorts, see Haybron, Unhappiness, 287 n.15, n.16, n.23. 7. Aristotle, 1176b27–1177a1. 8. C. Peterson, “Personal Control and Well-Being,” in Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz (New York: Russell Sage, 1999), 288–301; R. M. Ryan and E. L. Deci, “On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being,” Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 141–166. 9. NGOs unconstrained by political liberalism might also find my theory of well-being to be useful. 10. I argue for most bits of this interpretation of Aristotle in Howard Curzer, Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 11. Aristotle, 1094b11–27. 12. Ibid., 1144b31–1145a2. 13. Ibid., 1115a20–22. 14. Unlike most interpreters, I do not take unevenly virtuous people to have mere innate tendencies to engage in VA and to be prone to frequent moral blunders. Rather, these people are courageous alcoholics, temperate curmudgeons, fair but ungenerous people, and so forth. In a word, they are us— people with incomplete sets of adequate, though imperfect virtues. 15. The virtues are interdependent in some ways. To be a virtuous person one must have ‘enough’ virtues. One must have the right values, passions, and so forth about enough things. 16. The goal of the contemplative life is contemplation, not the results of good contemplation. 17. They must do some theoretical reasoning, of course, but it is a means rather than an end for them. 18. Haybron, Unhappiness, 161–164. 19. Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 81–83. 20. For an argument that happy immoralists are rare, see N. Snow, “Virtue and Flourishing,” Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (2008): 225–245. 21. Alternative paths exist. One might skip (d) and arrive at (e), for example. People may function well despite bad reasoning by just following orders by rote, or through right passions and desires; see Jonathan Bennett, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Philosophy 49 (1974): 123–134. 22. D. Kahneman, “Objective Happiness,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwartz, Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, 3–25. 23. V. Huta and R. M. Ryan, “Pursuing Pleasure or Virtue: The Differential and Overlapping Well-Being Benefits of Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motives,” Journal of Happiness Studies 11 (2010): 735–762; Ryan and Deci, “On Happiness”; M. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive

284 Howard J. Curzer

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (New York: Free Press, 2002); A. S. Waterman, S. J. Schwartz, and R. Conti, “The Implications of Two Conceptions of Happiness (Hedonic Enjoyment and Eudaimonia) for the Understanding of Intrinsic Motivation,” Journal of Happiness Studies 9 (2008): 41–798. Haybron, Unhappiness; I. McGregor and B. R. Little, “Personal Projects, Happiness, and Meaning: On Doing Well and Being Yourself,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 494–512; Ryan and Deci, “Self Determination”; C. D. Ryff and B. Singer, “The Contours of Positive Human Health,” Psychological Inquiry 9 (1998): 1–28; Seligman, Authentic Happiness. Haybron, Unhappiness, 165–168. Of course, since SWB is part of the happy life, increasing it is automatically conducive to leading a happy life. My claim is that it does not forward the happy life in some further way. Haybron, Unhappiness, 199–224. L. Tessman, Burdened Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). E. Deci and R. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (New York: Plenum, 1985). See Snow, “Virtue and Flourishing,” for an alternative approach to this task. Martin Seligman et al., “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions,” American Psychologist 60 (2005): 410–421; M. F. Steger et al., “Being Good by Doing Good: Daily Eudaimonic Activity and WellBeing,” Journal of Research in Personality 42 (2008): 22–42. M. Marmot, Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health and Life Expectancy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004), 255. S. G. Post, Altruism and Health: Perspective from Empirical Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). In general, people who pursue wealth rather than close or extended friendships have lower SWB; see T. Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Huta and Ryan, “Pleasure.” L. L. Toussaint and J. R. Webb, “Theoretical and Empirical Connections between Forgiveness, Mental Health, and Well-Being,” in Handbook of Forgiveness, ed. E. L. Worthington, 349–362 (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2005). M. Argyle, The Psychology of Happiness, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 2001); H. T. Reis, “Relationship Experiences and Emotional Well-Being,” in Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health. Series in Affective Science, ed. C. D. Ryff and B. H. Burton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57–86. J. T. Cacioppo and G. G. Berntson, “The Affect System: Architecture and Operating Characteristics,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 8 (1999): 133–137; R. E. Lucas et al., “Discriminant Validity of WellBeing Measures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1996): 132–140. I am indebted to Anne Epstein, Benjamin Huff, and Franco V. Trivigno for many helpful suggestions.

REFERENCES Argyle, M. The Psychology of Happiness, 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 2001. Bennett, Jonathan. “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.” Philosophy 49 (1974): 123–134.

Aristotelian Well-Being 285 Cacioppo, J. T. and G. G. Berntson. “The Affect System: Architecture and Operating Characteristics.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 8 (1999): 133–137. Curzer, Howard. Aristotle and the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Deci, E. and R. Ryan. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. New York: Plenum, 1985. Haybron, Daniel. The Pursuit of Unhappiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Huta, V. and R. M. Ryan. “Pursuing Pleasure or Virtue: The Differential and Overlapping Well- Being Benefits of Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motives.” Journal of Happiness Studies 11 (2010): 735–762. Kahneman, D. “Objective Happiness.” In Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz, 3–25. New York: Russell Sage, 1999. Kasser, T. The High Price of Materialism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Lucas, R. E., E. Diener, and E. Suh. “Discriminant Validity of Well-Being Measures.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1996): 132–140. Marmot, M. Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health and Life Expectancy. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004. McGregor, I. and B. R. Little. “Personal Projects, Happiness, and Meaning: On Doing Well and Being Yourself.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 494–512. Myers, D. G. “Close Relationships and Quality of Life.” In Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz, 374–391. New York: Russell Sage, 1999. Nussbaum, Martha. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Peterson, C. “Personal Control and Well-Being.” In Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz, 288–301. New York: Russell Sage, 1999. Post, S. G. Altruism and Health: Perspectives from Empirical Research. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Reis, H. T. “Relationship Experiences and Emotional Well-Being.” In Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health. Series in Affective Science, edited by C. D. Ryff and B. H. Burton, 57–86. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Ryan, R. M. and E. L. Deci. “On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being,” Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 141–166. Ryan, R. M. and E. L. Deci. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being.” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 68–78. Ryff, C. D. and B. Singer. “The Contours of Positive Human Health.” Psychological Inquiry 9 (1998):1–28. Seligman, Martin. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press, 2002. Seligman, Martin, T. A. Steen, N. Park, and C. Peterson. “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions.” American Psychologist 60 (2005): 410–421. Snow, N. “Virtue and Flourishing.” Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (2008): 225–245. Steger, M. F., T. B. Kashdan, and S. Oishi. “Being Good by Doing Good: Daily Eudaimonic Activity and Well-Being.” Journal of Research in Personality 42 (2008): 22–42. Stiglitz, Joseph, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. [Sarkozy Commission Report], 2009. www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais. pdf.

286 Howard J. Curzer Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Tessman, L. Burdened Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Toussaint, L. L. and J. R. Webb. “Theoretical and Empirical Connections between Forgiveness, Mental Health, and Well-Being.” In Handbook of Forgiveness, edited by E. L. Worthington, 349–362. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2005. Waterman, A. S., S. J. Schwartz, and R. Conti. “The Implications of Two Conceptions of Happiness (Hedonic Enjoyment and Eudaimonia) for the Understanding of Intrinsic Motivation.” Journal of Happiness Studies 9 (2008): 41–79.

