Moral Reflection

Moral Reflection

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Moral Reflection William Ransome Griffith University

© William Ransome 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22038–6 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–22038–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ransome, William, 1976– Moral reflection / William Ransome. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978–0–230–22038–6 1. Ethics. 2. Reflection (Philosophy) 3. Virtue. 4. Socrates. 5. Aristotle. 6. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804 I. Title. BJ1031.R26 2009 179’.9—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008034890

In memory of my father, Keith Horace Ransome 1946–1979 Beatus ille qui procul negotiis, ut prisca gens mortalium, paterna rura bobus exercet suis ... (Horace Epodes ii.1–3)

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1 Taking Virtues Seriously

5

2 The Virtue of Moral Reflectiveness

43

3 Socrates and the Life of Examination

78

4 Moral Reflectiveness in Aristotle’s Ethics

106

5 Kant’s Morally Reflective First Command?

143

6 Moral Reflectiveness and Moral Philosophy

174

Bibliography

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Index

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vii

Acknowledgements Many people have lent their support and encouragement to the writing of this book. I am particularly grateful to Michael Levine and Damian Cox for their extensive advice and commentary, which have greatly improved the discussion. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to Charles Sampford and the staff at the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance at Griffith University, who have midwived a long-awaited delivery with patient benignity. I must thank the Philosophy Department at The University of Queensland, several of whose members past and present – especially Tuan Nuyen, Graham Priest, the late Ian Hinckfuss, William Grey, Michelle Boulous Walker, Deborah Brown, Julian Lamont, Marguerite La Caze and Dominic Hyde – helped to form my philosophical ideas and offered encouragement and advice during early skirmishes with the book’s central themes. I must also thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan and a number of anonymous readers who have offered invaluable criticisms and suggestions for improvement. My greatest debt is to my family and to Rosemary Barry who have without demur borne the brunt of several extended bouts of febrile preoccupation with this book and who have always responded with a subtle admixture of forbearance, affection and loyal approbation – without which I should long since have foundered.

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Abbreviations

Works by Plato cited by abbreviation Apol. Lach.

Men. Prot.

Apology of Socrates (1997) trans. M. C. Stokes (ed.) (Warminster: Aris & Phillips). ‘Laches’, trans. B. Jowett, in E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds.) (1961) Plato: Collected Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton University Press). ‘Meno’, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Hamilton and Cairns (eds.). ‘Protagoras’, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Hamilton and Cairns (eds.).

Works by Aristotle cited by abbreviation EN MM

Nicomachean Ethics (2000) trans. and ed. R. Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ‘Magna Moralia’, trans. S. Stock, in W. D. Ross (ed.) (1925) The Works of Aristotle, Vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Works by Immanuel Kant cited by abbreviation G

MM R

‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’, trans. M. J. Gregor (ed.) (1996) Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, trans. M. J. Gregor, in Practical Philosophy. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1960) trans. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York: Harper).

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Introduction

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between. I didn’t know how much of it he believed himself. I didn’t know what he was playing up to – if he was playing up to anything at all – and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim. As moral agents, we suffer from a subtle but pervasive temptation to disregard and misrepresent to ourselves our past moral experiences. The temptation is particularly strong when remembering what we have done especially distresses us or threatens our self-esteem. Then again, sometimes it is just the past’s remoteness and our detachment from it [that] makes those experiences difficult to recall and analyse meaningfully. But what, after all, is the point of trying to get clear about our past moral experience? It is in the past, and if we are to live contentedly it might seem better to visit that other country only rarely. Our present concerns and moral future preoccupy us, and worrying about our moral past might seem a waste of valuable time and energy. Against this advice, I am convinced that there is something important missing if we evade concern for our past moral experiences. Some people appear to be very seriously concerned to come to grips with the moral character of their past. This concern is part and parcel of what it means for them to take their life seriously as a whole. I think we tend to admire such people and recognise that they are on to something important. What is more, our admiration seems to be a distinctively moral one. We feel that we ought to engage in this kind of critical moral 1

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reflection: that attaining lucidity about the moral character of our past is important and valuable, and that to be genuinely committed to such an end is a morally praiseworthy way to be. In the absence of such a commitment a person’s life has a hole in it – something important is missing. It also seems to me that the value of a morally reflective character is not exhausted by its instrumental value: to be morally reflective is not valuable to us just because it helps us correct our recurring moral mistakes, or act rightly, or otherwise lead an improved moral life – although it tends to help in these ways too. Its value seems to go beyond its usefulness. Moral lucidity – lucidity about our own past moral experience – is worth attaining in and of itself, even when its achievement does not help us out in practical affairs. Moreover, I think that the pursuit of moral lucidity as a deep motivation in our lives has intrinsic moral value of its own; it is morally admirable as a state of character, whether its possessor ultimately succeeds or fails in the pursuit. What interests me primarily in this book is how best to describe this intriguing moral state and its distinctive expression and how to explain what it means – including what it means for a moral theory – to take it seriously. My other main interest is to examine whether and how moral reflection has been recognised and accommodated in moral theories historically, represented by three eminent moral philosophers, Socrates, Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. In the first two chapters of the book, I develop an account of the nature and value of virtues in general, and particularly of the state of character I call moral reflectiveness. Contemporary debate surrounding the virtues centres on their moral status, so in Chapter 1, I develop an account of what it means to take virtues seriously, and offer my own dispositional state of character account of their psychological nature in response to Linda Zagzebski (1996). After considering what their psychological nature means for the moral status of the virtues, I examine the theory of a prominent virtue ethicist – Michael Slote – whose agent-based theory accords virtues primary moral value. I argue that this kind of agent-based theory has serious difficulties, and that the best way to account for the virtues whilst still taking them seriously is to be a pluralist about moral value. In Chapter 2, I offer my account of moral reflectiveness and suggest that it is a virtue of intrinsic moral value. I approach the account of moral reflectiveness through an account of moral consciousness, and the description of a specific retrospective, critical activity of moral consciousness that I call moral reflection. I characterise the state of

Introduction 3

moral reflectiveness itself as a genuine commitment to lucidity about one’s past moral experience, and specify what it means to hold a genuine commitment. My discussion of genuine commitment covers questions of sincerity and self-deception, and I ultimately specify the quality of genuineness of commitment through an account of key necessary conditions for genuineness. I argue that a genuine commitment to moral lucidity – moral reflectiveness – constitutes a virtue, and suggest that it ought to be taken seriously as such in any moral theory that takes virtues seriously. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, I turn my attention to a closely related question: how readily is the virtue of moral reflectiveness accommodated within moral theory? Of course one might simply include it in a list of moral virtues, but the deeper question turns on how moral reflectiveness interacts with other important moral concepts and how it might integrate with ambitious accounts of the nature and ground of moral worth. I approach this matter historically, examining the way moral reflectiveness emerges – or fails to emerge – in prominent and ambitious philosophical accounts of ethics. Socrates, as represented in the early Platonic dialogues, is famously associated with the thought that an unexamined life is not worth living, and this is a natural place to begin my historical inquiry. In Chapter 3, I examine Socrates’ expression of this thought in Plato’s Apology of Socrates and find on closer analysis that what Socrates means to say at this crucial point bears less resemblance to the common interpretation of his claim than might be supposed. Given a satisfactory account of Socrates’ background assumptions, I argue that what Socrates exhorts us to is not really a morally reflective life after all but a life of philosophical reflection. Although Socrates does not in the end exhort us to a specifically, morally reflective life, one might hope for a more explicit endorsement in Aristotle’s ethics, which accords virtues both contributory and intrinsic value and moreover is principally concerned with the nature and proper cultivation of moral virtues. In Chapter 4, I examine Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which the virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom occupies a central place. We might reasonably expect moral reflectiveness to be one of the primary sources for and constituents of phronesis and perhaps even an intrinsically valuable virtue in its own right. However, I argue that Aristotle’s virtue of phronesis has little to do with moral reflectiveness, and that we must look further, to his discussion of ordinary failure-prone moral agency, to elicit a central role for moral reflectiveness. In this discussion, I uncover a crucial role for moral reflectiveness in Aristotle’s conception of enkrateia – continence or self-control.

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Considerations of moral reflectiveness also surface – fleetingly – in the discussion of friendship in the Magna Moralia. In neither case, however, does Aristotle explicitly recognise or accord full value to moral reflectiveness as a virtue. I argue that at best its significance for Aristotle is only murky and indistinct. Immanuel Kant’s ethics might seem to be a perverse choice for my final consideration of moral reflectiveness in a moral theory. After all, Kant’s moral theory is renowned as the apogee of deontology – and deontological moral theories are traditionally considered unable to take virtues seriously. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Kant’s moral theory comes closest of all the theories I examine in this book to accommodating the importance and value of moral reflectiveness. In Chapter 5, I initially try to dispel the view that Kant’s theory is anathema to serious considerations of virtue, through an aretaically enlightened account of the nature and value of both a good will in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Kant’s conception of a moral maxim. I argue that there is room in Kant’s theory to accord virtues and moral reflectiveness intrinsic moral value. I outline Kant’s two duties of virtue and their place in his moral theory as he expounds them in the less well known Doctrine of Virtue, and moreover identify a passage where Kant explicitly recognises moral reflectiveness – albeit confusedly – and accords it special significance. However, I argue that Kant ultimately accords moral reflectiveness only a facilitating, instrumental role in his theory and question the extent to which moral reflectiveness could emerge undistorted in Kantian theory even if it were considered a virtue. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, I explore specific points in the history of moral philosophy where Socrates (Plato), Aristotle and Immanuel Kant might have been expected to consider moral reflectiveness as a virtue. However, despite its near-emergence, moral reflectiveness resists explicit acknowledgement in each case. Ultimately, I shall argue that the virtue of moral reflectiveness is not (or at least has not been) readily accommodated in moral theory. There are several reasons why moral reflectiveness doesn’t fully or easily emerge in these accounts, some of which I canvass in the discussion of Chapters 3, 4 and 5. In a brief final chapter, I attempt to draw out some of the central reasons why moral reflectiveness escapes explicit recognition, even in moral theories that take virtues seriously. Reflecting again on Anscombe’s original call for the abandonment of moral philosophy in its traditional deontic guises, I conclude by suggesting a promising future direction for philosophical inquiry into the virtues – one that makes room for the virtue of moral reflectiveness.

1 Taking Virtues Seriously

My aim in this book is threefold: to describe a distinctive kind of virtue, moral reflectiveness, which I believe ought itself to be found in moral theories that take virtues seriously; to inquire into whether and to what extent such a virtue has been recognised by three seminal figures in moral philosophy – Socrates (via Plato), Aristotle, and Immanuel Kant – and to reflect on its contemporary moral philosophical significance. However, before I embark on a description of moral reflectiveness, there are some important preliminary questions to be answered. What are moral virtues? What does it mean to take them seriously? In this opening chapter I inquire into the psychological nature and moral status of the virtues. I explain what I think it means to take virtues seriously in a moral theory and present my own rendering of the psychological nature of the virtues in light of Linda Zagzebski’s (1996) account. I also discuss whether virtues can be taken seriously at all, and if so, in the light of a close examination of Michael Slote’s agent-based virtue ethics (1997, 2001), how seriously they can be taken. This critical account of the nature and moral status of the virtues in general is a prologue to the description of the particular retrospective state I describe and claim to be a virtue in Chapter 2, moral reflectiveness. To begin, I briefly review the origins of the contemporary revival of interest in the virtues.

Virtue revival The last half-century has seen a renewal of interest in virtue ethics. The catalyst for this renewal has been G.E.M. Anscombe’s 1958 article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy.’ Anscombe criticises modern moral philosophy’s preoccupation with quasi-legalistic moral concepts, which she claims make sense only in the context of belief in a divine lawgiver – a 5

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belief she thinks is no longer credible (1958, 5–6). Anscombe argues that such concepts in moral philosophy as obligation and duty, right and wrong, ‘ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it’ (1958, 1). Furthermore, there is ‘no content ... in the notion “morally ought” ’ any more, and thus, ‘It would be most reasonable to drop it. It has no reasonable sense outside a law conception of ethics’ (1958, 8). Anscombe claims, however, that an alternative to using these ‘very fishy’ legalistic concepts in moral philosophy does exist, ‘as is shown by the example of Aristotle’ (1958, 8). The suggestion is as follows: It would be a great improvement if, instead of ‘morally wrong’, one always named a genus such as ‘untruthful’, ‘unchaste’, ‘unjust’. We should no longer ask whether doing something was ‘wrong’, passing directly from some description of an action to this notion; we should ask whether, e.g., it was unjust; and the answer would sometimes be clear at once. (1958, 8–9) Anscombe’s alternative ethical vocabulary – terms such as ‘truthful’, ‘chaste’ and ‘just’ – is a vocabulary of virtue terms. She argues that ethics would be much better off with virtue terms such as these than with the ‘moral’ terms modern moral philosophy has given us – such as ‘ought’, ‘obligation’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Virtue terms refer primarily to qualities of character and only derivatively to actions. The alternative, rejected moral terms do not refer to qualities of people at all but to laws or principles of action. These laws and principles of action, according to Anscombe’s argument, have no objective basis. Therefore, the vocabulary of modern moral philosophy is effectively meaningless. Concepts referring to qualities of people, derivatively to their actions – and not at all to ‘very fishy’ laws or principles – appear to be much more promising. Anscombe sees a difficulty, however, with using virtue concepts: ‘it is because of a big gap in philosophy that we can give no general account of the concept of virtue and of the concept of justice, but have to proceed, using the concepts, only by giving examples’ (1958, 16). Moral philosophy is now well used to a moral context of laws and principles of action, and the dramatic separation between our own philosophical age and Aristotle’s means that moral philosophy a does not have satisfactory account of morally salient qualities of people – an account of the relevant elements

Taking Virtues Seriously

7

of human psychology. The explanatory gap, according to Anscombe, is therefore a gap in the philosophy of psychology. If we wish to talk, in a modern way, ‘roughly how Plato and Aristotle talk’ – thus avoiding misguided modern concepts – ‘it can be seen philosophically there is a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human “flourishing” ’ (1958, 18). Anscombe is consequently pessimistic about the usefulness of doing moral philosophy in the absence of such an account: the modern way of doing moral philosophy is fatally flawed, and the alternative revived virtue ethics does not have hold of the conceptual tools it needs. She concludes ‘that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’ (1958, 1). Presumably, once an adequate philosophy of psychology has been constructed, moral philosophy can be taken up again, based this time on psychologically well-founded virtue concepts.