14 A Virtuous Cycle The Relationship between Happiness and Virtue Pelin Kesebir and Ed Diener

What constitutes a good, worthwhile, fulfilling life? How should one live? What kind of a person should one be? From Lao Tzu to Aristotle, from Dostoyevsky to Bertrand Russell, philosophers ancient and modern attempted their own answers to these oldest and most enduring of philosophical questions. Frequently figuring in the discussions on the highest, best possible life were the concepts of ‘happiness’ and ‘virtue.’ Notwithstanding inevitable differences in terminology, many great minds posited that the road to a happy, thriving, worth-of-living life is paved with virtues. Aristotle, for instance, believed that happiness (eudaemonia) is within the reach of anyone willing to lead a virtuous life.1 To Roman Stoic Cicero, the affinity between happiness and virtue was so strong that a man in possession of virtue could be happy even while being tortured.2 More recently, Rosalind Hursthouse argued that possessing virtue does not necessarily result in happiness, as luck plays an undeniable role in human affairs, yet it is the only reliable bet for a happy, flourishing life—just as adopting a healthy lifestyle is the best bet for being healthy, even though it does not guarantee perfect health or longevity.3 Is there any merit to these claims? Does possessing and exercising virtue indeed lead to happiness? The current chapter endeavors to shed light on these questions by reviewing the burgeoning empirical literature on the relationship between virtues and happiness. In line with the philosophical thinking on the topic, our review reveals virtue and happiness to be closely associated. It furthermore appears that happiness and virtue are bidirectionally related—with virtue leading to happiness and happiness leading to virtue, in a ‘virtuous cycle.’ Before delving into the nuances of this relationship, let us clarify what we understand from happiness and from virtue.

I.

HAPPINESS

“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure,” noted William James more than a century ago.4 Happiness certainly seems to be one of the chief concerns of living—both folk notions and

288 P. Kesebir and E. Diener philosophical characterizations of the best possible life consistently feature happiness as an essential component.5 Whereas the history of the idea of happiness spans millennia, its scientific treatment is much more recent. The science of happiness, starting in the mid1970s, flourished under the umbrella term of subjective well-being (SWB).6 SWB refers to people’s evaluation of their lives and incorporates both cognitive and affective elements. These elements include life satisfaction (global judgments of one’s life), satisfaction with important life domains (satisfaction with one’s work, health, relationships, etc.), positive affect (prevalence of positive emotions and moods), and low levels of negative affect (prevalence of unpleasant emotions and moods). SWB emphasizes the subjective nature of happiness and holds human beings to be the best judges of their own happiness. This differs from the more prescriptive conceptualizations of happiness, such as Ryff and Singer’s7 construct of psychological wellbeing and Ryan and Deci’s8 self-determination theory. These approaches, more in the eudaemonist tradition of the classical era, specify certain needs (such as relatedness, self-acceptance, and meaning and purpose in life) as imperative to human well-being. We should note that most of the studies conducted on happiness, as well as most of the studies we report in our chapter, conceive of happiness not in the prescriptive, eudaimonic sense—representing a value judgment about whether someone is leading a commendable life—but rather in the sense of subjective well-being. High subjective well-being and eudaimonic happiness are clearly not interchangeable concepts. However, many philosophers and psychologists agree that the two concepts are sufficiently close, and subjective well-being can reasonably be used as a proxy for eudaimonic well-being.9 Specifically, evidence suggests that SWB and eudaimonic wellbeing overlap both conceptually and empirically. Eudaimonic variables (e.g., meaning, purpose, quality relationships) are strong predictors of subjective well-being, and as we will see, people experience high levels of happiness when engaging in eudaimonic, virtuous activities. Overall, it looks like eudaimonic pursuits are associated not with a qualitatively different, ‘better’ form of happiness but simply higher levels of happiness.10 Recent decades have witnessed substantial progress in identifying the concomitants and causes of happiness. Accordingly, a person’s happiness level is determined by three major factors: (1) a genetically determined set point for happiness, (2) life circumstances (e.g., age, gender, education, culture), and (3) factors under one’s voluntary control, such as the activities and practices one chooses to engage in.11 After surveying the literature, Lyubomirsky and colleagues concluded that among these components, the genetically determined set point explains about 50% of variation in happiness, whereas life circumstances account for only 10%, and intentional activities are responsible for the remaining 40%.12 This picture suggests significant, even if not unlimited, room for increasing one’s happiness. Could acting virtuously be one of the ways in which to accomplish this?

A Virtuous Cycle 289 II.

VIRTUES AND HAPPINESS

Virtues are powerful psychological resources that help people to deal with and transcend the limitations inherent in the human condition. They are our noble attributes that provide resilience in the face of adversity and enable us to thrive and achieve the ‘good life.’13 Virtues are essential to optimal functioning in intrapersonal and interpersonal domains. As a result, people and societies that lack virtues do not fare well. Philosopher Philippa Foot, for instance, observes that nobody can get on well without courage or without some measure of temperance and that communities where justice and charity are lacking, such as Russia under the Stalinist terror or Sicily under the Mafia, are wretched places to live.14 Virtues, almost by definition, are considered to serve their possessors well, particularly when life is showing its dark face. Yet, do they go as far as fostering happiness? Is virtue “the foundation of happiness” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter? Are virtue and happiness “mother and daughter” as Benjamin Franklin believed?15 Is there “an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness” as George Washington proposed in his first inaugural address?16 Setting aside for a moment the question of whether a connection actually exists between happiness and virtue, let us note that people by and large would like it to. The potency of the desire to perceive the world as a just place is well established.17 We fervently want to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get, that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Wishing to see virtue rewarded with happiness and vice punished with unhappiness is a natural outcome of this understandable human tendency. Virtue is considered to lead to happiness not only in folk perceptions, but philosophers who pondered the topic also arrived at comparable conclusions. Aristotle, for example, saw happiness (eudemonia) as the result of cultivating one’s virtues and living in accordance with them.18 Even Epicurus, whose name has come to be associated with sensuous hedonism, believed in the interdependence of virtue and pleasure and the importance of practical wisdom (phronesis) as a determinant of happiness.19 Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages also associated virtue with happiness, albeit in a slightly different fashion: Earthly happiness, although fallible, was attainable by the devotedly faithful through the grace of God. More importantly, however, the same devoted faith was the key to the Kingdom of Heaven with its complete and eternal happiness.20 In the modern era, classical and medieval notions of happiness as closely related to ‘virtue’ have largely waned, and people have come to think of happiness “more as feeling good than being good.”21 The history of the virtue-as-a-purveyorof-happiness idea is clearly more complicated and nuanced than the story told here. Yet, this brief summary bridges the past and the present and reminds us that the roots of the psychological research to be presented in this chapter lie deep in history.

290 P. Kesebir and E. Diener III.

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH LINKING VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS

The study of virtues in psychology has undergone an awakening in the last fifteen years, encouraged by the positive psychology movement. Positive psychology was inaugurated with the overarching goal of articulating a vision of the good life, using scientific methodology to study positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions.22 Developing a better understanding of human strengths and virtues was considered to be of central importance to the mission of positive psychology from the outset.23 Not only did research on several previously underexplored virtues— such as gratitude, humility, forgiveness, wisdom, and hope—boom during this time, but a comprehensive classification of human strengths and virtues has also been created that further stimulated the research on the topic.24 This work, called the Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Character Strengths, specified six fundamental virtues that were endorsed virtually by every culture: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.25 Under each virtue, particular strengths were identified, such as persistence and integrity under courage or humility and self-control under temperance, culminating in twenty-four measurable character strengths. As we will see, research exploring the links between virtue and happiness in recent years has employed and benefited greatly from this taxonomy. The existing body of research on virtues and well-being can be roughly grouped into two categories: In one is research on how virtues prevent unhappiness and in the other on how virtues can promote happiness. The former has investigated the role of virtues in preventing undesirable life outcomes, providing resilience in the face of life challenges, and buffering psychopathology. The latter, on the other hand, highlighted how virtues are associated with positive life outcomes and help people to thrive. Next, we review these (inevitably interrelated) sets of findings, focusing predominantly on how virtues promote happiness and desirable outcomes.