The nature of the virtues: Psychological and moral Anscombe’s article has sparked a widespread revival of philosophical debate centred on the virtues of character. This revival has not, however, relied on the validity of Anscombe’s claims about the meaninglessness of deontic ethical concepts. Recent philosophers who have taken an interest in the virtues have not abandoned moral philosophy in the pursuit of a psychological foundation for ethics. Instead, philosophical analysis and debate surrounding the virtue concepts and virtue ethics has focused on both the psychological and the moral nature of the virtues, as well as the development of a critique of modern moral philosophy. The psychological and moral dimensions of the virtues are indeed intimately bound together, but it is not clear that a definitive psychological account of the virtue concepts will lead, as Anscombe thought, to a definitive conclusion about their centrality in ethics. As David Elliott points out, Anscombe’s idea of establishing the foundations of morality on ‘a single theoretical position in a different area of philosophy or empirical research – in this case the philosophy of mind or psychology’, is problematic (1993, 326). It is clear, however, that virtue ethics does offer a distinctive approach in psychological terms, since its focus is not primarily on actions people perform but on qualities of character. What distinguishes virtue ethics from other approaches is that it prefers what Michael Slote calls ‘aretaic characterizations in terms of excellence,

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moral goodness, or admirability to deontic evaluations making use of notions like “ought”, “wrong”, and “obligation” (1997, 239). Linda Zagzebski distinguishes a virtue theory from other moral theories simply by the fact that ‘it focuses analysis more on the concepts involved in the evaluation of persons than on act evaluation’ (1996, 78). Since an analytical focus on the evaluation of persons does not in itself assume that actions derive their moral worth from qualities of people, and since it does not assume any particular theory of the good, there is a diverse range of views on what kind of moral worth the virtues have within virtue theory. These views range from the weakest, ‘agentfocused’ theories (Slote 1997, 240) to the strongest, ‘hyper-agent-based’ (Zagzebski 1996, 80–1) forms of virtue ethics. The weakest virtue theories focus on the virtues but do not derive the concept of a right act from the concept of a virtue. The strongest virtue theories, classified as ‘pure’ or ‘agent-based’, do derive the rightness of action from the virtues. Zagzebski points out that this is a claim both about conceptual priority and ‘moral ontology’: the concept of a right act is defined in terms of the concept of a virtue; and the property of rightness in action ‘is something that emerges from the inner traits of persons’ (1996, 79). Traditional moral theories that do not accord the virtues a fundamental role as moral concepts – deontic theories or ethics of duty – represent perhaps the greatest philosophical threat to the development of agent-based theories. They tend (although this tendency is not quite as pronounced as it once was) to focus their analysis more narrowly on concepts involved in act or conduct evaluation. These moral theories, most notably utilitarianism and Kantian deontology, traditionally treat the definition of a virtue, and the source of its moral worth, as derivable from the prior definition and valuation of deontic moral properties. They typically consider inner traits of people as morally valuable, for example, only insofar as they dispose people to follow the moral law or produce right acts. Deontic theories thus typically define the virtues as skills or dispositions people possess which lead them to correctly apply moral rules or perform right acts (in turn ultimately determined by their version of consequentialist or deontological first principles). Gregory Trianosky sets up the distinction between virtue ethics and ethics of duty along aretaic/deontic lines, tracing the conflicting attitudes to the virtues back to a divergence of views on the proper ground of moral judgement: To speak roughly, in its pure form an ethics of duty holds that only judgments about right action are basic in morality, and that the

Taking Virtues Seriously

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virtuousness of traits is always derivative in some way from the prior rightness of actions ... Conversely, an ethics of virtue in its pure form holds that only judgments about virtue are basic in morality, and that the rightness of actions is always somehow derivative from the virtuousness of traits. (1990, 336) Thus, an account of the nature of the virtues appears to be intimately bound to another, closely related debate – whether the virtues are fundamental or derivative in moral evaluation. The two alternatives Trianosky presents are that right action has primary moral worth and the virtues derive their moral worth from their association with right action or that virtues have primary moral worth and right actions derive their moral worth from their association with the virtues. An argument for the first of these alternatives does not require a separate account of the virtues in psychological terms, since they are essentially whatever, psychologically, causes an agent to do the right thing. The virtues have only derivative moral worth – moral worth that is entirely reducible to the prior worth of something else – and hence there need be no psychological depth to an account of their nature. An argument for the second of these two alternatives, however, appears to require an account of just what kind of moral and psychological qualities the virtues are. If the virtues do indeed have primary – or at least irreducible (intrinsic or contributory) – moral worth, then they must be significant in the psychology of morally good people. If the virtues – inner qualities of morally good people – are to be basic or irreducible in moral theory, then an account of their nature in terms of human psychology seems, prima facie, to be essential. As Elliott points out, if the virtues cannot be accounted for in definite psychological terms, the claim that they are morally basic seems to be more difficult to maintain against the ethics of duty (Elliott 1993, 317). If the irreducibility of the virtues cannot be maintained, due to the inability to account for the virtues in specific psychological terms, then the assertions of an ethics of duty will gain greater plausibility. If those assertions prevail, then the case for the virtues to be taken seriously in their own right as ethical concepts loses at least some of its appeal. At this point I ought to clarify what I think it means to ‘take virtues seriously’. Christine Swanton says that one requirement for virtue ethics to be taken seriously – that is, ‘as a separate kind of moral theory’ – is that it ‘must offer its own virtue-centred conceptions’ of a whole raft of moral concepts (2003, 4). Swanton herself embarks on this endeavour. My own criterion for taking virtues seriously – I am not

10 Moral Reflection

concerned to defend the whole virtue ethics edifice but only to describe and endorse a virtue – is narrower. Put briefly, on my account taking virtues seriously means attributing to them as moral dispositions or motivations a value that is not wholly reducible to the prior value of deontic (duty-based) moral properties or states of affairs. By deontic moral properties I primarily mean right and wrong action, determined on either a consequentialist or deontological basis. This understanding of virtue-irreducibility reveals itself in the specific relation between the virtues and right action. There are at least three ways to represent the connection between virtues and right action in a moral theory: the moral worth of a virtue is derived from (reducible to) the prior value of right action; the moral worth of right action is derived from (reducible to) the prior value of the virtues; or – between these extremes – virtues have moral worth that is at least not reducible to the prior rightness of actions. In the first of these three alternatives, right action is primary, and the virtues have derivative and thus reducible moral worth. The virtues are not ‘taken seriously’ by defenders of this view, since under this view the moral worth of a virtue is reducible to the prior rightness of acts, which is in turn determined by whatever consequentialist or deontological theory it is ultimately defined under. A virtue is, for example, whatever state or collection of states causes an agent to produce a morally right act of a certain sort reliably in appropriate circumstances. On the second view, primacy and reducibility are reversed: the virtues are primary, and the moral worth of right action is reducible. This view represents what Zagzebski (1996) and Slote (1997, 2001) call ‘agent-based’ virtue ethics and what Trianosky (1990) calls a ‘pure’ ethics of virtue: the concept of a right act is defined in terms of the concept of a virtue, and the rightness of actions derives from – reduces to – the prior value of the virtues. Not only is the moral worth of the virtues not reducible to deontic moral properties but the value of deontic properties reduces to the prior value of virtues. For example, on Michael Slote’s theory, the rightness or wrongness of actions depends wholly on whether they display or exemplify benevolence (Slote 1997, 2001). Under this view the virtues are taken very seriously indeed as moral concepts, since they have primacy. What I mean by virtue primacy is that the value of the virtues not only does not depend on prior deontic (consequentialist or deontological) attributions of moral worth but deontic attributions of moral worth depend on (reduce to the prior value of) the virtues. On the third view, a virtue need not be defined specifically in terms of right action or valued due to nothing more than its connection with right action. Under this view, a virtue’s moral worth can be

Taking Virtues Seriously

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contributory, intrinsic or primary. What distinguishes this broader virtue-irreducibility view from the virtue-primacy view is that it is not committed to a particular position on the connection between virtues and right action – right action may, but need not, be defined in terms of the virtues; its rightness may, but need not, be reducible to the prior value of the virtues. If a virtue has intrinsic moral worth it means that it is accorded value for its own sake, regardless of any right action it brings about, and this does not lead to a conclusion about its defining or being the source of the rightness of actions. If a virtue has contributory moral worth it means that it partly constitutes – is an ineliminable feature of – the source of intrinsic or primary value.

Aristotle’s account Although there is not a single agreed-upon account of the precise nature of the virtues among contemporary virtue theorists, there is a strong resemblance between modern accounts. This strong resemblance can be explained by the fact that most contemporary accounts of the virtues, following Anscombe’s suggestion, have their genesis in ancient Greek ethics – particularly the ethics of Aristotle. Rosalind Hursthouse’s (1999) well-known account of virtue, for example, is explicitly based on Aristotle’s. Originally, the Greek arete, translated as ‘virtue’, meant ‘the excellence or goodness of any thing whatsoever according to its kind or for its proper use’ (Wright 1963, 137). However, in Aristotle, the concept of arete is applied specifically to human excellence or goodness. The genus of virtue, according to Aristotle (EN 1106a13–14) is a state of character. By states of character Aristotle means deep and enduring psychological states acquired through habituation, ‘in respect of which we are well or badly disposed in relation to feelings’ (EN 1105b25–6), for which we are ‘praised and blamed’ (i.e. for which we are held responsible) (EN 1106a2), and ‘are rational choices or at any rate involve rational choice’ (EN 1106a4–5). A virtue ‘will be the state that makes a human being good and makes him perform his characteristic activity well’ (EN 1106a22–3). Virtues make people good qua human beings and also determine good choices of action by determining that the virtuous person responds well: For example, fear, confidence, appetite, anger, pity, and in general pleasure and pain can be experienced too much or too little, and in both ways not well. But to have them at the right time, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the

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right way, is the mean and best; and this is the business of virtue. (EN 1106b18–23) The ultimate end of virtue – what is good without qualification – is eudaimonia, translated either (potentially quite misleadingly) as ‘happiness’ or, with Anscombe and many others since, as ‘human flourishing’ or ‘well-being’. Aristotle closely associates the virtues with eudaimonia: he says that his account is in harmony with ‘those who say that happiness is virtue or some particular virtue’ (EN 1098b35–6). Aristotle qualifies this statement by saying that the chief good of virtue is in its exhibition rather than in its mere possession: ‘For while a state can exist without producing any good consequences ... this is impossible for an activity: it will necessarily engage in action, and do so well’ (EN 1099a1–4). Aristotle states that, while eudaimonia requires good fortune and external goods ‘as complementary to a fully human life’ (EN 1100b10–11), ‘What really matters for happiness are activities in accordance with virtue, and for the contrary of happiness the contrary kind of activities’ (EN 1100b11–13). The virtues, which are the states that produce virtuous activity, therefore have a contributory role in achieving eudaimonia. However, it is worth noting that Aristotle accords the virtues value independently even of their contributory role in eudaimonia: ‘Honour, pleasure, intellect, and every virtue we do indeed choose for themselves (since we would choose each of them even if they had no good effects), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness’ (EN 1097b2–4). Turning this statement around, we choose the virtues for the sake of eudaimonia but also for themselves. That is, Aristotle believes the virtues have intrinsic value: they are worth having for their own sake, regardless of the good they also bring about.

A contemporary account Something like the above Aristotelian ‘states of character’ account of the virtues provides the dominant basis for modern virtue ethics. As already mentioned, Hursthouse’s account is drawn explicitly from Aristotle. G.H. von Wright also follows Aristotle in defining the virtues as states of character (1963, 144), although he cashes them out in a not necessarily Aristotelian manner. He expands on the nature of the virtues in terms of their role ‘to counteract, eliminate, rule out the obscuring effects which emotion may have on our practical judgment’ (1963, 147). The virtuous agent ‘has learnt to conquer the obscuring effects of passion upon his judgments of good and evil’ (147). Ultimately,

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the virtues are all ‘so many forms of self-control’ – the ‘master virtue’ (148–9). Arguably, an Aristotelian approach would represent the virtuous agent as having developed the appropriate emotional responses to various choice-making instances rather than having ‘ruled out’ or ‘conquered’ emotions. Certainly, it would seem that having emotional self-control as a master virtue seems much more a Platonic or Stoic – or indeed Kantian – than an Aristotelian idea; for Aristotle, there is a sharp difference between phronesis and enkrateia. Bernard Williams defines a virtue as ‘an ethically admirable disposition of character’ and describes virtues as ‘traits of character’, connecting them – perhaps more loosely than would a neo-Aristotelian – with the idea of human flourishing (1985, 9). Christine Swanton, in her recent pluralistic non-Aristotelian (and non-eudaimonistic) account of the virtues, nevertheless defines a virtue as ‘a good quality of character’ (2003, 19). Linda Zagzebski also uses an Aristotelian template in defining the virtues, engaging with Aristotle’s own discussion of the nature of virtue (1996, 84–137). I employ Zagzebski’s detailed account as the model against which to compare and contrast my own general picture of the psychological nature of a virtue. On my account, which diverges somewhat from neo-Aristotelian views, a virtue is an acquired excellence in moral motivation, typically deeply entrenched by habituation, which is admirable and constitutes part of what it is to live a good moral life. There are some important qualifications and clarifications to be made regarding my understanding of the psychological nature of a virtue, which I explore here through a brief examination of the central themes in Zagzebski’s account. Virtues and natural capacities Firstly, Zagzebski locates the virtues generally, as excellences of a person and as properties ‘that we attribute to the person in a deep and important sense’; her aim, therefore, is ‘to identify what it is about virtue that sets it apart from other excellences and other states of the soul’ (1996, 85). This is a distinctively Aristotelian approach to identifying the nature of the virtues – it is very much what Aristotle himself sets out to do in his general account of the virtues (EN 1102a–1115a). Zagzebski initially distinguishes the virtues from natural capacities, processes, faculties and qualities of temperament. Although some natural capacities are among the excellent qualities of people, they have not been acquired, properly speaking, by the virtuous person. Describing a virtue as an acquired excellence of the soul captures the sense in which we consider the virtues (and vices) states for which a person can be held

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responsible. Being acquired, in a certain sense of the term, is a necessary condition for a quality of a person to be such that he or she is held accountable for it, although Zagzebski points out that it is not sufficient (1996, 103). On this view, natural qualities or capacities that people display spontaneously from very early on in their lives – say natural charm, liveliness, humour, a gregarious nature – are qualities for which a person ought not in principle be praised (or blamed) in a moral sense. Such qualities are not virtues, although this leaves open an account of what kinds of qualities and capacities count as natural and how we might in practice distinguish them from acquired ones. A similar point to Zagzebski’s is also made by Aristotle himself (EN 1103a16–30; 1106a8–12). Virtues are typically acquired voluntarily over time by a person – Aristotle tells us that ‘nature gives us the capacity to acquire them, and completion comes through habituation’ (EN 1103a25–6) – whereas natural capacities do not come to be possessed through either choice or habit on the part of their possessor (although presumably some natural excellences can be moulded and reshaped in this way, thus being transformed into virtues). The central point to be extracted from Zagzebski’s distinction between natural capacities and virtues is the Aristotelian claim that we cannot be held accountable for the advantages (or disadvantages) nature has given us, whereas we are accountable for our acquired excellences (or deficiencies) of character. The distinction can perhaps be clarified by considering the temperaments and natural capacities of young children, for which we clearly do not hold them accountable. We are, for example, more likely to be fond of a child who displays a charming, sympathetic temperament than a child who displays an emotionally distant and difficult nature; yet we hold neither of them accountable for these natural tendencies any more than we would think it justifiable to praise or blame them for how pretty or intelligent they were. The kinds of natural qualities to which Aristotle refers are analogous to these qualities in children, although with a certain qualification. Adults have, and have had, the opportunity to reflect on and modify many of their own natural qualities and capacities – to change, mould, refine, develop or to let deteriorate, override or abandon. Here, the analogy with children breaks down. The idea that Aristotle and Zagzebski endorse is that we ought not in principle to morally praise or blame people for qualities they cannot help having – those over which they have had no opportunity to exercise any agency. I also endorse this view, which has obvious intuitive appeal. Yet I also think that we can expect this class of pure,

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childlike natural qualities to be rare in adulthood – the fact that we do hold people responsible for admirable and less-than-admirable features of themselves which we refrain from morally judging in children lends some support to this view. The extent to which adults can plausibly retain natural qualities in the childlike sense is doubtful, given the opportunities we all have had (some taken, others not) to exercise at least some degree of agency. Given the assumption of at least a basic level of agency, people can also be assumed to have (at least the opportunity of) some degree of influence over what shape their long-term, settled moral character takes, apart from what nature originally provided. We commonly assume, in other words, that people have some degree of influence over whether they are or will become a certain kind of person – whether, for instance, they acquire excellences of character despite their countervailing natural tendencies or develop promising qualities already possessed, such as natural sympathy, into various excellences of character. It is because this kind of agency is already assumed – that people can contribute to their own character in this way – that accountability for excellences and deficiencies of character, and the distinction between virtues (and vices) and natural capacities (and deficiencies) arises. Whether we can reliably distinguish between people’s natural and acquired qualities in practice and to what extent our holding them responsible – according praise and blame – relies or should rely on this distinction, of course, are separate (and difficult) questions. Virtues and skills The fact that in general skills, unlike natural capacities, are acquired excellences leads Zagzebski to the question of whether the virtues are a special category of, or are distinct from, skills (1996, 106–16). Zagzebski argues that virtues are not skills, essentially because ‘virtues are prior to skills and are strongly connected to motivational structure, whereas skills are more connected to effectiveness in action’ (1996, 116). Zagzebski reviews several related arguments for the distinction between virtues and skills, from both Aristotle (EN 1105a24–b4) and recent virtue literature, and adds two arguments of her own. Philippa Foot (1978, 9) and Gilbert Meilaender (1984) both argue that skills are ‘only capacities’ that can be exercised or not exercised at will if possessed, whereas virtues are not possessed if they are not exercised in the appropriate circumstances (Zagzebski 1996, 107). James Wallace (1978) offers several arguments intended to distinguish virtues from skills.

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The most persuasive of Wallace’s contentions, according to Zagzebski, is ‘that skills are or are closely associated with techniques, whereas virtues are not’(1996, 108; Wallace 1978, 46). Whereas a skill is the mastery of a specific sort of action that is difficult to perform, a virtue has more to do with the mastery of difficulties ‘due to contrary inclinations (past or present)’ (Zagzebski 1996, 108). In other words, the difficulty of a skill – which accounts for the condition that it is gradually acquired – is primarily a technical or act-directed difficulty (i.e. it is external); the difficulty of a virtue, on the other hand, is primarily motive-related (i.e. it is internal). Wallace’s third ground for distinguishing virtues and skills is that a skill can be forgotten but a virtue cannot (1978, 46). Zagzebski does not consider this ground a convincing one and points out that Robert Roberts (1984, 240) makes a persuasive case against both assertions (1996, 109–10). Virtues can, in a sense, be forgotten. Some technical skills, on the other hand, can be so deeply ingrained in a person that they are never forgotten. Zagzebski argues that Sarah Broadie (1991, 89) identifies a more convincing distinction along the same lines, based on her interpretation of Aristotle’s comment that the virtuous do not forget their virtues (EN 1100b19–20). Broadie argues that it is compatible with a skill that a person voluntarily gives it up but that this is not so with a virtue. It would not count against the possession of a skill to voluntarily give it up, whereas ‘it is partly constitutive of a virtue that the possessor never voluntarily lets it go’ (Zagzebski 1996, 110; Broadie 1991, 89). Further, related grounds for the distinction are extracted by Wallace, Broadie and Zagzebski from Aristotle’s own distinction between the arts (i.e. skill) and the virtues. One argument is that it is satisfactory as far as the product of an art (skill) goes that it meets a certain standard, whereas the exhibition of virtue requires ‘additional qualities of the agent’s will and enduring character’ (Zagzebski 1996, 111). Another is that a lack of skill ‘implies no defect in what [an agent] has done on this occasion’, as long as what has been done is what a skilled person would have done, which is not the case with virtues. (Broadie 1991, 83) A third ground, based on Aristotle’s claim that virtuous action must proceed from ‘a firm and unshakeable character’ (EN 1105a36) is that it does not count against the possession of a skill that it fails to be exhibited ‘in the face of distractions’ or due to persuasion, whereas this is clearly not the case with the virtues (Broadie 1991, 89; Zagzebski 1996, 112). Zagzebski adds two further grounds of her own: that a virtue has a contrary vice (for example, courage has as its contrary cowardice) while skills do not; and that the value associated with the

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exhibition of a skill is extrinsic to the skill itself, whereas ‘a virtue is intrinsically valuable’ (1996, 112–13). Zagzebski maintains that there are both moral virtues and moral skills, the role of the moral skills being that they ‘serve virtues by allowing a person who is virtuously motivated to be effective in action’ (1996, 113). Thus, the virtue of courage is served, for example, by the skills of ‘knowing how to stand up to a tormentor’; the virtue of compassion is served by the skills of ‘knowing what to say to the bereaved’; the virtue of generosity is served by the skills of ‘being effective in giving to others (e.g. in a way that does not embarrass them)’ (1996, 113). This distinction between the roles of virtues and skills – a division of labour in the moral psychology of virtue – rings true. The moral virtues may have many skills associated with them or only a few or perhaps none. Zagzebski suggests that virtues having no associated skills might include humility, sincerity and the Christian virtues faith and hope (1996, 13). It is unclear, however, whether any of these – especially the latter two – are virtues at all; whereas there seem to be many skills associated with humility and sincerity. We might expect a sincere agent to have moral skills associated with the avoidance of the temptation to exaggerate, dissimulate and dissemble. This last point would, I think, also apply to humility (if it is to be counted as a virtue). There may also be skills, Zagzebski adds, such as tact and self-control, which serve many virtues but do not correlate with one particular virtue (1996, 114). Zagzebski concludes that there is a valid distinction to be made between virtues and skills, which divides them in terms of psychological depth: the motivational component of virtues is central whereas external effectiveness is peripheral; the comparative importance of these two elements is reversed in the case of moral skills. Also – and this seems to be a telling distinction – ‘Virtues have a broader range of application than do skills, at least typically, whereas skills tend to be more subject specific, context specific, and role specific’ (1996, 115). A person who is virtuously motivated is disposed to produce the external consequences desirable from the virtuous point of view and will be motivated to learn and maintain the skills required for ‘effectiveness in action’(1996, 115). However, Zagzebski points out that it is possible in principle for an agent to possess the motivational component while at the same time lacking the skills to be effective in action. Still, this does not mean that the agent does not possess the virtue in question, since virtue is to be found primarily in motivation rather than effectiveness (1996, 116). I shall return to the discussion of this point below.

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Virtues and habituation Another important question in the psychology of virtue is whether gradual acquisition by habituation is ‘intrinsic to the nature of a virtue ... or whether the fact that a virtue requires training and develops over time is just an accidental feature of it’ (Zagzebski 1996, 117). The fact that a virtue is acquired rather than given by nature is part of what distinguishes it, as we have seen, from natural faculties and capacities. Zagzebski follows Aristotle in arguing that a virtue is traditionally acquired through long habituation from childhood through to maturity (1996, 103). She raises the question, however, of whether it is part of the nature of the virtues that they are acquired by the kind of habituation Aristotle describes (EN 1103a–b) or whether they could be acquired (less gradually and laboriously) by other means (1996, 117). To pursue this line of inquiry, Zagzebski considers the acquisition of a virtue ‘via Robert Nozick’s imaginary transformation machine’ (1996, 117). Could a virtue be acquired at the flip of a switch in Nozick’s transformation machine (Nozick 1974, 44) by someone who is not virtuous? Zagzebski argues that the process of gradual acquisition by habituation is essential for the possession of a virtue; the transformation machine cannot produce virtues. Her argument is that, for a human being, ‘moral identity is intrinsically connected with a series of experiences of interaction with the world around her’ (1996, 120). Human virtues, she argues, are acquired only through ‘certain habits of feeling and acting’, over a lengthy period, from within this series of experiences. The praise we have for a virtuous person takes this manner of acquisition as a condition – we are partly praising the moral work the virtuous person has put in over a long period in acquiring virtue. Nozick’s transformation machine, which produces virtues at the flip of a switch, ‘is not even conceptually possible if it is intended to produce human virtues. The reason is that a virtue is not a human virtue if it is acquired at the flip of a switch’ (1996, 120). The transformed person has not done enough to be praised in the appropriate sense in Zagzebski’s view and in any case is not the same person after the switch has been flipped. Her selfhood includes, intrinsically, her previous lack of virtue; she would maintain selfhood – and be worthy of praise – only if she overcame her lack of virtue by gradual (hard-won) character change (1996, 121). Zagzebski concludes that it is not accidental to the possession of the virtues that they are acquired over a long time through habituation but that ‘it is part of the nature of a virtue in the standard case that it be an entrenched quality that is the result of moral work on the part of the human agent, and that it be acquired by a process of habituation’ (1996, 125).

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On this point I disagree. Zagzebski’s appeal to moral identity and selfhood in securing the point that the virtues must be acquired by habituation appears somewhat dubious. That the person who results from the Nozickian transformation has a different moral point of view to the moral agent who existed before does not establish that there is a breakdown in self-identity. If the idea of the transformation machine were to be replaced by a more plausible human example – a profound moral experience – then it would also be plausible that an agent, as a consequence of the experience, also suddenly and dramatically changed her whole moral point of view. Her moral motivations may change, due to the profound experience, and she might become virtuous by it. This profound, moral identity-changing experience would be one of the ‘series of experiences of interaction with the world around her’, and the agent would have no difficulty integrating the change of moral identity into his or her sense of self. This point may bear some relation to Bernard Williams’s well-known distinction between internal and external reasons (Williams 1981). The salient point to be made in this discussion, however, is that in a moral life these kinds of opportunities for sudden character change are unlikely to occur (or will be very rare), and if one does arise, the person must have acquired at least some background set of readied enabling states in order to transform dramatically as a response. Zagzebski herself alludes to this kind of background moral ability in considering moral virtues analogous to artistic creativity and originality: ‘it might be that even before the conversion, the moral convert possessed a virtue that gave him a cast of mind that made him ripe for insights and able to embrace them with enthusiasm’ (1996, 124). I would argue, additionally, that the conversion must be such that it involves an element of agency on the part of the agent such that the agent can be held responsible for her own subsequent character. In the case of an experience machine transformation, the moral work done by the agent is tempered by the experience itself, but there is still agency involved in the acquisition. Hovering behind this position, again, is the condition that a virtue be a quality for which we hold a person accountable. I think that we ought not in principle to hold a person accountable for qualities to which they have had no opportunity to contribute their own agency. Yet I also think that it is unlikely that our settled moral motivations in adulthood can plausibly be considered natural – the opportunities for agency over the dispositions that motivate our conduct have by adulthood become a constant (if usually background) feature in our lives. The manner of agency need not be overt or self-conscious: in the case of natural

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tendencies that bloom into full virtue, the growth can be so gradual and subtle that they still appear in a sense ‘natural’, but I think that this appearance can be quite misleading. A person’s natural excellences, in Aristotle’s and Zagzebski’s sense, are by definition the qualities a person possesses prior to, and independently of, their own agency. They are the ‘raw materials’ that a person has due to good fortune, which provides a sufficient ground for ruling natural excellences out of contention for moral status as virtues proper unless we are willing to entertain a central place for moral luck in our account of virtue. The element of acquisition by a process of habituation is not essential to the nature of the virtues on my view – they can be acquired, at least in principle, quite suddenly – but there is still a strong connection. Zagzebski’s conclusion is on my view correct in saying that, in the standard case, a virtue is a deeply entrenched quality that is acquired by a process of habituation. However, the element that I think Zagzebski correctly identifies as being essential to the nature of the virtues is that they result from some measure of agency on the virtuous agent’s part, not that the process of habituation itself is essential. Virtues, motives and emotions Having distinguished virtues from natural capacities and skills and having established that there is a strong (though not inevitable) link between the nature of the virtues and acquisition through a process of habituation on the part of the virtuous agent, Zagzebski defines virtues in terms of motivations (1996, 126–137). She has already argued, in developing the distinction between virtues and skills, that virtues are connected more with excellence in motivation than external effectiveness. It is an account of motivations, then, that is decisive in determining the nature of the virtues. Motivations, according to Zagzebski, are motives ‘in the dispositional sense’ (1996, 132). Generally, a motive is ‘a force acting within us to initiate and direct action’ (1996, 129). A motive is usually taken to be ‘an occurrence used to explain a particular act’, and in the directly act-related sense ‘a motive is understood as occurring at a particular moment of time or span of time’ (1996, 132). A motivation, on the other hand, is the kind of motive that persists over time, which is ‘almost continually operative’ and works ‘at moderate or even weak levels of intensity’ (1996, 131–2). Motivations in the dispositional sense initiate and direct actions, ‘for the most part, without getting to a level of intensity that forces our consciousness to focus on them for an appreciable length of time’ (1996, 132). Dispositional motives of this kind, according to Zagzebski, ‘are among

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the more important motives because they drive most of our behaviour’ (1996, 132). The definition of a motivation is ‘a persistent tendency to be moved by a motive of a certain kind’ (1996, 132). The motivational component of a virtue, according to Zagzebski, is a persistent tendency to be moved by motives specific to that virtue. For example, benevolent motivation is ‘a disposition to have a benevolent motive’ (1996, 133). This, however, is uninformative. What we require is an account of a benevolent motive. A motive is an action-guiding force that lasts for a moment or a span of time and explains a particular act. An end or desire seems to at least partially fit this description, and so does an emotion. Zagzebski argues, however, that the mere specification of an end does not account for someone’s motive, and nor is the situation improved if it is added that she desires that end. Desires do not fully account for motives because they do not properly explain why a certain state of affairs is desired, Zagzebski claims, only that it is. According to Zagzebski, virtuous motives have an aspect of desire but also include ‘something about why a state of affairs is desired, and that includes something about the way my emotions are tied to my aim’ (1996, 131). Emotions, she claims, explain more fully why someone desires a certain state of affairs. A motive, in Zagzebski’s view, ‘in the sense relevant to an inquiry into virtue is an emotion or feeling that initiates and directs action towards an end’ (1996, 131). Unfortunately, Zagzebski offers no satisfactory account of the virtuous emotions to show us what it is about them that explains virtuous motives any better than desires do. In the example of benevolent motivation, Zagzebski’s assertion that virtuous motives are emotions sheds remarkably little light: ‘it involves a disposition to have characteristic emotions that direct action in a particular direction, probably the well-being of others’ (1996, 132). ‘Characteristic desires’ would be just as informative, or otherwise, here. Zagzebski appears unable, independently of the characterisation of the virtue in question, to say which emotions virtuous motives actually are. She is forced into oblique, and ultimately opaque, reference to them. She calls virtuous motives, for example, ‘benevolent feelings’ and ‘the emotion that is characteristic of acts of courage’ (1996, 130), and appeals to the reader’s imagination: ‘I will assume that when the reader imagines such cases, she imagines being in certain emotional states and is able to do so even if she and I are unable to identify the emotion by name’ (1996, 130). I disagree with Zagzebski’s claim that motives, in the sense relevant to an inquiry into the virtues, ought to be defined exclusively in terms of action-guiding emotions. Motives in the aretaic sense are moral