Virtue Prevents Unhappiness and Undesirable Life Outcomes Character strengths such as courage, future-mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skills, work ethic, hope, and perseverance have been shown to have a buffering effect against unwanted outcomes like substance abuse, violence, mental illness, and suicide.26 Empirical support for these claims oftentimes comes from character education programs that teach young people about topics like moral reasoning, social skills, responsibility, spiritual growth, civic values, and conflict resolution.27 Other cross-sectional and longitudinal studies yield similar conclusions. For example, a three-year follow-up study with university students identified at risk for depression showed that, compared to a control group, those who were trained in optimism (i.e., trained

A Virtuous Cycle 291 in identifying automatic negative thoughts, marshalling evidence to question and dispute them, and replacing them with more constructive interpretations) reported lower levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, hopelessness, and dysfunctional attitudes.28 Another longitudinal study revealed that a combination of high gratitude and high grit at baseline predicted a near absence of suicidal ideation over time in a group of college students.29 In a cross-sectional study, Park and Peterson documented that teenagers high in the strengths of hope, zest, and leadership displayed significantly fewer internalizing problems (e.g., social withdrawal, depression), whereas teenagers high in persistence, authenticity, prudence, and love displayed fewer externalizing problems (e.g., aggressive, destructive behavior).30 Taken together, these findings illustrate that virtues can help shield people from misery and attest to the powerful role they play in determining life outcomes. Not being unhappy is not identical to being happy, however. Can virtue effectively foster happiness too?

Virtue Promotes Happiness and Desirable Life Outcomes In this section, we present a plethora of research exploring the link between virtue and happiness. The reader will notice that, as rare as it is, our review tells a very consistent story: Virtue is good for happiness. The first line of evidence for this assertion comes from studies showing that ‘doing good’ is associated with ‘feeling good’: It turns out that people are happier when they are engaged with activities and goals that carry eudaimonic rather than sheer hedonistic value.31 For example, Steger, Kashdan, and Oishi found using the daily diary method that engaging in eudaimonic behaviors (e.g., expressing gratitude, volunteering one’s time, persevering at a valued goal even in the face of obstacles) was associated with significantly higher subjective wellbeing than engaging in hedonic behaviors (e.g., getting drunk, having sex with someone one doesn’t love, obtaining material goods).32 The more participants reported engaging in eudaimonic behaviors, the higher was their life satisfaction, positive affect, and meaning in life. No such relationship was observed for hedonic behaviors. Remarkably, daily eudaimonic (but not daily hedonic) behaviors predicted higher life satisfaction and higher meaning in life the following day, illustrating their causal role in promoting well-being. Further support for the positive impact of doing good on subjective wellbeing comes from studies examining how the content of one’s goals relates to happiness. Pursuing goals that can be described as virtuous, eudaimonic, or self-transcending has consistently been linked to higher well-being than pursuing hedonic or egoistical goals. For example, Emmons reports that, in both community and college student samples, certain types of personal strivings are associated with higher subjective well-being than others.33 Specifically, the presence of intimacy strivings (e.g., ‘help my friends and let them know I care,’ ‘accept others as they are’), generativity strivings (e.g., ‘be a good role model for my siblings,’ ‘feel useful to society’), and spirituality strivings

292 P. Kesebir and E. Diener (e.g., ‘learn to tune into higher power throughout the day,’ ‘appreciate God’s creations’) predicted greater subjective well-being, whereas power strivings (e.g., ‘be the best when with a group of people,’ ‘get others to see my point of view’) predicted lower well-being. Headey, similarly, found that endorsing family-oriented and altruistic life goals, such as commitment to family and friendships, helping others, and being socially and politically involved predicted higher life satisfaction cross-sectionally and over time.34 In contrast, commitment to competitive goals related to wealth and consumption was associated with lower life satisfaction. The picture emerging from these studies is that virtuous, self-transcending priorities in life foster happiness. Apparently, happiness follows more from the engagement of our better, higher selves than from hedonistic or otherwise self-absorbed pursuits. Also testifying to the felicific nature of virtue are studies that assess the relationship between character strengths and happiness. These studies almost unequivocally reveal a positive relationship between possession of character strengths and subjective well-being, particularly when it comes to certain strengths. In an early, large-scale study Park, Peterson, and Seligman35 showed that almost all of the twenty-four character strengths specified by Peterson and Seligman36 correlated with global life satisfaction. The strengths of love, gratitude, hope, curiosity, zest, and perspective/wisdom emerged as most robustly linked to life satisfaction (correlations in the .35 to .60 range), followed by strengths such as persistence, self-regulation, spirituality, forgiveness, social intelligence, humor, leadership, bravery, citizenship, integrity, and kindness (correlations in the .20 to .30 range). The character strengths that exhibited the lowest, albeit still significant, associations with life satisfaction were fairness, prudence, love of learning, judgment, appreciation of beauty, creativity, and modesty/humility (in the .05 to .20 range). Research with adolescents37 and young children as described by their parents38 similarly reveals love, zest, hope, and gratitude as the character strengths most closely affiliated with happiness. Furthermore, comparable strong associations between happiness and the virtues of zest, curiosity, gratitude, hope, and love have been obtained in Japanese,39 German-speaking Swiss,40 and Croatian41 samples. Finally, there is evidence that not only selfreported character strengths but also strengths as assessed by knowledgeable others yield the same patterns, suggesting that the data from self-reports are not biased by methodological problems.42 Findings from experimental studies overlap with the conclusions of correlational studies: Possessing and using character strengths in general is associated with elevated happiness; at the same time, some strengths are more conducive to happiness than others. In one intervention study, for example, participants took an inventory of character strengths and received individualized feedback about their top five strengths. They were then asked to use one of these five strengths in a novel way every day for one week.43 At the one-month, three-month, and six-month follow-ups, these participants were

A Virtuous Cycle 293 happier and less depressed compared to both their personal baseline and a placebo control group. Another intervention study conducted with British adolescents demonstrated that those who participated in school exercises aimed at promoting character strengths experienced increased life satisfaction compared to those who did not participate in these exercises.44 This socalled Strengths Gym program was designed to have students exercise their strengths ‘like muscles’ over a period of six months. Students, for example, had to come up with real-life examples of a strength in action (e.g., “Can you remember a time when you or somebody you know truly showed their love of beauty?”) or challenge themselves to use a specific strength (e.g., “Look for beauty on your way to school. Tell a friend or family member what you noticed”). A recent study used an experimental approach to tackle the question of whether all strengths are created equal with respect to fostering subjective well-being.45 The researchers trained a group of adults with the strengths most correlated with happiness (curiosity, gratitude, hope, zest, and also humor). This group was compared to a group that trained with strengths that typically yield low correlations with happiness (appreciation of beauty and excellence, creativity, kindness, love of learning, and perspective) and a wait-list control group. When life satisfaction scores before and after the treatments were contrasted, only the group trained with the strengths most correlated with happiness improved significantly in comparison to the control group. At the same time, when asked for subjective ratings of experienced changes due to the program (e.g., perceived cheerfulness, happiness, positive mood) participants in both intervention groups indicated gains above that of a wait-listed control group. These experimental findings reinforce our earlier observation that although virtues in general appear to contribute to happiness, some virtues are more promising in that regard. One thing seems notable about the virtues most closely associated with happiness, such as curiosity, gratitude, hope, zest, and love: They all have a self-transcendent aspect to them and involve positive connections to some ‘larger beyond.’ Among other things, curiosity connects one to a large, fascinating world, gratitude connects one to a benevolent higher force as well as to others, hope connects one to a desirable future, zest connects one to life, and love of course connects one to other people. Transcending the self and connecting to something larger than the self are considered essential to psychological health and well-being.46 It should perhaps be expected, then, that character strengths that facilitate these abilities are most conducive to happiness. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a more detailed review of the research connecting virtues to happiness. However, the interested reader should be aware that the literature provides evidence linking almost any virtue to happiness, including self-control,47 kindness,48 hope and spirituality,49 gratitude,50 honesty,51 wisdom,52 and patience.53

294 P. Kesebir and E. Diener

Can One Have Too Much of a Virtue? Surveying the available evidence, it is very hard to escape the conclusion that virtue and happiness are closely interlinked. That said, a question that naturally comes up is whether one can have too much of a virtue: Is there perhaps an optimal level of possessing a virtue, beyond which it starts to hurt rather than help one’s well-being? After all, temperance itself is a virtue and ‘too much of a good thing’ is commonly regarded with suspicion. Proverbial wisdom warns us about ‘curiosity killing the cat’ and the self-help genre about ‘women who love too much.’ Even the psychology literature provides evidence that having too much happiness or too much optimism, for example, may not yield the most ideal results.54 Can too much of a virtue be detrimental to one’s happiness too? Relying on data from thousands of respondents, Park, Peterson, and Seligman conclude that there does not seem to be any evidence for this notion.55 They report that no matter how they split their samples, the relationship between life satisfaction and any character strength was “relentlessly monotonic.”56 The top of the top were higher in life satisfaction than those in the mere top. In contrast, people who scored in the bottom 5% or 10% of a strength exhibited notably low levels of life satisfaction. Our conviction is that a virtue taken to the extreme can only be dangerous in the absence of other balancing virtues. For instance, perseverance and self-control, which are both laudable qualities in themselves, can cause harm to oneself and others if applied to misguided, unwisely chosen goals. Think of someone who perseveres in staying in an abusive marriage or an impossible business endeavor or an anorexic woman who uses self-control to starve herself. Similarly, one can think of suicide bombers who are high in courage, stalkers high in curiosity, con-artists high in creativity, and cult members high in spirituality. The absence of balancing virtues such as kindness, fairness, honesty, judgment, and wisdom in these examples is bound to prove destructive or self-destructive. Thus, what is problematic appears not to be excess virtue but deficient virtue: A virtue in abundance does not present a threat (quite the opposite, it can be a boon), unless accompanied by dangerously low levels of some other virtues. Deficient virtue, on the other hand, is responsible for poor choices and poor outcomes more often than not—as such, it can render irrelevant the virtues one has in abundance or even turn them into a liability. Similarly, Peterson observed that the absence of character strengths characterizes psychological disorder—if one studied those who enter therapy, he suggested, one would find one or another character strength to be conspicuously depressed or altogether absent.57

Why Not Act More Virtuously? Considering all the happiness benefits that virtues provide, one might wonder why people do not choose to act more virtuously and reap its rewards. Are they unaware of the joys of virtue, or is it just too difficult sometimes to

A Virtuous Cycle 295 act with virtue, even if one might anticipate felicific returns down the road? Research suggests that the answer may have to do with both. For one, nature and nurture predispose people to possess virtue in varying degrees. Even though it is well within the realm of possibility to inculcate and foster virtue, as in the several intervention studies we reviewed, it would be wrong to expect no limits whatsoever on a given person’s capacity to act with virtue. It has been noted that virtue consists of having the intention to carry out desirable actions as well as having the wherewithal to do so.58 A person, for example, might value honesty as a supreme virtue and intend to speak the truth as a general rule. There might come a time, however, when that same person cannot afford honesty and resorts to a lie instead. In situations like this, when acting with virtue entails some personal discomfort, the wherewithal issue becomes critically important. Baumeister and Exline argue that this wherewithal heavily depends on self-control. Particularly when virtue requires overcoming easier initial responses and stepping out of one’s comfort zone, self-control becomes a primary determinant of virtue.59 Accordingly, virtues oftentimes necessitate the exertion of self-control, whereas sin and vice revolve around poor self-control—as in sloth, gluttony, or lust. Self-control, then, not only is a virtue itself but also facilitates the exercise of other virtues. This led Baumeister and Exline to describe selfcontrol as “the master virtue.”60 In light of this, it is unfortunate that across fifty American states and fifty-four nations, self-control consistently came up among the character strengths people said they possess the least.61 Self-regulatory failure seems to be a major obstacle keeping people from acting virtuously. Yet, there is no reason to assume that people are sufficiently aware of the happiness-virtue link either. Even though they may have the general sense that virtue will be rewarded ultimately, they do not appear to realize the more immediate affective benefits that virtuous acts carry with them. Sandstrom and Dunn review evidence showing that virtue often provides happiness benefits even in the short term, but due to systematic affective forecasting errors, people do not tend to be aware of these rewards.62 While they report short-term emotional benefits after exercising virtues such as generosity, industriousness, integrity, forgiveness, or gratitude, when asked to predict how they would feel, they do not anticipate these benefits and oftentimes assert that the alternative to the virtuous behavior would make them feel better. Sandstrom and Dunn argue that these affective forecasting errors create a “virtue blind spot” that drives people away from the exercise of virtue.63 One potential way to address this problem is to remind people of how good they felt after past virtuous acts. In one study, for instance, participants were randomly assigned to recall a time they had spent money on either themselves or on others. People who recalled spending money on others reported higher happiness, and this also led them to act more generously when given a chance in the second part of the study.64 It seems that frequent reminders are necessary to circumvent our proclivity to conceive of virtue as painful rather than rewarding.

296 P. Kesebir and E. Diener IV.

VIRTUOUS CYCLES

Our discussion on the consequences of virtue for one’s happiness has concluded that virtue is conducive to happiness. Yet might happiness be conducive to virtue too? Growing evidence in recent years suggests that happiness is not only an epiphenomenon, but itself the cause of many favorable outcomes in life. Comprehensive reviews of the literature reveal that happiness and positive affect foster better health, better work performance, better social relationships, and more altruistic behavior.65 Among other things, happy people are more productive, spend less and save more, donate more time, money, and blood to others, are more likely to resolve conflicts through cooperation, are less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, and even more likely to wear seatbelts. These findings do not constitute a direct test of the idea that happiness causes virtue. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine that such outcomes could be achieved without the use of a wide range of virtues such as love, kindness, fairness, industriousness, or self-control. Hence, our sense is that happiness and positive affect do play a functional role in guiding people toward more virtuous ways of acting. Further support for the notion that happiness leads to virtue comes from the broaden-and-build model of positive emotions.66 According to the model, positive emotions broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires, widening the array of the thoughts and actions that come to their mind. This broadening serves to build enduring physical, intellectual, and social resources, allowing people to become more creative, knowledgeable, resilient, socially integrated, and healthy over time. The body of research on the topic, encompassing both experimental and longitudinal methods, led to a conception of positive affect as a source of human strength.67 This strength can trigger upward spiral processes, whereby positive emotions and desirable outcomes feed into each other, leading toward enhanced emotional well-being over time.68 We propose that the relationship between happiness and virtue involves a similar feedback loop: Happiness fosters virtuous behavior, which leads to higher happiness, which in turn facilitates further virtuous behavior. The reciprocal influences between happiness and virtue thus fuel a ‘virtuous cycle,’ potentially leading to enhanced happiness and enhanced virtue over time. This relationship is probably more apparent for some virtues than others. For example, Watkins writes that the answers to the questions “does gratitude cause happiness” and “does happiness cause gratitude” are both positive.69 Gratitude promotes happiness, but happiness promotes gratitude as well—the two emotions feed off each other in a virtuous cycle. Similarly, Aknin, Dunn, and Norton argue that a positive feedback loop exists between spending money on others—an act of generosity—and happiness. In their research, not only did recalling previous acts of prosocial spending

A Virtuous Cycle 297 lead to higher levels of happiness, but higher levels of happiness predicted a greater desire to spend on others again too. In light of all this, a positive feedback loop between virtue and happiness strikes us as an idea worthy of further exploration.70 Lest we create the impression that ‘the rich get richer’ when it comes to happiness and virtue too, we wish to note that not only happiness, but unhappiness too, can lead to virtue. Human strengths are oftentimes born in encounters with life challenges and adversity.71 Though extended exposure to degraded and impoverished environments can clearly have debilitating effects on people’s health and well-being, some exposure to negative events has been suggested to be beneficial to cultivating strengths such as self-confidence, hope, sense of coherence, capacity for hard work, and connection to others.72 The literature on posttraumatic growth also provides ample support for the claim that adversity can lead to self-improvement.73 In a similar vein, Peterson, Park, and Seligman report associations between a history of physical illness and the character strengths of appreciation of beauty, bravery, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, humor, kindness, love of learning, and spirituality.74 Thus, it seems that, under the right conditions, traumas and crises can propel people toward virtue too, kick-starting a virtuous cycle.