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motives: a moral motive is what both drives and explains a person’s moral action. In characterising motives as emotions, Zagzebski gives little attention to the view that a person’s motives are also their reasons for acting. It is our reasons for acting that explain why we act one way rather than another, and reasons are sourced from a variety of psychological origins, represented by what Williams (1981, 102) calls our ‘subjective motivational set’. Emotions have a role in the account of a moral motive: moral emotions, such as Zagzebski attempts to describe, can be reasons for acting one way rather than another. However, it seems obvious that emotions alone do not satisfactorily explain – give the full range of reasons for – people’s moral motives. A full account of the nature of a moral motive is well beyond the scope of my present project, but it is useful here to say a little about some of the states that inform moral motives. A moral motive is formed out of and is informed by – and is an expression of – that part of our motivational set that represents, roughly, our moral dispositions: the (reflective or unreflective, implicit or explicit) convictions, commitments, plans, projects, values, thoughts, beliefs, doubts, emotions, desires and judgements about the things we consider morally relevant, important or worthwhile. I use ‘moral’ here in roughly the way that Williams prefers to use ‘ethical’, without the sharp deontic limitations – those tying its use strictly to the notions of obligation and duty – that attach to what he calls ‘the narrower system’ of morality (Williams 1985, 6). In this usage of ‘moral’ and its cognates, I also follow Williams’s view (on ‘ethical’ and its cognates) about the range of considerations thus encompassed: it is ‘not clearly delimited’, and it ‘does no harm that the notion is vague’ (1985, 7). It seems clear that complex psychological phenomena such as those mentioned are the most likely candidates for motivating moral conduct. An account of the way these sorts of psychological states have combined to produce each isolated moral action – if we were to grant that it made sense to analyse moral experience in this particular way – would probably be sufficient to explain that action. However, it is also clear that these states are not wholly explicable in terms of emotions. They are more than emotions, and to represent moral motives just as emotions is to simplify and distort them. I suggest, therefore, that it is mistaken to limit the definition of motives in the sense relative to the present inquiry to emotions: motives have a broader range and are much more psychologically complex than Zagzebski’s definition allows; they constitute the reasons for our actions. I cannot, however, pretend to offer an account here of the full range of moral motives.

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Virtues are motives in the dispositional sense, according to Zagzebski: they are motivations rather than motives proper (i.e. in a directly actrelated sense). Virtues, being motivations, are ‘almost continually operative and do most of their work at moderate or even weak levels of intensity’, operating ‘for extended periods of time without the agent’s having much, if any, awareness of them’ (Zagzebski 1996, 132). They are dispositions to be moved by virtuous motives. A virtuous motivation, moreover, ‘makes the agent want to act effectively’, and this has a twofold effect (Zagzebski 1996, 133). The general consequences of virtuous motivation, according to Zagzebski, are that the virtuous agent desires to ‘gain knowledge appropriate to the area of life that is the focus of the virtue and to develop the skills associated with virtuous effectiveness in that area of life’ (1996, 133). The particular consequences include ‘the desire to find out the relevant nonmoral facts about the particular circumstances encountered by the agent in which action on the virtuous motive may be called for’ (Zagzebski 1996, 133). We shall meet this interesting doubling-back feature of virtue again below, in the discussion of Slote’s agent-based ethical theory. As far as successful action is concerned, the general and particular consequence of the desire to act effectively ‘does not reliably lead to success, although it reliably leads the agent to do as much as is in her power to be successful’ (Zagzebski 1996, 133). The connection between motivation and success is such that some virtues ‘already have a weak reliability component built into the nature of the virtue that is entailed by the motivation component alone’ (1996, 133). However, Zagzebski holds – and I agree on this point – that reliable success is not likely to be guaranteed in all cases of virtuous motivation. Thus, Zagzebski claims that there is a ‘success’ feature of a virtue that is distinct from the motivational component, which guarantees reliable success in action (1996, 133–4). Virtues and success Zagzebski argues that, in addition to the motivational component, virtues have a definitional component guaranteeing ‘success in reaching the internal or external end of a virtuous motivation’ (1996, 134). It is not clear, however, whether the success condition is essential to the possession of a virtue. Zagzebski’s reason for including the success condition is that the motivational component by itself only weakly links virtues to success in producing the ends of virtue; yet ‘virtue’, she claims, ‘is a success term’ (1996, 136). This concern appears to reflect Aristotle’s observation (EN 1099a1–4) that ‘while a state can exist

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without producing any good consequences ... this is impossible for an activity: it will necessarily engage in action, and do so well.’ However, this does not supply conclusive reasons for attaching a condition of reliable success to the possession of a virtue itself. Aristotle himself appears to reject a success condition for virtue possession, retaining the separation between state of character and good results: a virtue can be possessed ‘without producing any good consequences’ (EN 1099a1–2), and virtues are such that ‘we would choose each of them even if they had no good effects’ (EN 1097b3–4). This would seem to be a non sequitur if a success condition were indeed attached to Aristotle’s definition. Zagzebski has already argued for the distinction between virtues and moral skills along this very divide – she has said that moral skills are defined more by external effectiveness, whereas virtues are defined more by motivation. If there is a success condition attached to the possession of the virtues, then it seems that moral skills, which are skills in achieving the particular ends set by virtuous motivation, now partly define a virtue for Zagzebski. In concluding the earlier discussion about virtues and skills, however, Zagzebski argues that it is possible to have a virtue and ‘lack the corresponding skills’ (1996, 116). This means that, earlier in the account, the possession of a virtue was independent of the skills needed to be successful in action (1996, 115). If the possession of a virtue is independent of the skills ensuring reliable success in action, then I think it is also independent of that success. Is virtue a success term or not? The addition of a success condition to the possession of a virtue appears odd, given what Zagzebski appeared earlier to claim about virtues not always requiring the possession of corresponding moral skills. Getting this confusion clear requires throwing some light on the connection between virtuous motivations, moral skills and success. On my view, the expression of virtuous motivation is to be found first and foremost in the deployment of the various moral skills and abilities – typically well-honed with deeply entrenched habitual practice – that correspond to that motivation. In other words, the practical expression of virtuous motivation is often wholly constituted by the deployment of its corresponding moral skills. Thus, the virtue of compassion is often expressed in the keen sensitivity to how someone is really feeling, the offer of just the right kind of support and comfort in the circumstances, and knowledge of precisely what to say. Indeed, these moral skills are called ‘skills’ because, when judiciously applied by the virtuous agent, they tend to produce success in achieving the ends of virtuous motivation. Insofar as such moral skills (and any other supporting psychological capacities)

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are deployed in virtuously motivated activity, and insofar as they reliably bring about the ends of virtuous motivation, a success condition of a kind also attaches to my own account of virtue. Indeed, there is a kind of virtuous circle of positive feedback between a virtue and the exercise of moral skills, where the practice and development of corresponding moral skills in turn tends to reinforce, strengthen and deepen the original virtuous motivation, which in turn reinforces the desire to exercise the corresponding moral skills. However, I do not think that my qualified success condition accords with Zagzebski’s, which seems to be significantly stronger. Perhaps I have misread Zagzebski’s account, in the sense that, for her, virtuous motivation is not a sufficient condition for full virtue possession, and what I have taken her to be arguing about the possibility of a disconnection between virtues and their corresponding moral skills is intended only to apply to the motivational element of a virtue. On this account, a virtue is only ‘completed’ once a success condition has been added to the motivational component. If this is the case, then my success condition (and hence my understanding of a virtue) probably differs from Zagzebski’s on this point. It is unclear to me whether Zagzebski sees the possession of corresponding moral skills to be what attaches the success condition – in which case we may agree – or whether success is assumed for other reasons. If Zagzebski’s success condition is separate from considerations of the psychological nature of a virtue, then it appears to import a significant – and I think unnecessary – element of moral luck into her account. I believe that this would change it for the worse. While virtuous agents can clearly be held accountable for the quality of their motivation and the development and deployment of their moral skills and other capacities, it seems in a sense arbitrary to include success or failure beyond the features over which agency could have been exercised. To return to the example of compassion, Zagzebski’s account appears to include as a component of compassion that the compassionate person successfully comforts the distressed person. Yet this external result seems to rely too much on the state of the distressed person to count as a feature of the compassionate person’s virtue. It is easy to imagine someone who is utterly inconsolable and for whom none of the moral skills of compassionate agency will be effective. Indeed, it is easy to imagine whole families, communities and even societies who cannot be consoled. Perhaps on Zagzebski’s view it is impossible for compassion to survive as a virtue in such circumstances. Yet in these sorts of cases, is it really a failure to possess the virtue of compassion that explains the failure

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of compassionately motivated people, equipped with the corresponding moral skills, to comfort and console the inconsolable? I think that, in these cases – which may well be common for some virtues – the better explanation is that even fully virtuous people can fail to achieve some of their ends under the weight of countervailing circumstances and that this kind of failure does not necessarily affect their virtue. Virtues and intrinsic admirableness On my own view, virtues are admirable acquired excellences in moral motivation, typically deeply entrenched by habituation, constituting part of what it is to live a good moral life. However, to say that a virtue is an ‘excellence in moral motivation’ and ‘part of what it is to live a good moral life’ is not primarily to describe its psychological nature but to refer to its moral status. I shall pursue the implications of this distinction in the next section. Here, though, it is important to sketch briefly the connection that I think most plausibly holds between virtues, excellent moral motivation and a good moral life. The core of my account of the virtues, as far as broader questions about the good moral life are concerned, revolves around what the notion of excellent moral motivation implies. Virtues are called excellences because they are, in the first instance, moral motivations that we intrinsically admire, and I think that their intrinsic admirableness – at least in the paradigm case – is the primary connection we should make between their psychological nature and moral status. By intrinsic admirableness, I mean that we admire a virtue in itself – for its own sake – and moreover admire it quite apart from any further connection we think it has with other morally admirable or desirable goals or ends. Thus, we admire the kind person for their kindness, the honest person for their honesty and the equitable person for their equity, quite apart from whether these features of their moral motivation are parts of a well-rounded overall moral character, tend to bring about morally approved results, assist in supporting other valued states of affairs, contribute to a well-lived moral life or anything else. We may and often do think that to the extent that people possess a virtue, then they possess one of the constituents of a morally good life – but we do not (and I think that we ought not to) hold the virtue’s admirableness to depend on this connection. Rather, insofar as people are virtuous, they already are living a morally good life – at least partially so – precisely to the extent that they are virtuous. Virtues are also admirable in a secondary sense, as constituents of a good moral life: each partially defines in theory and partly constitutes

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in practice the way in which a good moral life ought to be lived. Both of these conceptions of the relation between virtues and moral status are senses in which we consider virtues to have irreducible worth. They are thus also senses in which we take virtues seriously, on my understanding of what it is to do so. There is also a third connection that virtues have with moral status, neither as intrinsic nor constitutive values but as instrumentally valuable psychological states. Virtues can have – as they exclusively do under deontic value theories – an instrumental role in supporting and enabling other values, and therefore (sometimes great), instrumental admirableness. In this regard, virtues are often instrumental to the fulfilment of all sorts of other moral obligations and duties, and for doing well in a variety of moral senses – and are admired as such. They can be admirable because they tend to make us more likely to keep our promises, for example, or more effective generators of utility. In these respects, however, virtues are themselves theoretically separable from an independent characterisation of what constitutes the source (or sources) of moral value and in this respect are not being taken seriously. Virtues, then, are admirable in three senses: in the primary sense, they are intrinsically admirable; in the secondary sense, they are admirable for their contribution to a morally good life and in the third sense, they are admired instrumentally. In the first two senses, they are taken seriously as moral concepts in their own right, and in the third sense, they are not. However, none of these three connections between psychological nature and moral status is strictly part of the psychological nature of virtues themselves (although their psychological characterisation might well require that this web of connections be teased out). Moreover, the question of whether and how the psychological nature of the virtues determines once and for all their moral worth, in the light of my (and Zagzebski’s) psychological account of their nature, is not immediately clear.