V.

CONCLUSION

The nature of the relationship between virtue and happiness has been the subject of philosophical treatises for long. In this chapter, we relied on current psychological research to better illuminate this relationship. Our review points to a clear association between happiness and virtue, which seems particularly strong when it comes to self-transcendent virtues such as hope, zest, gratitude, love, and curiosity. Whereas experimental and longitudinal studies suggest that virtue leads to happiness, there is also support for the notion that happiness leads to virtuous behavior. We have argued that these reciprocal causation dynamics are conducive to virtuous cycles running from virtue to happiness to virtue. There is virtually no doubt that virtues make the world a better place for oneself and for others. Yet, a recent analysis found that during the twentieth century, words related to virtue (e.g., honesty, courage, humility, generosity, perseverance) appeared with diminishing frequency in American books.75 This suggests that the salience of virtue has declined in American minds during this time. If virtues are indispensable to human happiness and societal welfare as ancient philosophical and current empirical queries indicate, and if they require favorable cultural conditions to thrive, then these findings are somewhat concerning. We believe that a virtue-salient culture will provide the most fertile ground for individual and societal flourishing.

298 P. Kesebir and E. Diener NOTES 1. Aristotle, Eudaemian Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 2. D. M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006). 3. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 4. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Signet, 2003), 68. 5. Pelin Kesebir and Ed Diener, “In Pursuit of Happiness: Empirical Answers to Philosophical Questions,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (2008): 117–125; L. A. King and Christie N. Scollon, “What Makes a Life Good?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 156–165. 6. Ed Diener, “Subjective Well-Being,” Psychological Bulletin 95 (1984): 542–575. 7. Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer, “Psychological Well-Being: Meaning, Measurement, and Implications for Psychotherapy Research,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 65 (1996): 14–23. 8. Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 68–78. 9. A. Timothy Church et al., “Need Satisfaction and Well-Being Testing SelfDetermination Theory in Eight Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 44 (2013): 507–534; Daniel M. Haybron, “On Being Happy or Unhappy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2005): 287–317; Leonard W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 10. Todd B. Kashdan, Robert Biswas-Diener, and Laura A. King, “Reconsidering Happiness: The Costs of Distinguishing Between Hedonics and Eudaimonia,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 3 (2008): 219–233. 11. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade, “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change,” Review of General Psychology 9 (2005): 111–131; Martin E. P. Seligman, “Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, ed. Charles R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–12. 12. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener, “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?,” Psychological Bulletin 131 (2005): 803–855. 13. Steven J. Sandage and Peter C. Hill, “The Virtues of Positive Psychology: The Rapprochement and Challenges of an Affirmative Postmodern Perspective,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 31 (2001): 241–260. 14. Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 15. McMahon, Happiness. 16. George Washington, “First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789,” in The Declaration of Independence and Other Great Documents of American History, 1775–1865, ed. John Grafton (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1789] 2000), 43–46. 17. Carolyn L. Hafer and Laurent Begue, “Experimental Research on Just-World Theory: Problems, Developments, and Future Challenges,” Psychological Bulletin 131 (2005): 128–167; Melvin J. Lerner, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). 18. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985).

A Virtuous Cycle 299 19. Mark Holowchak, Happiness and Greek Ethical Thought (New York: Continuum, 2004). 20. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, Analysis of Happiness (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1976). 21. McMahon, Happiness, 65. 22. Martin E. P. Seligman, “The President’s Address,” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 559–562; Martin E. P. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Positive Psychology: An Introduction,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 5–14. 23. Michael E. McCullough and Charles R. Snyder, “Classical Sources of Human Strength: Revisiting an Old Home and Building a New One,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 19 (2000): 1–10; Sandage and Hill, “Virtues”; Kennon M. Sheldon and Laura King, “Why Positive Psychology is Necessary,” American Psychologist 56 (2001): 216–217. 24. Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 25. Katherine Dahlsgaard, Christopher Peterson, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Shared Virtue: The Convergence of Valued Human Strengths Across Culture and History,” Review of General Psychology 9 (2005): 203–213. 26. Martin E. P. Seligman, “Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy,” in Handbook of Positive Psychology, ed. Charles R. Snyder & Shane J. Lopez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–12. 27. Marvin W. Berkowitz and Melinda C. Bier, “Research-Based Character Education,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 591 (2004): 72–85; Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez, “Character Education,” in Handbook of Child Psychology Volume 4, ed. Ann Renninger and Irving E. Siegel (New York: Wiley, 2006), 248–296. 28. Seligman et al., “Prevention.” 29. Evan M. Kleiman, Leah M. Adams, Todd B. Kashdan, and John H. Riskind, “Gratitude and Grit Indirectly Reduce Risk of Suicidal Ideations by Enhancing Meaning in Life: Evidence for a Mediated Moderation Model,” Journal of Research in Personality 47 (2013): 539–546. 30. Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson, “Moral Competence and Character Strengths Among Adolescents: The Development and Validation of the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths for Youth,” Journal of Adolescence 29 (2006): 891–909. 31. L. A. King, “Interventions for Enhancing Subjective Well-Being: Can We Make People Happier and Should We?,” in The Science of Subjective WellBeing, ed. Michael Eid and Randy J. Larsen (New York: Guilford Press, 2008), 431–448. 32. Michael F. Steger, Todd B. Kashdan, and Shigehiro Oishi, “Being Good by Doing Good: Daily Eudaimonic Activity and Well-Being,” Journal of Research in Personality 42 (2008): 22–42. 33. Robert A. Emmons, “Personal Goals, Life Meaning, and Virtue: Wellsprings of a Positive Life,” in Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life WellLived, ed. Corey L. M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003), 105–128. 34. Bruce Headey, “Life Goals Matter to Happiness: A Revision of Set-Point Theory,” Social Indicators Research 86 (2008): 213–231. 35. Nansook Park, Christopher Peterson, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Strengths of Character and Well-Being,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 23 (2004): 603–619. 36. Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

300 P. Kesebir and E. Diener 37. Park and Peterson, “Character Strengths.” 38. Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson, “Character Strengths and Happiness Among Young Children: Content Analysis of Parental Descriptions,” Journal of Happiness Studies 7 (2006): 323–341. 39. Satoshi Shimai, Keiko Otake, Nansook Park, Christopher Peterson, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Convergence of Character Strengths in American and Japanese Young Adults,” Journal of Happiness Studies 7 (2006): 311–322. 40. Christopher Peterson, Willibald Ruch, Ursula Beermann, Nansook Park, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Strengths of Character, Orientations to Happiness, and Life Satisfaction,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 2 (2007): 149–156. 41. Ingrid Brdar and Todd B. Kashdan, “Character Strengths and Well-Being in Croatia: An Empirical Investigation of Structure and Correlates,” Journal of Research in Personality 44 (2010): 151–154. 42. Claudia Buschor, René T. Proyer, and Willibald Ruch, “Self-and Peer-Rated Character Strengths: How Do They Relate to Satisfaction with Life and Orientations to Happiness?,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 8 (2013): 116–127. 43. Martin E. P. Seligman, Tracy A. Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson, “Positive Psychology Progress,” American Psychologist 60 (2005): 410–421. 44. Carmel Proctor, Eli Tsukayama, Alex M. Wood, John Maltby, Jennifer Fox Eades, and P. Alex Linley, “Strengths Gym: The Impact of a Character Strengths-Based Intervention on the Life Satisfaction and Well-Being of Adolescents,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 6 (2011): 377–388. 45. René T. Proyer, Willibald Ruch, and Claudia Buschor, “Testing StrengthsBased Interventions: A Preliminary Study on the Effectiveness of a Program Targeting Curiosity, Gratitude, Hope, Humor, and Zest for Enhancing Life Satisfaction,” Journal of Happiness Studies 14 (2012): 275–292. 46. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Mark R. Leary, The Curse of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); for a review, see Heidi A. Wayment and Jack J. Bauer, Transcending Self-Interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2008). 47. Wilhelm Hofmann, Rachel R. Fisher, Maike Luhmann, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Roy F. Baumeister, “Yes, But Are They Happy? Effects of Trait SelfControl on Affective Well-Being and Life Satisfaction,” Journal of Personality (2013). 48. Kathryn E. Buchanan and Anat Bardi, “Acts of Kindness and Acts of Novelty Affect Life Satisfaction,” The Journal of Social Psychology 150 (2010): 235–237. 49. Susana C. Marques, Shane J. Lopez, and Joanna Mitchell, “The Role of Hope, Spirituality and Religious Practice in Adolescents’ Life Satisfaction: Longitudinal Findings,” Journal of Happiness Studies 14 (2013): 251–261. 50. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, “Counting Blessings versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective WellBeing in Daily Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (2003): 377–389; Philip C. Watkins, Kathrane Woodward, Tamara Stone, and Russell L. Kolts, “Gratitude and Happiness: Development of a Measure of Gratitude, and Relationships with Subjective Well-Being,” Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 31 (2003): 431–451. 51. Harvey S. James Jr., “Is the Just Man a Happy Man? An Empirical Study of the Relationship between Ethics and Subjective Well-Being,” Kyklos 64 (2011): 193–212.

A Virtuous Cycle 301 52. Ad Bergsma and Monika Ardelt, “Self-Reported Wisdom and Happiness: An Empirical Investigation,” Journal of Happiness Studies 13 (2012): 481–499. 53. Sarah A. Schnitker, “An Examination of Patience and Well-Being,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 7 (2012): 263–280. 54. For example, Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman, “Delusions of Success,” Harvard Business Review 81 (2003): 56–63; Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener, and Richard E. Lucas, “The Optimum Level of Well-Being: Can People Be Too Happy?,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 2 (2007): 346–360. 55. Park, Peterson, and Seligman, “Strengths.” 56. Christopher Peterson, “The Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths,” in A Life Worth Living: Contributions to Positive Psychology, ed. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella S. Csikszentmihalyi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46. 57. Peterson, “Values.” 58. Roy F. Baumeister and Julie Juola Exline, “Virtue, Personality, and Social Relations: Self-Control as the Moral Muscle,” Journal of Personality 67 (1999): 1165–1194. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Park, Peterson, and Seligman, “Strengths.” 62. Gillian M. Sandstrom and Elizabeth W. Dunn, “The Virtue Blind Spot: Do Affective Forecasting Errors Undermine Virtuous Behavior?,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5 (2011): 720–733. 63. Ibid. 64. Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, and Michael I. Norton, “Happiness Runs in a Circular Motion: Evidence for a Positive Feedback Loop Between Prosocial Spending and Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies 13 (2012): 347–355. 65. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Ed Diener, Louis Tay, and Cody Xuereb, “The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being,” in World Happiness Report, ed. John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs (New York: UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2013); Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener, “Pursuing.” 66. Barbara L. Fredrickson, “What Good Are Positive Emotions?,” Review of General Psychology 2 (1998): 300–319. 67. Alice M. Isen, “Positive Affect as a Source of Human Strength,” in A Psychology of Human Strengths, ed. Lisa G. Aspinwall and Ursula M. Staudinger (Washington, DC, American Psychological Association, 2003), 179–195. 68. Barbara L. Fredrickson and Thomas Joiner, “Positive Emotions Trigger Upward Spirals Toward Emotional Well-Being,” Psychological Science 13 (2002): 172–175. 69. Philip C. Watkins, “Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 167–192. 70. Aknin, Dunn, and Norton, “Happiness.” 71. Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer, “Ironies of the Human Condition: WellBeing and Health on the Way to Mortality,” in Aspinwall and Staudinger, A Psychology of Human Strengths, 271–287. 72. For example, Haidt, Happiness; Karen W. Saakvitne, Howard Tennen, and Glenn Affleck, “Exploring Thriving in the Context of Clinical Trauma Theory: Constructivist Self Development Theory,” Journal of Social Issues 54 (1998): 279–299; Daniel Stokols, “The Ecology of Human Strengths,” in Aspinwall and Staudinger, A Psychology of Human Strengths, 331–343.

302 P. Kesebir and E. Diener 73. Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence,” Psychological Inquiry 15 (2004): 1–18. 74. Christopher Peterson, Nansook Park, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Greater Strengths of Character and Recovery from Illness,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 1 (2006): 17–26. 75. Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir, “The Cultural Salience of Moral Character and Virtue Declined in Twentieth Century America,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 7 (2012): 471–480.

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Contributors

Stephen C. Angle is Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University. Neera K. Badhwar is Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma and affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and Department of Economics at George Mason University. C. Daniel Batson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Kansas. Howard J. Curzer is Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University. Ed Diener is Joseph Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Senior Scientist, The Gallup Organization. Wenjie Duan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Applied Social Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. Daniel M. Haybron is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University. Samuel M. Y. Ho is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Applied Social Studies at the City University of Hong Kong and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Hong Kong. Pelin Kesebir is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Psychology Department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Daniel Lapsley is ACE Collegiate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. Christian B. Miller is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. Darcia Narvaez is Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame.

308 Contributors Clea F. Rees is Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University. Hagop Sarkissian is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Baruch College. Nancy E. Snow is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sandy C. M. Tang is a Research Staff Member in the Department of Applied Social Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. Franco V. Trivigno is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. Jonathan Webber is Reader in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Erik J. Wielenberg is Professor of Philosophy at DePauw University.

Index

agency 135, 148, 171, 199, 242–6, 254, 277, 280 aggression 147, 148 akrasia 44; see also incontinence altruism 5, 58–9, 61, 63–4, 117 Analecta (Confucius) 168, 181, 184–5, 188–90 anguish 125–6 Anscombe, Elizabeth 1 Aristotelian science 55, 56 Aristotelian virtue ethics 4, 15, 22, 24, 43, 274, 277; see also virtue ethics Aristotle 1, 16, 23, 25, 28n9, 35–9, 86, 101–2, 123, 252, 266; charitable interpretation of 273; on ethics and well-being 267–73 attitude psychology 75, 84, 86 attitudes: as automatic motivations 83–5; as underpinning ethical virtue 85–7 automaticity 5, 165; goal-dependent 165; of initiating emotions 81–3; of modifying motivations 79–81; in cognitive-affective processes 47–8; preconscious 166; skill and action in 77–9; and virtuous action 75–7 autonomy 85, 101, 148, 245, 255, 256–8, 279 Bandura, Albert 172 Bargh, John 79, 84, 165 Batson, Daniel 20, 113, 116–18 Beaman, Arthur 27 behavior: aggressive/destructive 291; consistent 1; ethical 21; as expression of character 221–3, 226; eudaimonic 288,

291; external influences on 4, 242–3; as function of person and environment 54; hedonic 291; helping 117; moral 20–2, 58–66; rational control of 242, 244–7, 253, 258; socially appropriate 2; virtuous 295, 296, 297; see also situational determination of behavior (SDB) behaviorism 133 bias 27, 40, 46, 49, 134, 137, 138, 143, 173, 243, 247; cognitive 241, 256 Blasi, Augusto 164, 167 Blum, Lawrence 63, 168, 171 Bond, Michael 206 Book of Changes 216; see also I-Ching Buddhism 8, 216, 227 bystander effects 43–5 callousness 15 Capabilities Approach 9, 266–7, 282; Aristotle’s ethics compared with 267–73 Casebeer, William 27 Cassirer, Ernst 54–5 character 1–2, 3; 48–9; Confucian concept of 207–9; cultural implications of 201–4; defined 221; multicultural study of 3, 7, 204–7; moral 141; strengths 222–3; see also character traits; dispositions, virtue character traits 16, 17, 66; aggregative solution for 38; virtuous 17–18; see also traits Cheung, Fanny 206 China: economic growth in 225; natural disasters in 225; philosophy in 198, 215,