The moral worth of the virtues Does my account of the psychological nature of a virtue establish irreducibility or even primacy for the virtues in moral evaluation? There appears prima facie to be a good case for virtues to be taken seriously as ethical concepts in their own right; both Zagzebski (1996, 113) and Aristotle (EN 1097b2–4) also accord the virtues irreducible value. However, nothing that has been said about the psychological nature of the virtues decides the question of their moral worth. That they even

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have intrinsic moral value is not certain. The question of the moral worth of the virtues is independent of the question of their psychological character. As David Elliott (1993) argues, even if we do have an accurate psychological account of the nature of the virtues, a positive conclusion about their moral worth does not necessarily follow. The virtues, being moral excellences, have moral worth (of whatever stripe they are thought to have it) by definition. However, what kind of value – primary, intrinsic, contributory or derivative – depends on where moral worth resides. If we take moral worth to be derived exclusively from people’s admirable inner states, then virtues have moral primacy. If we do not, then they may have irreducible moral value but also may have only derivative value. The moral worth we accord the virtues does not depend on their psychological nature but on where we already think the source of moral worth lies. A psychological account of the virtues does not in itself establish whether we ought to take them seriously. However, on Elliott’s view there is a certain feature of the virtues that may indicate a position on their moral worth. This is the fact that virtues tend to be defined in terms of directing action towards certain desired ends; typically they have a teleological structure. Virtues are in one sense dispositions to have certain ends, and these ends are partly definitional of the virtues – the defeat of fear, for example, partly defines of the virtue of courage. Without these ends being specified in moral terms, it is difficult to tell which deep and enduring acquired dispositions of people are virtues and which are not. The virtues can only be specified, according to Elliott, ‘from within some more general moral belief system – only after we have specified what has value and why it does’ (1993, 329). This fact, Elliott claims, suggests that ‘Virtues may not be intrinsically valuable because they are not identifiable without another theory of moral value and because they do not have an uncontroversially identifiable nature independent of that value system’ (1993, 329). Such a value system may be represented, Elliott suggests, by an ethics of duty which considers virtues as secondary to specifications of right action. In that case, ‘virtue would have to take second place’ (1993, 329) to rules of action. Elliott seems to suggest here that although no psychological account of the virtues can decide the question of their moral worth, an account of their moral nature in terms of overarching value systems does. He suggests that the virtues are not primary, and are not even irreducibly valuable, because they must be defined in terms of an overarching theory of moral value – and, presumably, primacy will rest with the principles of action determined by this theory. This conclusion, however,

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does not follow. Elliott’s argument fails to show that the virtues do not, or cannot, have irreducible moral value. Nor does it entail the conclusion that the virtues are not, or cannot be, primary moral values. And it certainly does not lead to the conclusion that the moral worth of the virtues is derived from (is reducible to) right action and that they ought to be defined in terms of right action. Elliott does not advance a serious case for any of these conclusions because he offers no reason why states of character may not themselves play a fundamental role and be accorded irreducible moral worth in any moral belief system used to identify the virtues. For Aristotle, eudaimonia is the fundamental value which provides the teleological framework of the virtues. However, eudaimonia also includes, among other goods, possession of the virtues. Aristotle defines eudaimonia as ‘a certain kind of activity of the soul in accordance with complete virtue’ (EN 1102a7–8), and an action in accordance with complete virtue is one that exhibits or demonstrates a virtuous character, not one that merely agrees externally with the action of a virtuous agent. For Aristotle, virtues are constituents of eudaimonia. Aristotle embeds his theory of the virtues in an overarching teleological framework, but the virtues do not play a secondary role to right action in this framework because his conception of right action is aretaic. Aristotle, on this reading, ascribes moral worth to the virtues on the basis of the constitutive role they play in eudaimonic life. Another kind of aretaic theory holds that virtues have value independent of even this role and that admirable states of character are valuable in their own right. This kind of theory accords virtues intrinsic, though not necessarily primary, moral worth. As we have seen, both Zagzebski (1996, 113) and Aristotle (EN 1097b2–4) explicitly state this position. Such a view is compatible with there being other sources of moral worth, for instance, that certain obligations or duties have non-aretaic grounds. A more radical aretaic theory of moral value would maintain that praiseworthy states of character in fact constitute the whole basis of moral worth, and all other moral concepts can be given an aretaic explication. For instance, such a theory might hold that right actions are actions performed by the person of equitable character, and their rightness is thus dependent on the moral worth of an equitable character. In a radical theory such as this, virtues have primacy as moral concepts, and other moral concepts such as right action and duty would have to take second place to them. None of what Elliott maintains about the psychological or moral nature of the virtues decides the issue against these three alternatives. If Elliott is right that the virtues are fundamentally moral, not psychological, concepts, this leaves open the question of what kind of moral concepts we take them to

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be. And if individuation of the virtues presupposes an overarching value theory, this leaves open the question of what kind of value theory this ought to be and what role virtues themselves should play in it. There is a question, however, of how or whether one can individuate a virtue by giving a precise account of, say, its necessary and sufficient conditions. Perhaps only those who give priority to non-aretaic moral principles and concepts are able to supply such a precise definition. For example, honesty could be defined as the disposition or propensity to tell the truth (when one is duty bound to do so), or benevolence as the tendency to give to others in need (when such-and-such moral rules apply). The relevant moral principles or rules precisely individuate each virtue in deontic terms. This seems to suggest that the appropriate overarching value theory for an account of the virtues is deontic: ultimately, a virtue is ethically admirable due to the principle or rule to which it answers. But a virtue theorist can insist that there are other ways of individuating a virtue. On one rendering, it is that state of character we find admirable about someone in such-and-such a way. For instance, honesty is the praiseworthy state of character related to truth-telling (as exemplified by X), or benevolence is the praiseworthy state of character related to desiring the good of others (as exemplified by Y). Such an agent-based approach to individuating a virtue is not as precise as a deontic account – its full articulation relies on facts about the moral exemplar. However, there is still no decisive reason not to take an exemplar rather than a principle or rule as the basis for individuation – as long as the virtue theorist is willing to forego the conceptual precision deontic accounts can afford. Virtue theorists are indeed willing to forego precision of this kind and plausibly maintain that the individuation of a virtue is not a matter of definitional precision but of sketching a general conceptual outline and identifying exemplary individual cases. The reply to deontic theorists is that the virtues are by nature not the kinds of things that are fit to be bound by act-oriented principles or rules and that their individuation is, and should be, a matter of proceeding by examples. Elliott fails to consider this argument, apparently assuming that to be individuated virtue concepts must be precise. This turns out not necessarily to be the case. The question of what kind of overarching value theory ought to be used to individuate the virtues is thus still open.

Agent-based moral theories: Michael Slote One contemporary advocate of the primacy of the virtues as moral concepts is Michael Slote (1997, 2001). Slote takes what he calls an

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‘agent-based’ approach to virtue ethics, which treats ‘the moral or ethical status of actions as entirely derivative from independent and fundamental ethical/aretaic facts (or claims) about the motives, dispositions, or inner life of the individuals who perform them’ (1997, 240). His argument aims to show how basic characterisations of ‘the motives, dispositions, or inner life’ of people can wholly ground moral actions without having to be grounded, in turn, by an overarching principle or rule-based deontic theory of moral value. Inner strength and benevolence Slote considers two kinds of moral theory that base the morality of actions solely on an overarching master virtue. The first, ‘cool’, agentbased approach he sketches forms itself around a conception of inner strength or self-reliance. Such a view considers self-reliant motivation as inherently admirable and its opposite, motivational parasitism, as inherently deplorable (1997, 247). Morality based on self-reliance judges conduct on the basis of the degree of motivational (as opposed to achieved) self-reliance exhibited by an agent. Motivational self-reliance exhibits inner strength and is therefore inherently admirable, whereas motivational parasitism demonstrates inner weakness and is therefore inherently deplorable. Slote claims that there is an obvious problem, however, with pursuing a cool agent-based morality: all other-regarding states, such as benevolence, compassion and kindness, only have derivative moral value, which, according to Slote, ‘seems highly implausible to the modern moral consciousness’ (1997, 250). Even if the ‘warm’ otherregarding dispositions need to be limited or qualified by consideration of other moral values such as justice and inner strength, to require their justification in terms of cool aretaic ideals is to deny the ‘warm’ motives their ‘very important basic moral value’ (1997, 251). The second form of purely agent-based morality, favoured by Slote, is a morality based on these ethically ‘warm’ – other-regarding – virtues, specifically those of universal and particularistic benevolence. An aretaic morality based solely on benevolence judges actions on how well their motive exemplifies or approximates the motive state of benevolence, ‘rather than in terms of whether those actions achieve or are likely to achieve certain goals that universal benevolence aims at’ (1997, 252). Morality as universal benevolence, for instance, is an agent-based analogue of utilitarianism, ‘that morally judges everything, in unified or monistic fashion, by reference to universal benevolence as a motive that seeks certain ends rather than, in the utilitarian manner, by reference to the actual or probable occurrence of those ends’ (1997, 253).

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The moral status of an action in a morality of universal benevolence does not depend on the consequences of the action but purely on the admirable motive states of the agent. This allows a morality of universal benevolence to make some salient distinctions about actions that utilitarian and other consequentialist systems cannot. If, for example, the admirableness of giving a donation to a charitable organisation relies on the motivation to do good rather than on the consequences of doing good, then those who have less-than-admirable motivation for donating to a worthy cause (to gain prestige for instance) can be morally distinguished from those who genuinely exhibit the admirable motive (Slote 1997, 253). On the other hand, if the moral status of the act relies solely on its consequences, the (intuitively) undesirable result is that the badly motivated agent, whose motivation in giving is to gain prestige, is no less admirable than the agent whose sole motivation is to bring about the good of others. Slote thus shows how virtues might be used to ground moral theory without recourse to deontic concepts, with some intuitively appealing results. Whether a claim that benevolence suffices as the sole foundation of morality turns out to be tenable or not, Slote puts forward a strong case for the view that motivations can have moral worth not reducible to the moral worth of actions and consequences. Under morality as inner strength, self-sufficient motivation is admirable even when self-sufficiency is not achieved, and dependent or parasitic motivation is deplorable, regardless of actions or consequences. Under morality as benevolence, benevolent motivation is admirable in itself, whether or not it is accompanied by the capacity to act in a benevolent manner and whether or not it brings about the good of others in a particular case. Also, when a benevolent motive is absent, an action is less admirable than it would have been if benevolent motivation were present. This separation of the evaluation of motives from the evaluation of actions allows these appealing moral distinctions to be made. A deontic morality, which derives the evaluation of motivations from an evaluation of actions, cannot separate the moral worth of people’s motivations from the primary moral worth of their actions. If we agree that self-sufficient motivation is admirable even when self-sufficiency is not achieved or that the lack of benevolent motivation makes an action less praiseworthy than it could have been, then we are taking the virtues as an independent and irreducible (non-derivative) set of moral concepts. In other words, if the agent-based moral distinctions Slote makes are justified, then the virtues are to be taken seriously.

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Applying agent-based theories The attempt to apply an agent-based moral theory to practical moral problems, however, generates an immediate, seemingly insurmountable difficulty: if an agent is faced with a practical moral problem, it appears that the only way she can solve it is to examine what is fundamentally morally at stake, and this is likely to consist of her own moral state. Surely, however, facts about states of affairs out in the world are crucial to solving practical moral problems. Salient or decisive facts about the world ought to determine the thinking of a virtuous agent and not reflection on her own admirable states. Examining one’s own motivations seems to be an unenlightening process, Slote admits, when action-guidance is required in a difficult case: If someone is faced with a perplexing moral problem, it somehow seems irrelevant and even objectionable for her to examine her own motives rather than facts about people and the world in order to solve it. Yet is not this what agent-basing allows for and even prescribes? ... Looking inward at or for motives presumably will not help to solve that person’s problem, and so, where we most need moral guidance, it would seem that agent-basing not only is irrelevant but makes it impossible to find a solution to one’s moral difficulties. (1997, 258–9) If examination of an agent’s inner states is irrelevant or objectionable in attempting to solve a perplexing moral problem, then it seems that agent-based virtue ethics, whether or not it is ‘the correct theory or view of morality’, cannot be usefully applied to practical moral issues (Slote 1997, 259). However, Slote argues that this criticism can be answered, and that agent-based virtue ethics can be applied. He makes use of what he has said previously about the apparent one-way fit between agent and world (1997, 245). That criticism was that the very idea of agent-basing is flawed because standards of conduct can only be determined from within the virtuous agent herself: ‘the direction of fit between world and moral agent is all one way: from agent to world, and this too suggests a kind of autism or isolation from the world that makes one wonder how any such form of ethics can possibly be plausible or adequate’ (1997, 244). The reply to that problem was that the admirable states of virtuous agents do not operate ‘in splendid causal/epistemic isolation from what most of us would take to be the morally relevant realities’ but ‘invariably wish and need to take the world into account’ (1997, 245). In

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other words, it is an essential feature of the virtues themselves to direct their attention to the outside world; in the case of benevolence, Slote has pointed out that a state is not really a state of benevolence ‘unless one cares about who exactly is needy and to what extent they are needy, and such care, in turn, criterially involves wanting and making efforts to know relevant facts’ (1997, 245). We have already seen above how virtuous motivation involves the desire to act effectively, which includes the desire to ‘gain knowledge appropriate to the area of life that is the focus of the virtue and to develop the skills associated with virtuous effectiveness in that area of life’ (Zagzebski 1996, 133). The reflective world-directed nature of benevolent motivation furnishes, for Slote, a plausible solution to the problem of practical application: If one morally judges a certain course of action or decision by reference to, say, the benevolence of the motives of its agent, one is judging in relation to an inner factor that itself makes reference to and takes account of facts about people in the world. One’s inward gaze effectively ‘doubles back’ on the world and allows one ... to take facts about the world into account in one’s attempt to determine what is morally acceptable or best to do. (1997, 259) The ‘doubling back’ on the world of the virtuous agent’s inward gaze allows morally salient circumstances, events, states of affairs and people to be taken into account in practical deliberation. Why, the deontic critic would reply, complicate deliberation by bringing in an extra step – why not just take into account what is morally salient in the world (what the virtuous agent cares about) and abandon any link to inner states? It seems to be an unnecessary waste of moral effort to ultimately turn back to motive states in deciding what to do. Slote disagrees: But neither, on the other hand, is this doubling-back unnecessarily duplicative or wasteful of moral effort, if we assume that motive is fundamentally at least relevant to the moral character of any action. For if we judge the actions of ourselves or others simply by their effects in the world, we end up unable to distinguish accidentally or ironically useful actions (or slips on banana peels) from actions that we actually morally admire and that are morally good and praiseworthy. (1997, 259) When a virtuous agent is faced with a particularly difficult or perplexing moral problem, which, due to her current ignorance of

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the circumstances, she cannot solve, her possession of the virtue in question motivates her to find out more before acting. The virtue does not tell her what the solution to the problem is, but does tell her to find out more about the particular circumstances before acting. It determines this course because to decide what to do in ignorance, without making further efforts to know the real circumstances, would exhibit a lack of virtue (Slote 1997, 260). Once the facts of the case have been ascertained, and assuming they are straightforward, the agent knows enough to fully exhibit the virtue. A criticism of agent basing On closer inspection, however, Slote’s doubling-back argument appears to reveal a conflict of moral values in agent-based virtue ethics. Slote briefly addresses this conflict at the conclusion of his article, and more recently (Slote 2001), but does not appear to see how destructive it is to his preferred theory – and, indeed, to agent-based virtue ethics generally. Slote presents powerful arguments for the virtues to be brought forward from ethical obscurity and be considered ethically important independently of their traditional, derivative, deontological or consequentialist role (1997, 2001). However, a motivation such as benevolence cannot be the sole foundation for a plausible moral theory. As we shall see shortly, a disposition such as benevolence – as morally admirable as it is – cannot plausibly ground all of morality. Slote’s morality as benevolence is based on an inherently self-undermining theory of moral value. To illuminate this conflict in Slote’s argument, it is useful to return briefly to the original candidate for an agent-based virtue ethics – a ‘cool’, inner strength-based morality of self-reliance. On this type of theory, self-reliance is the sole fundamental moral value, and all other morally valuable things depend for their value on whether they are derived from the motive of self-reliance. The teleological framework of morality as self-reliance ultimately directs moral concern and moral effort inwards, towards the agent’s own character and inner life. The telos of the master virtue rests, as it were, in the agent herself. Morality is thus inherently and ultimately a species of self-concern. And this means that a primary preoccupation with the state of one’s own moral being is both justifiable and admirable – after all, being a certain way oneself is what moral goodness is ultimately all about. Concern for the welfare of others, on the other hand, is only derivatively good – if it follows somehow from, or is required for, self-reliance, then it has moral value. Being preoccupied with the well-being and happiness of any