310 Index 225–7; see also Chinese culture; Confucian ethics; Confucianism Chinese culture 215–17, 225–7; core virtues in 8–9; see also East Asians Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory 206 Chinese Virtues Questionnaire (CVQ-96) 223, 227 chronic accessibility 48, 80, 86, 89n8, 101, 119, 124–5, 141, 143, 165, 166 Cicero 287 cognition 94; moral 97, 99–101 cognitive architecture, and ethical virtues 87–8 cognitive development 133, 142, 164 cognitive-developmental tradition 133 coherence 170, 175; see also Universal Coherence collectivism 5, 58–9, 62–3, 64 compassion 2, 15, 18–21, 27, 48, 63, 65, 82, 87, 121–6, 133, 147, 166, 172, 184 Confucian ethics 183, 186, 191, 210; burdens of 182–4, 185 Confucianism 8, 164, 172, 174, 181–2, 209–10, 215–16, 227, 225; see also Confucian ethics; Confucius; neo-Confucianism Confucius 168, 181, 184, 222; see also Confucian ethics; Confucianism; neo-Confucianism conscientiousness 9, 139, 184, 206, 223, 224, 226, 227 contemplation 268, 273–5, 277; relationship with happiness 275–7 contextualism, and well-being 255–8 courage 10, 36, 37, 48, 63, 77, 102, 251, 270, 273, 281, 282, 289, 290, 294, 297 Cua, Antonio 168, 170 culture and cultures: Chinese 215–17, 225–7; and the effect of SDB 248; as factor in moral schema development 167; influence on self-regulation 186–8; lowcontext vs. high-context 200, 205; and psychology 215–17 Cunningham, Michael 19 curiosity 8, 125, 222, 223, 292, 293, 297 Darley, John 43–4 Darley and Batson study 2

Dawes, Robyn 62 DesAutels, Peggy 167, 172 development: cognitive 133, 142, 164; moral 6, 146–8, 172, 266 disgust 5–6, 91; contemporary research on 102–3; malleability of 100–1; and moral cognition 99–101; unreasoning nature of 103 dishonesty 15, 48 dispositions 30, 31n41, 31n43, 35, 36, 38, 54, 85, 133, 134, 169, 183, 200, 210, 244, 254, 269, 276; and habituation 76; and schemas 139, 141, 144; global 136–8; emotional 101–2; for empathy 119, 124–5; in terms of goals and attitudes 86; v. motives 57; v. social-cognitive units 135 Doctrine of Double Effect 97 doctrine of the mean 67, 209, 271, 274, 276 Doris, John 1, 2, 15, 197, 201–5, 207, 210, 241, 242 East Asians: culture of 198–201; psychology of 197, 201, 203, 210; see also Chinese culture economic growth, and happiness 224–5 education, moral / character 24, 27, 163, 176n2, 290; see also habituation; training egoism 4, 58–9, 60–1, 6; psychological 128n23 embarrassment, as motivator 21, 41 emic perspectives 217, 221, 226 emic-etic combined perspectives 217, 219, 221, 223 emotion/emotions 36, 38, 46, 55, 58, 60, 120–4, 142, 147, 164, 183–4, 218, 222–3, 244, 246, 267, 270; broaden-and-build model of 296; centrality to empathy 115–6; end-state vs. need-state 58; influence of 91; moral 164; regulation of 186–8; role of in moral cognition 97; training of 100–4; v. principles 64–5; see also disgust; empathic concern emotional contagion 115–16, 193n31, 259n7 empathic concern 6, 113, antecedents of 118; causal model of 119; facilitators of 118; training 124–6;

Index 311 and virtue 119–24; see also empathy; emotion/emotions empathy 6, 20, 46, 63; cognitive 114; development of 146–7; emotional concern 116; emotional contagion 115–16; imaginative 114; imagine-other 115; imagine-self 114–15; and moral functioning 164; otheroriented 117–18; proper 115; real 115; varieties of 113–15; see also empathetic concern empathy-altruism hypothesis 20, 61, 63 Epictetus 24 Epstein, Seymour 38 ethics: eudamonist 128n23; globalized 258; Kantian 134, 175, 252; see also Aristotelian virtue ethics; Confucian ethics; Triune Ethics Theory (TET); virtue ethics etic perspectives 217 eudaimonia 2, 113, 116, 119, 126, 252, 267, 279, 288, 291; see also eudaimonic well-being; happiness; well-being eudaimonic well-being 218, 221; see also eudaimonia; happiness; well-being evaluative integration 204, 206 evolution, and moral development 6, 146–8 Evolved Developmental Niche 146, 147, 148 Expanded Satisfaction with Life Scale (ESWLS) 221, 227 fairness 48, 61, 63, 65, 66, 77, 104, 222, 223, 292, 296, 297; see also justice filial obligations 182 Flanagan, Owen 174 Foot, Philippa 75, 289 framing 41, 63, 209; fundamental attribution error 137–8 Galileian science 55, 56, 66–7 Gilligan, Carol 63 global traits 1, 136–8 globalism 36–8 goal psychology 75, 86 goals: as automatic motivations 83–5; as ethical virtue 85–7; ultimate vs. instrumental 56–7; and virtue 271 Goldie, Peter 77

Good Samaritan experiment 54, 56 gratitude 8, 182, 222, 223, 270, 281, 290–3, 295–7 guilt 18–22, 280; as motivator 41, 42, 60–1; avoidance 21, 29n29 habituation 49, 75, 76, 77, 86, 102, 124, 125, 252; see also education; training happiness: and adversity 225–7; of Chinese people 224–7; in Chinese philosophy 8, 215–16; cultural variables of 218–21; determining factors of 224, 288; and economic growth 224–5; effects of external factors on 224–7; interdisciplinary research on 3; interpersonal relationship as cultural variable in 219; multicultural study of 3, 7; nature of 287–8; philosophical conceptions of 3; study of 288; sustainable 224; virtues associated with 293; virtue’s relation to 2, 10, 289–95, 296, 297; see also eudaimonia; eudaimonic well-being; wellbeing Harman, Gilbert 1, 2, 15, 16, 17, 97, 241 Harman/Doris strategy 15–17 Hauser, Marc 91 Hidden Principles Claim 5, 95–7 Hoffman, Martin 164 Holloway, Stephen 25 honesty 15, 48, 56, 63, 77, 136, 270, 293, 294, 295, 297 hope 10, 216, 222, 223, 290, 291, 292, 293, 297 Hursthouse, Rosalind 1, 287 Hutton, Eric 198 I-Ching 8, 216, 218, 225, 227 identity: moral 7, 141, 164–5, 167, 172; narrative 167 incontinence 28n9, 28n10, 277, 280; see also akrasia indifference 125 individualism 185, 256–8 individuality 185, 198, 202, 204 Ivanhoe, P.J. 173, 174 Jacobson, Daniel 174 junzi 210

312 Index justice 39, 48, 56, 61, 63, 65, 120, 123, 222, 251, 266, 269, 289, 290; see also fairness; virtue Kahneman, Daniel 91 Kantian ethics 134, 136, 175, 252 Kant, Immanuel 36, 63–6, 134; see also Kantian ethics Kelley, Daniel 99 kindness 38, 41–3, 78, 80–1, 83–4, 87, 206, 222, 293, 294, 296, 297 knowledge 49, 222; moral 91; shallow 171; see also wisdom Kohlberg, Lawrence 149n2, 163, 164, 174 Kupperman, Joel 175 Lao-Tzu 218, 222 Lapsley, Daniel 164, 165 Latané, Bibb 43–4 Latané and Darley model of group effects 27 Lewin, Kurt 4, 54–8 Liljenquist, Katie 21 love 8, 147, 169–70, 173, 182, 222, 223, 253, 291, 292, 293, 296, 297; of learning 222, 292, 297; of self 65–6 luck, role of 275, 277 McAdams, Dan 167, 172, 175 McDowell, John 173, 174 Merritt, Maria 209 Milgram, Stanley 54 Milgram experiment 2, 15, 45–8, 51n65, 54, 243, 246 Mill, John Stuart 60, 123–4 Mischel, Walter 38 modeling effects 24–5, 31n40 moods: effects of 40–3, 244, 247; negative mood relief 20–1 moral behavior: influences on 20–2; motives for 58–66 moral chronicity 165, 166 moral dissociation: bystander effects 43–5; Milgram experiments 45–8, 51n65; moods 40–3; and obedience 45–8 morality: cultural emphasis on 101; development of 145–7, 149n2; psychologized 175; rationality of 134; striving for 17, 23–4; see also active moral perception; morally virtuous activity; virtue

morally virtuous activity 268, 271–7, 279–80; see also virtue Morphological Reliabilism Model (MoRM) 5, 96–7, 99, 101–2 Moshman, David 167 motivations: automatic 83–5; for ethical behavior 21; initiating 81–3, 89n5; modifying 79–81, 89n5; see also motives motives 57; linking to values and goals 56; for moral action 58–66; see also motivations Mou, Zongsan 164 Murdoch, Iris 168 Murray, Henry 57 Nagel, Thomas 244 Narvaez, Darcia 164, 165, 167, 172 neo-Confucianism 7, 163–4, 165, 166, 168, 171, 174, 175; see also Confucianism Nisbett, Richard 197–200, 203, 206 nudges, as situational influence 248 Nussbaum, Martha 266–70 Oishi, Shigehiro 219 passion 39, 101, 134, 271–2, 274, 277, 280–1, 285 patience 293 perception 42, 83, 96, 97, 98, 116, 118, 120, 121, 124, 139, 140, 197, 201, 205; 271–2; see also active moral perception personality: coherence 139; development of 145–7; models of 6; moral 141–3, 164–5; social-cognitive approach to 138–41; theory 3; and virtues 135–6; see also character; personality traits personality traits 38, 136, 137, 145, 204, 206; Big Five 206, 212n62 Petruska, Richard 25 phronesis 35–8, 289; see also wisdom, practical Piaget, Jean 164 Pollard, Bill 77 positive feedback loop 296 positive psychology 3, 223–4, 290 posttraumatic growth 225 Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) 226 Prentice-Dunn, Steven 25

Index 313 priming 45, 46, 48, 80, 83, 84, 89n8, 117, 119, 128n26, 141, 209 principles: hidden 5, 95–7; fairness and justice 65; interpersonal 65; moral 61, 63, 64, 97, 102; as related to happiness 280; propriety 65 principlism 5, 58–9, 63–6, 67 psychokinesis 223 psychological well-being see eudaimonia; eudaimonic wellbeing; happiness, well-being psychology: attitude 75, 84, 86; experimental social 54; goal 75, 86; moral 1, 258; moralized 175; personality 3; positive 3, 223–4, 290; situationist 241; social 1, 2, 54, 144–5, 198–9; 203 rarity response 16, 17, 28–9n10 Rational Control (RC) 9; and human agency 242–6 rationality 4, 134, 165 rationalization, post hoc 96, 104 Rawls, John 63 realism challenge 22–4, 29n29 Regan, Dennis 18 regulation of others 188–90; see also self-regulation relationality 207–8 relationship (as virtue) 8, 72, 201, 215–16, 218–19, 223–4, 227 reliabilism 92–4 ritual propriety 7, 181–3; as an imposition 190–1 Rokeach, Milton 57 Ross, Lee 26 Samuels, Steven 27 Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) 221 schemas 6, 139–40; and moral personality 141, 142; and traits 144–5 self-actualization 215, 218, 221 self-awareness 47, 184–5 self-control 9, 47, 186, 290, 293, 294, 295, 296 self-cultivation 208–10 self-deception 40, 46, 280 self-determination 255, 257; theory of 288 selfishness 172, 173 self-monitoring 183–5, 187 self-protection 146–7

self-regulation 7–8, 182; Eastern and Western 186–8; as imposition 190–1; regulating others through 188–90 Sen, Amartya 266–7, 270–1 shame 39, 61, 65, 269, 282 situational determination of behavior 9, 242–3, 245–6; extent of 247–51; implications for well-being 251–8 situational priming 84; see also priming situationism 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 15, 28n6, 41–2, 197, 203, 210, 241; challenge to virtue ethics by 15–24, 241–51 situations, power/pressure of 38–40, 54 small-band hunter-gatherers (SBHG) 148 Snow, Nancy 77, 82, 163, 172 social contagion 248 social origins theory 198, 200, 202 social psychology 1, 2, 54, 144–5, 203; East vs. West 198–9 social-cognitive theory 6, 138–41, 142–3 spirituality 291–2, 294, 297 Spivey, Cashton 25 stability, in trait-relevant behaviors 204, 205–6 Stanford Prison Experiment 2, 54 strategies 6, 139–40 subjective well-being 218, 225, 279, 281, 288; see also eudaimonic well-being Taoism 8, 215, 216, 218, 226, 227 tasks 6, 139–40 temperance 222, 270, 282, 289, 290, 294 Toi, Miho 117 training 76, 102, 124–6, 166; see also education; habituation traits: CAPS 205–6; in Eastern vs. Western cultures 203–7; global 1, 136–8; and paradigms 133–5; robust 1; and schemas 144–5; see also character traits; personality traits trait-state theories 137 transcendence 216, 222, 290 Triune Ethics Theory 146, 167, 172 Tu, Wei-ming 208, 209, 210, 211 unity thesis 36 Universal Coherence 7, 168, 169, 173

314 Index values: civic 290; Eastern 202–4; instrumental vs. terminal 57; intrinsic vs. extrinsic 57; linking motives to 56; Western 199, 202–4 Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Character Strengths 222, 290 Values in Action Inventory of Strength (VIA-IS) 222, 223 vices 2, 4, 125, 274; traditional 15, 16, 28n10; see also anguish; callousness; dishonesty; indifference virtue/virtues 2, 3; Aristotelian concept of 251–4, 269–70, 276, 282; causal model of 6, 120; in Chinese culture 8, 222–3, 227; classifications of 222; contextspecific 38; defined 221–2; and empathetic concern, 119–24; empirical grounding of 5; ethical 85–8; excessive 294; how it prevents unhappiness 290–1; how it promotes happiness 291–2; ideal 39–40; ideal vs. actual 35; interdisciplinary research on 3; nature of 36–8; and personality 135–6; relationship with happiness 10, 289–95, 297; six fundamental 290; skill model of 174; study of 1, 290; three core virtues (Chinese) 223–4, 227; traditional 16, 20, 28n10; true 66, and VA 273; and well-being 271, 293; see also character; conscientiousness; courage; curiosity; gratitude; honesty; hope; humanity; kindness; knowledge; justice, love; patience; relationship; selfcontrol; spirituality; temperance; transcendence; virtue ethics; virtue

theory; virtuous action; virtuous cycles; vitality; wisdom; zest virtue ethics 1–4, 28n6, 35–6, 38, 41, 43, 163; Aristotelian 15; cognitive structure for situationist challenge to 15–24, 241–51; see also Aristotelian virtue ethics virtuous action 5; automaticity in 75–7; joys of 294–5 virtuous cycles 296–7 vitality 8, 216, 223, 224, 227, 279 Wang, Yangming 163, 168–9, 171–2, 173, 174 Way (dao) 168, 208, 211 well-being: Aristotle’s account of 266–73; contextualism and 255–8; factors influencing 277–9; impact of SDB on 251–8; psychological 288; see also eudaimonia; eudaimonic wellbeing; happiness Weyant, James 20 Williams, Bernard 76 Wilson, John 25 Wilson, Timothy 91 wisdom 148, 210, 222, 290, 292, 293, 294; folk 221; practical 35, 102, 205, 253, 289 (see also phronesis; knowledge) Yang, Kuo-shu 206 Yan Hui 210 Yi Jing 216 Zagzebski, Linda T. 1 zest 8, 222, 223, 291, 292, 293, 297 Zhong, Chen-Bo 21 Zhongyong 209 Zhu, Xi 163 Zhuangzi 185