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other people might be a good thing – if it helps one towards the ideal of self-reliance – but it has no irreducible moral value of its own. Morality as self-reliance is thus a morality of self-concern. And this is Slote’s reason for abandoning it as a plausible example of agent-based virtue ethics. Surely, Slote asserts, concern for the welfare of others ‘counts with us as a very important basic moral value’ (1997, 251). The implication of Slote’s preference for a ‘warm’ agent-based virtue ethics is that there is something not wholly admirable in a person who bases all morality on self-concern. We would ordinarily think that, if the ultimate basis of moral value had to be either concern for oneself or concern for others, concern for others ought to come out on top. The agent who thinks that self-concern comes out on top – regardless of how much admirable other-regard she can derive from it – hardly has what we would ordinarily think of as a moral point of view at all. However, the same spectre does not seem to loom over ‘warm’ views based on other-regard. We tend to admire a person whose basic moral concern is for others all the more for her lack of moral self-absorption. This person, we think, has moral value the right way around – morality is ultimately about concern for others, not oneself. Having side-stepped the spectre of ultimate self-concern, we can then (agent-) base all of morality on what we really admire most about people – benevolent motivation. What we value above all else is benevolence, and since benevolence (it appears) is concern for others that is not derived ultimately from any kind of selfregard, our overarching theory of moral value is in the clear, because concern for the welfare of others grounds moral value. What we get with morality as benevolence is the value-primacy of other-regarding motives, which, our moral intuition tells us, is better than the valueprimacy of self-regarding motives. However, if we look carefully at the teleological structure of morality as benevolence, we find that it suffers from the same structural weakness that brought Slote to favour it over morality as self-reliance in the first place. The structural weakness – that morality is ultimately based on self-concern – has not been removed. Self-regard has only shuffled from the foreground to the background, where it is partially obscured by other-regard. The teleological framework of morality as benevolence, like that of morality as self-reliance, ultimately directs moral concern and moral effort inwards, towards the agent’s own character and inner life. The good of others does not have value primacy: the motive state of the agent who seeks the good of others does. The desire for others’ good ultimately loops back to, and is embedded in, an overarching desire for the possession of a certain state of character. Once again, the telos

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of the master virtue rests, as it were, in the agent herself. Concern for the welfare of others, to borrow Slote’s terminology, effectively ‘doubles back’ on the agent, and morality as benevolence is also inherently and ultimately – arguably, perversely – self-concerned. Where the advocate of morality as self-reliance will agree that morality is ultimately a matter of self-concern and accept the perverse consequences, the advocate of morality as benevolence will want to argue the point. She will want to say that morality as benevolence is not ultimately a matter of self-concern; it is a matter of other-concern – as is shown by the truly benevolent agent. The truly benevolent agent, S, is concerned with helping others. Intrinsic value rests, for S, in either people in general (universal benevolence) or specific others (partialistic benevolence) – their needs, desires, happiness or welfare. Others’ good is what primarily motivates S’s actions, not anything about herself, certainly not the maintenance of her own good character, and this is why we admire her. If she were ultimately preoccupied with her own state instead, we would not think S was motivated in the right way, and would not admire her so much. Intuitively, this appears to be the correct kind of response. However, the advocate of morality as benevolence cannot, without some very dubious manoeuvring, answer the self-concern criticism in this way. Slote’s own practical example of benevolent agency under morality as benevolence is useful here. Slote’s benevolent agent is told that her mother has suddenly been taken to hospital, and ‘flies from a distant city to be with her’ (2001, 39–40). What, morally, ought she to do for her mother when she gets to the hospital? Morality as benevolence does not tell her precisely what she ought to do for her mother in ignorance of her mother’s condition (Slote 2001, 40). However, her benevolent motivation does tell her one thing at least to do: ‘she morally ought (would be wrong not) to find out more about her mother’s condition and prospects, as regards quality and duration of life and certainty as regards future suffering and incapacity’ (2001, 40). To try to decide what to do in a state of ignorance would exhibit a callous disregard for her mother rather than benevolent motivation. Her benevolent state tells her to find out the facts before she acts, by doubling back on the world. According to Slote, Then, once the facts have emerged and assuming they are fairly clear-cut and point to horrendously painful and debilitating prospects for her mother, the woman’s decision is once again plausibly derivable from morality as benevolence. At that point, it would be

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callous of her to insist on heroic measures and benevolent not to do so and the proper moral decision can thus be reached by agent-based considerations. (2001, 40) The ultimate reference to inner moral states in this example seems prima facie not only irrelevant but objectionable. It seems clear that ensuring she makes the best decision for her mother’s sake ought to be what is fundamentally morally important to the benevolent agent in this example, rather than the maintenance of her own moral state. However, if she is a morally reflective person who seeks to act on the basis of what is fundamentally morally at stake in the situation, then she will be aware that it is her own state that is fundamentally at stake. How can Slote’s benevolent agent herself think in such terms and still plausibly be considered admirable? Slote does reply to this concern: ‘But surely, someone might say, the woman herself does not think in such terms. She is worried about whether her mother would have a painful or pleasant future existence, for example, not about whether she herself would be acting callously if she sought to prolong her mother’s existence’ (2001, 40). Slote’s reply is this: Are you sure? Could she not morally justify her decision not to allow heroic measures either by reference simply to likely future sufferings if her mother were kept alive or by saying: it would be (have been) callous of me to try to keep her alive, given her prospects. Surely, there is nothing unusual or inappropriate about the latter as an expression of moral problem-solving. (2001, 40–41) Contra Slote, what is unusual and inappropriate about the latter is not only that the horrendously painful and debilitating prospects for her mother, due to agent-basing, only register derivatively in the benevolent agent’s reasons for moral action. It is also that her ultimate moral reasons – that this is the benevolent thing to do or that it would have been callous to do otherwise – inevitably display a distasteful moral self-regard. This self-concern is distasteful not because the benevolent agent ought to have no moral self-regard but because moral self-regard is taken to ground all other attributions of moral worth. Put differently, the moral self-regard evident in this example is distasteful because it is at the foundation of moral agency. The truly benevolent agent, on Slote’s view, knows what is fundamentally morally at stake in any situation in which she acts: her own moral state. She ‘doubles back’ on the world in order to see what needs to

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be done to cultivate and maintain her own benevolence. According to Slote, this ought not to seem strange. After all, benevolence has primary moral worth. It is her own state that is fundamentally morally at stake, and how she actually treats others is only of derivative moral worth. The benevolent treatment of others is secondary. On the other hand, if she were not to see moral primacy in her own character, like S, would she really possess benevolence? She would not, according to Slote’s view. In thinking that trying to bring about others’ well-being is morally important independent of her own state of character, S’s moral values are in the wrong place. They are in the wrong place because bringing about others’ good is really only morally worthwhile insofar as it exhibits S’s own state of benevolence. Of course it is quite difficult to see how Slote’s benevolent agent, who self-reflectively possesses the correct view of moral value, is more admirable than S, who has a false view. For Slote’s benevolent agent, like the agent who bases morality on self-reliance, moral agency is fundamentally self-centred. However, unlike the agent who practises morality as self-reliance, the agent who practises morality as benevolence appears in some sense to veil her primary moral self-concern behind a superficial other-regard. Seen in this light, the person who is benevolent on Slote’s agent-based view seems quite an appalling character. One would naturally think this kind of person falsely benevolent or a hypocrite. In fact, it is clear that Slote’s benevolent agent – someone who has benevolent motivation and the correct agent-based view of moral value – is not, and cannot be, benevolent at all. Her concern for the well-being of others is ultimately motivated by moral self-centredness. There is a fine line, if any line at all, between Slote’s benevolent agent and those self-serving or accidentally good non-benevolent people Slote tells us morality as benevolence catches out. On Slote’s account, genuine benevolent motivation appears to be impossible. The agent’s motivation is either not benevolent or it is not genuine. Slote’s benevolent agent, fully aware that the moral value of her act resides in its motive state and not in the states of other agents, exhibits a species of moral self-concern. If she claims that her primary reason to act as she does is the well-being of others she is being dishonest, and her conduct when she acts on this motive exhibits hypocrisy rather than benevolence. On the other hand, S, who is motivated by concern for others’ well-being, and who is not aware that the moral worth of her actions is derived from her own state, may not be genuinely benevolent either. S appears to exhibit either self-deception or ignorance with regard to what is of fundamental moral worth in a situation. That is,

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either she knows that it is her own state which holds all moral value and she somehow conceals this knowledge from herself, or she does not know the primary moral worth of her own motivation at all. It would be very difficult to argue that motivation based on self-deception about or ignorance of what has moral value can be genuinely moral motivation at all. If Slote agrees, then benevolent motivation that irreducibly values the well-being of others is not genuine benevolent motivation in his view. It is difficult, in any case, to see why we ought to admire above all else the moral motivation of people who are self-deceived or ignorant about what is fundamentally morally important. Ultimately, on Slote’s account, the agent we would most naturally think benevolent – agent S – is not genuinely benevolent because she is either self-deceived about, or ignorant of, the source of the moral worth of her actions. On the other hand, the agent we naturally find less than admirable, whom Slote calls benevolent, is not really benevolent at all, but hypocritical. Another way of putting this complaint against Slote is that in his version of virtuous agency, moral motivation cannot be a matter of knowingly pursuing what is fundamentally of moral importance in a difficult choice-making situation. Knowingly pursuing what is fundamentally morally important generates a conflict with the benevolent agent’s other-regard. On the other hand, to pursue what is fundamentally morally important in ignorance of the fact that it is ultimately a matter of self-concern is to place what is fundamentally morally important outside the sphere of the benevolent agent’s own reflective agency. A full characterisation of benevolent agency surely should not require such a serious defect in the benevolent agent’s own reflective capacities. Both characterisations of benevolent agency present deeply unsatisfactory accounts of moral motivation. Slote’s view overlooks a consequence of seeing benevolence as an evaluative state. To be benevolent in any plausible sense is to take the well-being of others as itself a source of moral value and not just an instrument of it. And this means that the conflict between moral values is not just a problem with the practical application of morality as benevolence. (I believe my argument has also shown that Slote fails to deal adequately with its practical application.) The deeper problem is that what morality as benevolence fundamentally morally values – when this inner state is taken as the primary moral value – is in unavoidable conflict with benevolence itself as an evaluative state. Morality as benevolence finds fundamental moral worth in a state of character, which is a moral worth to be found in the inner lives of moral exemplars – those moral agents who possess and exhibit perfectly benevolent motivation.

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The moral worth of benevolent action derives from the primary moral worth of the inner state. However, the defining values of benevolence qua state of character are located somewhere else altogether. The moral worth of actions is grounded, for benevolent agents, in the intrinsic value found in the lives of other people, their circumstances and the quality of their lives. Morality as benevolence cannot accommodate these values except as derivative, yet to benevolence itself they are basic, definitional values. Even in theory, before the attempt at practical application, Slote’s morality as benevolence undermines itself. I think that in fact neither one of these two kinds of moral value can plausibly ground the other. That others tend to live better lives with benevolent people around does not mean that the moral value of benevolent motivation is wholly derived from its consequences, and the fact that we admire benevolent motivation does not mean that the moral worth of its consequences is wholly derived from the virtuous motive. If one is benevolent, one wants the best for people, regardless of motives. Slote marshals a convincing argument for the former. The problem, however, is that he fails to properly recognise the latter. This does not mean that the two different sources of moral value are inconsistent in any overarching theory of moral value. The value of benevolence (as an inner state) can coexist with the values of benevolence (concerning the wellbeing of others) without inconsistency, as long as they are not treated as either primary or derivative. One of Slote’s unquestioned basic assumptions – that one kind of moral value is primary and all other kinds are derivative – is at the heart of the problem. It would be an improvement in Slote’s view if he held that benevolence the state has irreducible moral value, that what the benevolent agent values is also an irreducible source of moral value, and that an overarching theory of moral value ought to accommodate both sources without trying to reduce one to the other. For example, Christine Swanton (2003) presents a robust virtue ethics which assumes pluralism in at least two relevant senses: Swanton has a pluralistic view of the ‘morally significant features’ (2003, 2) of the world which can ground virtues and of ‘rightness of action’ (2003, 4). Swanton develops not an agent-based but what she calls a ‘target-centred’ virtue-ethical account of right action (2003, 227–48). Ultimately, the current criticism of Slote’s preferred agent-based theory is a criticism of virtue primacy – and value monism – and not just of morality as benevolence. My argument indicates, I think, that the reductionism inherent in Slote’s other-regarding agent-based theory generates an unsustainable account of moral motivation. If all moral value in a

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difficult choice-making situation is reducible to the benevolent agent’s own state, then virtuous action cannot plausibly be a matter of knowingly pursuing what has fundamental moral worth. Any genuine critical reflection on the moral saliencies of the situation by the benevolent agent would be self-defeating. This fact clearly indicates to me that Slote’s version of agent-basing does not work. However, the failure of virtue primacy does not damage the case for taking virtues seriously. I argued earlier that, contra Elloitt, there is no conclusive argument which rules out taking virtues seriously in their own right, irreducible to the value of deontic properties. There is broad scope for pluralistic theories of moral value which take virtues seriously but which do not make Slote’s move towards according any one of them primary moral value. My own view is that virtues – including the virtue of moral reflectiveness, which I describe in Chapter 2 – can bear intrinsic, but not primary, moral value. I will turn now to the description of moral reflectiveness.

2 The Virtue of Moral Reflectiveness

In this chapter I wish to draw attention to a specific retrospective moral state and argue that it constitutes a virtue. I will call this state ‘moral reflectiveness’. Some degree of it is a feature of all competent moral agency, and in my view, its deep and enduring possession holds a central – but rarely recognised or acknowledged – place in our conception of what constitutes a worthwhile or admirable moral life. One of the standard or typical practical expressions of moral reflectiveness, ‘moral reflection’, refers to a particular way in which morally conscious people in general, and morally reflective people in particular, critically reflect on moral features of their own lives – their moral experience. The disposition to engage in moral reflection is a central component of moral reflectiveness. In order to explain moral reflectiveness with some degree of clarity, it will be useful to approach my initial account through the description of moral reflection. Moral reflection in turn is perhaps best described via a feasible general account of consciousness and moral consciousness. This is what I initially set out to do.

Moral consciousness In this section I introduce the concept of moral reflection through a categorisation of consciousness in general and moral consciousness in particular. The categorisation of consciousness distinguishes conscious states by the intentional object they take: a conscious state can be directed at perceived intentional objects, non-perceptual intentional objects and the self. I use examples of each type of state to illustrate these distinctions. Using this categorisation of consciousness in general, I introduce moral consciousness in each type of conscious state. I illustrate the nature of moral consciousness and how morally conscious 43

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perceptual, non-perceptual and self-directed states manifest themselves in a person’s ordinary consciousness. Consciousness I describe moral consciousness here – a condition for the possibility of moral reflection – via a brief excursion through a basic categorisation of conscious states. It is not my intention to present and defend a theory of consciousness or to make claims about the ultimate nature of consciousness. My modest initial intention is to present a plausible categorisation of conscious states through which some features of the character of people’s moral experience can be described. When I am in a conscious state, my attention is focused on something, and it is this of which I am said to be conscious. That is, consciousness is characteristically consciousness of something. John Searle points out that, ‘in general in any conscious state, the state is directed at something or other, even if the thing it is directed at does not exist, and in that sense it has intentionality’ (1992, 130). This implies a natural division of conscious states in terms of different types of intentional object taken by conscious states. Since my purpose here is to represent conscious states – and subsequently morally conscious states – as the subjective, experiential states of people, a categorisation of consciousness based on the type of intentional object taken is appropriate. Consciousness in general can be divided into three types of states: perceptual states, non-perceptual states and self-directed states. Perceptual states are states of consciousness, taking as their object some feature or features of what is directly before the senses. They are the states of consciousness of objects and events in the immediately present environment. Put simply, perceptual states of consciousness are our current conscious perceptions of the world around us. When I am playing a point in tennis, for example, my attention may be directed at the movement of the ball, my body and racquet, the boundaries of the court, the shots and movements of my opponent, and so on. When I am at a party, my perceptual states may be of the people talking and dancing around me, the music, the smells of food and cigarette smoke, the conversation in which I am engaged, the couple arguing with raised voices and how miserable my lovelorn friend looks. When I am reading a novel, my attention may be directed at the words and sentences on the page, the various meanings and images they elicit, and the story unfolding through them. A person’s conscious perceptual states, as is obvious from examples such as these, are accompanied by other characteristic features of

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consciousness. They are, typically, not pure states of observation and sense-data collection. According to Searle, conscious states are accompanied by two clearly identifiable features: an aspectual shape (1992, 131; 156–7), and a background of capacities including a supporting network of unconscious states capable of becoming conscious (1992, 190). The aspectual shape of conscious states is a universal feature of those states, according to Searle: Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others. These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what makes it the mental state that it is. Aspectual shape is most obvious in the case of conscious perceptions: think of seeing a car, for example. When you see a car, it is not simply a matter of an object being registered by your perceptual apparatus; rather, you actually have a conscious experience of the object from a certain point of view and with certain features. (1992, 156–7) In the tennis example, what I am perceiving is structured and informed by my taking a tennis-playing point of view, my background understanding of the game of tennis and its rules, the skills and tactics I have learnt through practice, and my immediate intention to hit the ball well. As the game flows, my conscious state may change due to the network of supporting unconscious tennis-related states I have – from serving, to hitting a topspin forehand, to approaching the net, and so on. At the party, my perceptions are informed by, and serve to reflect on, my already existing network of thoughts and feelings about the particular people I perceive, social relationships and forms of human interaction, pleasure, entertainment, friendship and sympathy. In reading the novel, my perceptual states take an aspectual shape through my imagination, memories, thoughts and feelings bearing upon my current experience of the story – the point of view that informs, structures and influences the conscious perceptual state. Non-perceptual states are states of consciousness that need not rely on the immediate perception of objects and events for their content – their intentional objects need not be present contemporaneously with the state itself. A non-perceptual state of consciousness occurs when, for example, I bring my brother to mind while I sit in my office. I remember his physical appearance and characteristic gestures, think of his generosity, imagine what he might be up to on the other side of the world and form the intention of calling him on the telephone later this week.

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All of these non-perceptual states occur without my current perceptual states (of my office) having anything to do with the intentional object (my brother). Purely non-perceptual states also occur when, for example, I consider the chances of my football team winning their match this weekend or try to remember which groceries I am supposed to buy while I am on my way to the supermarket (having forgotten to bring the list). Some of these conscious states, both perceptual and non-perceptual, share the distinctive further characteristic of being directed at – taking as their intentional object – the person whose states they are. These are self-directed states of consciousness. Self-directed states range from those in which a person is acutely self-conscious to those in which selfawareness is only peripheral. Given this description, a large proportion of a person’s conscious states are also – to a greater or lesser extent – selfdirected conscious states. Any of the above examples may, or may not, also include self-directed conscious states. In the tennis example, my consciousness is self-directed insofar as I am perceiving and trying to control my own body movements, intending to play this or that shot, or berating myself for poor play. At the party, self-directed states might include my ideas about the impression I wish to make, the success or failure of my attempt, or the consciousness of being bored or tired. In the novel-reading example, the representation of a character’s situation or conduct might remind me of my own experiences and behaviour. When I think of my brother overseas, I am aware of my missing him and my intention of calling him; when thinking about the football I wonder at my own fanaticism; when trying to remember what was on the grocery list I realise that I have been in this situation many times before. On the other hand, I may be so engrossed in trying to remember the grocery list – or in the point of tennis, in a conversation at the party, in the story – that my consciousness is only very minimally selfdirected. Moral consciousness What is it to be morally conscious? For a person who is generally conscious in the way I have described, some perceptual, non-perceptual and self-directed conscious states are also morally conscious states. What kind of state is a morally conscious state? In my view, a conscious state counts as a morally conscious state just when a moral point of view forms its aspectual shape – in other words, when the conscious state’s intentional object is perceived or thought about from a moral point of view. No particular theoretical commitments or doctrinal

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contentions about what a moral point of view consists in are intended in this characterisation. Consciousness ‘from a moral point of view’ is intended broadly and inclusively – pluralistically – to be instantiated in all and any of the ways in which human beings conceive of and experience morality. Points of view that form the aspectual shape of particular instances of moral consciousness may shape our consciousness from the perspective of any of the full range of moral concepts that we are capable of grasping and deploying in practice. The moral concepts that shape and direct moral consciousness may be conscious features of the state itself but are not necessarily transparently present to consciousness. Moral consciousness can thus be understood as a particular type of consciousness that supervenes on general consciousness, its distinguishing characteristic being that it responds to – or picks out – moral features relevant to the intentional objects of consciousness. A person might be in a morally conscious perceptual state when involved in a dispute. To take an example, when my neighbour visits me to retrieve her garden shears, imagine that I spontaneously admit to lending them, in turn, to a friend of mine. Momentarily startled by my frank admission, she quickly regains her composure, although I can see that she is quietly furious with me. This is not acceptable behaviour under any circumstances. I must recover and return her property at once, please. Embarrassed at being caught out and stung by her fury, I reply lamely that I had intended to return them to her tomorrow, as we had originally agreed. I apologise and promise remorsefully that I will not take such liberties with her property again. My neighbour replies, curtly, that this is most certainly the case, since I shall no more be trusted to borrow it. In this case, I am in a perceptual state, being immediately confronted by my neighbour and also in a morally conscious state, aware of and responding to some of the moral features of the situation – in this case, features that happen to reflect rather badly on me. The distinctive characteristic of perceptual moral states is that the person in them is focused on – is directing moral attention towards – present circumstances. In the garden shears case, I am morally conscious in an immediate sense, in the moment. As is the case with perceptual states in general, moral perceptual states are accompanied by other background capacities and states that inform, structure and influence their particular shape. When people are in morally conscious perceptual states, they are also employing background structures that provide moral content for those perceptual states – background moral states that combine to structure and inform the perceptual state of moral consciousness. These background states

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include such things as deeper dispositions, motives, thoughts, feelings and beliefs that need not be coherently formulated or transparently represented in the moment. Moreover, we need not be explicitly conscious of any of this background at the time of perceptual moral consciousness. Indeed, to be explicitly aware of these background states in the moment of perceptual moral consciousness, to any significant degree, would be a rare achievement. Moral consciousness may also be non-perceptual. When I think of the garden shears confrontation afterwards, for example, non-perceptual morally conscious states may be stirred up by my memory of the experience. The moral consciousness is non-perceptual because the situation it takes as intentional object – the garden shears incident – is not present to me. A clearer case of non-perceptual moral consciousness occurs when, for example, I am discussing an international refugee crisis with a friend over lunch. I am surrounded, perceptually, by trees, lawn, benches, a lake with a fountain, other people having lunch or strolling by, my friend sitting next to me, waterfowl heckling for food scraps and so on. The object of our mutual moral concern – an international refugee crisis – is not here in the park with us. We discuss the status and rights illegal refugees have and should have when they arrive, the manner of their arrival, what conditions they are escaping, what the first-world response should be, the propriety of our own government’s response and how we as citizens should respond. The moral content of such a discussion is blended with, and is influenced by, matters of fact and contention, the taking of different perspectives – issues and ideas either of us believes is relevant to the discussion. If my interlocutor becomes visibly angry or upset during the discussion, my moral consciousness might switch from a non-perceptual to a perceptual state. To take the example further – into the realm of moral self-consciousness – consider my revisiting our lunchtime discussion, when I have a moment for cool reflection later in the afternoon. I think about important points made in the discussion, how heated the argument became, my friend’s angry outburst and how I reacted to it. I am in a morally conscious (non-perceptual) state. I also see, however dimly, my own role as proponent of a certain moral point of view, interlocutor and friend – as a moral agent. Thus, I am also in a self-directed state of moral consciousness or am morally self-conscious – my morally conscious state also takes me as an object of moral interest. My moral self-consciousness, however, need not contain feelings of guilt, self-reproach, regret or moral self-satisfaction, or any of the various explicit manifestations of conscience I might be expected to feel in this

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case. It may be that I judge harshly my conduct in the discussion with my friend. However, I am in a morally self-conscious state simply by virtue of my being an object of moral consciousness in that situation, regardless of any self-directed moral judgement. In this way, moral self-consciousness may be only peripheral selfawareness in a morally conscious state that is primarily about something else. Morally self-conscious people need not be solely, or even primarily, morally concerned with themselves. In the garden shears example I am morally self-conscious in a fairly direct sense. In other examples moral self-consciousness is less direct. Returning to the earlier novel-reading example, while my consciousness is primarily concerned with the unfolding narrative, I may also be aware of the way that a character’s experiences, conduct, circumstances or character reflect in some morally significant way on my own. Morally self-conscious states can also be sharply self-judgemental, as when I blame myself for being too argumentative and insensitive in the lunchtime discussion or when I see myself as shamefully having breached my neighbour’s trust. Further (roughly sketched) examples of morally self-conscious states include the intention to judge loved ones less harshly in future, the belief that I am being generous in my praise of a colleague’s work or the memory of letting someone down. The intention to judge loved ones less harshly might come about through criticism of my behaviour, fresh consciousness of the misery I have inflicted on my family in the recent past or the sudden realisation of my own harshly judgemental nature reflected in a literary character. The self-directed belief that I am a generous and thoughtful person might accompany the putatively helpful advice I offer. If I have broken a promise to meet a friend or have not performed well in my job, I may be morally conscious of the fact that I have let people down.

Moral reflection The account of general consciousness and moral consciousness prepares the ground for an account of moral reflection. Moral reflection itself enters my account of morally conscious states as a specific practice of higher-order moral consciousness. Higher-order consciousness occurs when people take their own states, or features of their own states, as intentional objects. It is a state of thinking about – or being in a conscious state about – one’s conscious states. Moral reflection is a higher-order morally self-conscious state that takes as its intentional object a lower-order conscious state or collection of states. It is

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morally self-conscious insofar as, taking (lower-order) conscious states as intentional objects, moral reflection critically examines their moral content. Moral reflection is a specific kind of moral self-consciousness. Being a morally self-conscious activity, moral reflection shares the characteristic features of moral consciousness. The relevant intentional object is a lower-order state, which need not have been morally conscious. The specific type of lower-order state upon which moral reflection operates is direct conscious experience – either morally conscious or not – made available for moral reflection through its agent’s memory, which can be assisted (or distorted) by various other internal psychological features such as desires, emotions, sensibilities and external evidence such as the presence of physical traces, recordings and especially others’ rendering of events. Moral reflection is self-conscious in the minimal sense that people are themselves present in memories of their own direct conscious experience. Furthermore, lower-order experience is examined not from any given perspective but from a moral point of view – moral reflection is a state of higher-order moral consciousness. Thus, moral reflection shares the same feature which distinguishes moral consciousness from other kinds of consciousness. This characteristic neatly distinguishes moral reflection from some other kinds of higher-order reflective states. However, what I mean by moral reflection is more specific than this. It is not just any critical higher-order examination of experiences whose aspectual shape is informed by a moral point of view. Take George, who values kindness as a moral virtue. George believes that people ought to be guided by ideals of kindness and that kind people are high moral exemplars. Moreover, George believes that he himself qualifies as a kind person. However, being prone to occasional bouts of crippling self-doubt about his own virtue, George requires reassurance that his self-assessment is justified. George brings to mind his moral motivations, questioning whether or not he really feels motivated kindly towards others in general or whether he might not feel kindly after all. He tries to remember kind things he has done for people and why he did them. He asks a trusted friend if she considers him a kind person. She says that of course she does, on the whole. George, on reflection, judges that he is motivated kindly towards others in general, and, bolstered by his friend’s words, remembers sufficiently many instances of his own kindness to justify his positive moral self-image. George’s self-doubt is assuaged. Although his bouts of self-doubt appear to be induced by vanity, George may well be a genuinely kind person. Regardless of this,

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however, George has not been engaging in what I take to be moral reflection. George has not been morally reflecting because he is concerned principally with his own moral status or moral self-image rather than his moral experience. Moral reflection, as I understand it, is not principally concerned with scrutiny of one’s moral status or self-image. It is not the same thing as moral self-examination. The primary concern in moral reflection is not moral self-analysis. Its most important questions are not about oneself (‘What kind of moral person am I?’ ‘How good am I?’). The most important questions in moral reflection are about one’s experiences in all of their particularity and what, morally, they might mean (‘What happened here?’ ‘What have I done?’). The primary concern for moral reflection is one’s own moral experience and one’s response or lack of response, one’s action or lack of action. Self-image may partially inform this experience, but reflection on moral experience is not reflection on self-image. George fails the test for moral reflection because he is not concerned with his actual moral experiences but instead with his own moral status. If George had been concerned first and foremost with questions such as whether his putatively kind moral response on a particular occasion was the appropriate moral response (whether he had understood the moral circumstances properly or whether the putatively kind intention which moved him really was what he thinks it was) rather than whether his self-assessment as a kind person can be justified, then his reflection would have had the aspectual shape of moral reflection. Although the question of one’s moral status is often closely associated with the question of one’s moral agency – and although in people’s morally conscious states, concern about status and agency often combine or overlap – the two are separable. Moral reflection primarily concerns itself with experience and moral response – moral agency – not moral status. The critical nature of moral reflection The higher-order moral consciousness exhibited in moral reflection, however, is not fully characterised by its being an examination of one’s moral experiences – particularly what bears on one’s moral responses – undertaken from a moral point of view. Moral reflection also has a specific structure and functions in a distinctive way. Moral reflection is an actively sceptical morally self-conscious state, as opposed to other higher-order morally self-conscious states of examination that may be merely observational, assenting or self-serving. It is sceptical firstly in the sense that it proceeds from a position of doubt about the reliability of one’s lower-order moral responses or lack of moral response. For exam-

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ple, subsequent to the garden shears incident, when both my neighbour and the heat of the moment have receded, I might take a quiet moment to reflect on the moral features of the situation. To morally reflect, I must be prepared to dissent from my existing first-order moral response if examination of the experience finds me in the wrong or mistaken. That is, moral reflection requires of me that I am first of all willing to genuinely question – not just review and re-endorse – the moral features of my part in the dispute. It is questionable whether George, whom we have disqualified already for reasons of self-image, would pass the sceptical test for moral reflection either. It seems, rather, that George’s reflection (on his own self-image rather than his moral experience) was not sceptical in the sense required for moral reflection. George sought reassurance – to review and re-endorse an existing judgement – rather than engagement in a genuinely sceptical examination. It should be clear that moral reflection is not simply a state of doubting the reliability of lower-order moral responses. George’s type of selfdoubt, if it is about one instance of putative kindness rather than his moral status in general, would still not qualify him for moral reflection. Moral reflection, being a critical examination, is interrogative about one’s moral experience. It is not the act of inducing doubt about one’s past moral experience or simply of identifying moral responses about which one has latent doubts. Moral reflection is the act of seeking out explicit and tacit moral responses and judgements in the particular experiences it examines and – if clear responses are discovered – of questioning from a moral point of view what those moral responses and judgements were. If, on the other hand, the original experience being held up for reflection fails to yield a clear moral response or judgement in the first instance – if the moral features of the lower-order state are too obscure, opaque or complicated for immediate clarity – then an instance moral reflection need not be at an end. Moral reflection is persistently interrogative, in an instance such as this, seeking to make at least some moral sense of the original experience. For example, I might morally reflect on the case of comforting my upset colleague, scrutinising the circumstances of the case and questioning whether sympathetic anger was, morally, a good response. A thorough sceptical interrogation of the experience may at one extreme swiftly bring me to a clear resolution of this matter or, at the other extreme, may uncover a nest of moral confusions and conundrums in the original experience which frustrate attempts at clarity. In the latter case, moral reflection nevertheless continues its sceptical interrogation, seeking to make some sense of the confusions and conundrums I have uncovered.

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Social aspects of moral reflection It seems at this point that, as a type of moral conduct, moral reflection is peculiar in that it is an internal, unobservable – private – action. This is not the case for activities taken to be typical of other moral dispositions, for example, a disposition to tell the truth or the disposition to give to those in need. In the activity of moral reflection, a person seems to turn away from the outside world to reflect upon his or her own moral states, perhaps in an unattractively obsessive and isolated manner. Dispositions such as honesty and benevolence are not open to this criticism to anywhere near the same degree: the actions they bring about are not only public and observable; they are outwardly rather than inwardly directed. Moral reflection, however, is often as much a social action as a private one. Although the act of morally reflecting itself is private in the sense that what goes on in one’s own mind is not in the public realm or directly observable by others, the conditions in which moral reflection takes place, and the manner of its expression, are as likely to occur in the social realm as they are to be private. Other people and their experiences are crucial resources for moral reflection, and moral experience is often shared, both in the sense that we share moral experiences in certain particular circumstances (e.g. acting cooperatively on a shared project, taking part collectively in civil disobedience, suffering from prejudice and discrimination in a minority group) and in the sense that we often find that our own particular or personal moral experiences have their reflection in the moral experience of others. Openness to such experiences, and more generally to others’ moral points of view, will be central to excellence in moral reflection. Moral reflection is entered into, and moral experiences are critically explored, in a multitude of social contexts – in conversation with friends, in dialogue and debate with those who take an opposing position on some moral issue or in asking for and receiving advice, and from novel and unexpected sources. A sceptical, critical examination of moral experience could be pursued privately through comparing the moral experiences of a particular protagonist in a novel to one’s real-life experience and publicly by bringing personal experience to bear on a discussion of the admirable or blameworthy aspects of the character with someone who has also read the book. Wherever and whenever moral issues are raised in social interaction, the possibility of engaging in moral reflection of the kind I am describing is also raised. The fact that moral reflection is not primarily an outward, public action in the way that, say, acts of benevolence are, does not mean that

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moral reflection need be a lonely or isolated or insular matter. Moral reflection, the critical, sceptical reflection on moral experience, can be public and social. Moral reflection can be a social act in an even stronger sense. It can be a practice in which a social group reflects upon shared moral experiences. A social group can share moral experiences in the sense that each member of the group manifests the same moral response to an experience they have in common. For this reason, moral reflection need not always be exclusive self-analysis but can also be a shared general examination that is primarily directed at a group. A social group might, for example, experience a shared sense of indignation, outrage or guilt about what has been done to or by them, or in their name. Another group might harbour a shared grievance over an injury inflicted by others. Moral reflection in these cases will be a matter of examining as a social group what, morally speaking, has happened, what the group’s response has been and whether it was appropriate or justified in the circumstances – a sceptical and interrogative group effort at reflecting critically on this particular shared moral experience. In larger social groups, such as communities or nations, the shape that a broad critical examination would have to take to count as moral reflection is uncertain but wide public discussion would be a minimal requirement. For example, it is not clear what it would be for a nation to morally reflect on its hostility to refugees, or its deep suspicion of a particular religious faith – or under what conditions these count as shared moral experiences – but if critical examination of the circumstances of this hostility only happens in the fringe press or outside the public realm altogether, it would clearly not count as moral reflection by a nation. In these cases, the nation is morally unreflective about its response to refugees and unfamiliar religious faith, and this unreflectiveness is connected to a lack of critical examination through wide public discussion. Excellent moral reflection and openness Moral reflection can be done well or badly, and excellent moral reflection involves judicious exercise of various moral skills. What skills are required for excellent moral reflection in a particular instance will depend on the requirements of the case. For example, reflecting well upon one’s moral experience might require skill in regarding its emotional dimension impassively in one instance and in another instance require specialised skills of sympathy or empathy. Genuine critical engagement of the kind required for excellent moral reflection can be achieved only if an agent has acquired the skills and knowledge to

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raise and pursue effectively genuine doubts regarding his or her own moral experience. Poor moral reflection, in contrast, will be the result of failure to genuinely critically engage with one’s own moral experience. This type of failure often has its genesis in a closed, myopic moral perspective – an inability to reflect on one’s experience except from one’s own well-entrenched moral point of view. A central requirement of excellent moral reflection is its opposite – an openness (though not uncritical) to novel moral perspectives. Excellent moral reflection is never a matter of blindly applying already well-entrenched moral views, but, since it is a critical reflection upon moral experience, it always involves an openness to the possible merits of other perspectives. Take, for example, a case where I allow one of my colleagues to push his own strident views on any number of issues when we meet, although I strongly disagree privately with much of what he has to say. I do not confront him or argue the point on many occasions out of what I unreflectively take to be tolerance of others’ views. When I critically reflect on my response to the most recent of my colleague’s diatribes, I see that I make things easy for myself by not standing up against him but am convinced that I am exercising tolerance and that it is morally important to do so. However, in conversation with another of my colleagues, who happens not to get on well at all with my aggressive colleague, it emerges that she thinks I display several moral faults in my habitual (lack of) response. One of her complaints is that I appear to be acting in a cowardly manner rather than a tolerant one. Another is that I display disrespect and show disdain for my aggressive colleague by not deigning to engage him in genuine argument. These are moral features of the situation I would otherwise have overlooked completely, and in this case, I needed another person to point out these failings – or at least to raise these possibilities. Left alone with my moral blind spot, I would have remained ignorant of the critical possibilities when morally reflecting on encounters with my aggressive colleague. Although this is a very limited example, it does help to point out that in moral reflection openness to novel moral perspectives is central to excellence. Harder to recognise and incorporate into excellent moral reflection would be the recognition of a value stand that directly challenges one’s moral assumptions. If my critical colleague were to take a strong stand against tolerance and say, ‘Appeals to tolerance are always really a front for straight-out cowardice or some other moral failure; your “tolerance” there was just a moral failure,’ then, assuming I just plain disagree about the moral status of tolerance, the issue is transformed. Openness to others’ moral perspectives can bring about direct moral

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challenges such as this, and these challenges are of a different kind to merely pointing out novel moral features. The status of one’s moral response is not only at stake, but also one’s value assumptions. When one’s value assumptions are directly challenged, excellent moral reflection will involve taking these challenges seriously – neither dismissing them out of hand, nor accepting them uncritically. Since I cannot just recognise my critical colleague’s views on tolerance as something I had overlooked, and supposing that her view represents a direct challenge to my own value assumptions, then I have some more moral work to do reflecting critically on encounters with my aggressive colleague. Response to moral self-understanding To what extent does excellent moral reflection involve excellent response to the insights it garners? Consider for example that through moral reflection I eventually come to the realisation that I have been both cowardly towards and unjustly disdainful of my aggressive colleague. I may respond in a variety of ways to this lucid realisation of my inadequacy in the circumstances – from remorse, agent regret or self-forgiveness to embarrassed bafflement or self-contempt. Some of my possible responses will be appropriate to the situation; some, not. One natural way to consider excellence of moral reflection is in terms of the adequacy or excellence – or moral maturity – of these responses. Should an expanded conception of excellent moral reflection include excellence in response to its results? I argue that it should not and seek to limit my account of moral reflection to the search for moral lucidity rather than admirable reaction to this lucidity (or what an agent takes to be this lucidity). Moral reflection is best defined as a reasonably sharply distinguished activity with a reasonably sharply distinguished end or goal – a clear understanding of our past moral experiences. To introduce the requirement that excellent moral reflection includes responding excellently to what arrives at the end of the reflective process is to muddy the description unnecessarily. These other affective and cognitive responses to self-understanding reflect their own species of virtue, connected for example with self-respect and justice as it applies to the self. To illustrate this distinction, imagine a person who has reached a level of proficiency in the one activity – moral reflection – but who fails to exhibit excellent responses to its results. A familiar example of this sort is the person who tends, usually through engaging habitually in moral reflection of the sort I have described, to accurately diagnose their own moral faults, but who fails miserably when it comes to being fair on

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themselves. They genuinely seek to understand the moral character of their past actions but tend to overreact to their faults. In a conspicuous display of moral pride, say, they hold themselves to higher moral standards than they hold others and come to blame themselves excessively for quite ordinary and everyday failings. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, seems to have been such a character (see Monk 1990). I think in this kind of case we should say that the person morally reflects well but fails when an excellent response to their self-understanding is called for. And in spite of this failure concerning responsiveness, there is still something admirable about their pursuit of moral lucidity about themselves. There is nonetheless a connection between the responses one is apt to have to an understanding of one’s past and the pursuit of moral lucidity concerning one’s past. The genuine pursuit of lucidity through moral reflection includes a commitment to properly judge the character of one’s actions, and this is not completely distinguishable from the affective and practical responses we may have to these actions. For example, a person cannot genuinely come to see that they have done something unforgivable, and, failing to feel any horror at the fact, immediately set about forgiving themselves. How we understand the past act and how we feel about it are not fully separable. On the other hand, how we understand the action and how we respond to it, act towards it and integrate it into our future are not at all the same. Moral reflection is an activity aimed at understanding but not at what may follow from this understanding.

Morally reflective motivation So far I have described moral reflection, an activity that morally reflective people are disposed to engage in. Moral reflection is a higher-order critical activity whose intentional object is its agent’s own moral experience. The discussion now shifts to an account of the nature of virtuous morally reflective motivation. In order to outline in more depth what I take to be the virtue of moral reflectiveness – a state distinct from the activity of moral reflection – in this section I describe and analyse some of the salient features of the core motivation of morally reflective agents: a commitment to moral lucidity. Genuine commitment to moral lucidity By a commitment to moral lucidity, I mean a commitment to lucidity about one’s own past moral experience. In using the phrase ‘moral

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experience’, I do not mean to imply that there is some kind of hardand-fast distinguishing property that sharply separates a special class of ‘moral’ experience from the general run of past experience to which the morally reflective agent somehow has privileged access but to emphasise that moral reflection takes the moral dimension of our own particular, lived experience as its primary object – what really happened, how one actually behaved, thought, felt or was motivated – as opposed to our ‘moral self’ or self-image (although these two are closely interrelated). A commitment to lucidity about one’s moral experience is, according to my view, the central motivational component of a morally reflective person’s virtue. For a moral motivation to constitute a commitment, it needs in the standard case to be a deep, enduring and pervasive motivation directed at a particular end or collection of related ends. Another way of saying that the morally reflective person has a deep and enduring moral motivation to achieve moral lucidity is to say that she has a genuine commitment to it. What, however, is the nature of a genuine commitment of this kind? What distinguishes it from a commitment that is not genuine? Genuine commitment and action One necessary condition of genuine commitment, according to Cox et al., is that we consistently act in pursuit of the end that defines our commitment, ‘even when this is difficult and uncomfortable’ (2003, 140). This means that someone with a genuine commitment is actually disposed to act in the light of that commitment, rather than, for example, merely desiring that its end be advanced, or being disposed to avow a commitment to it (Cox et al. 2003, 141). An example Cox et al. use is that of a person who evinces ‘a commitment to world peace’ but whose cynicism causes despair of ever being able to do anything about it (2003, 141). The cynic will not even engage in merely symbolic action for the cause of world peace, seeing this type of action as self-indulgent and self-serving (2003, 141). This person has a desire for or is favourably disposed towards world peace, but does not have a genuine commitment to it, since they do not actually do anything about it: A person does not come to have a commitment by merely desiring a thing, or judging a thing desirable; nor by merely announcing their commitment, either to themselves or to others. A person comes, genuinely, to have a commitment when [they] are actually disposed to act upon it – disposed to act upon it in the actual course of their life and not merely in a hypothetical situation they will never face. (Cox et al. 2003, 141)

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This distinctive feature of genuine commitment, together with confusion, ignorance, error and self-deception, makes it possible – perhaps common – that people sincerely express commitments they do not genuinely hold. This is the case because people’s avowed commitments may not be matched with appropriate action, even though those commitments sincerely reflect their self-understanding. I do not have room in this book to pursue a full inquiry concerning the concept of sincerity, but I understand sincerity to be a concept that applies when there may be a gap between expressive act and self-understanding: an expressive act is sincere when it expresses the state of mind its agent understands herself to be in. A state of mind is sincere in a derivative sense, when it is the state of mind that is both self-understood and expressed. My view, which allows for self-deceived sincerity, is in conflict with some of the views expressed in the literature on sincerity such as A.D.M. Walker (1978), Stuart Hampshire (1971), Robert G. Olson (1958) and Eva Feder Kittay (1982). However, it agrees broadly with the definition offered by Lionel Trilling (1972, 2): ‘a congruence between avowal and actual feeling’. I take self-deception here, as defined by Herbert Fingarette (1969, 1998) and Mike W. Martin (1985, 1986), not only to be possible but indeed to be common. Fingarette defines self-deception as the purposeful evasion of self-acknowledgement, which is typically aided by a range of behaviours such as rationalisation, self-pretence, wilful ignorance and emotional detachment. This view is not without its critics, and the literature on self-deception is voluminous (see for example Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie Oskenberg Rorty (1988), Mike W. Martin (1985)). An excellent overview of self-deception literature between 1960 and 1985 is Alfred Mele (1987); more recent attempts at a plausible account of self-deception include Annette Barnes (1997) and Mele (2001). There are several direct responses to various aspects of Fingarette’s analysis of self-deception, including Mele (1987, 11–13), Haight (1980), Hamlyn (1971), Miri (1974), Saunders (1975) and Szabados (1974). Owing to the fact that the disposition to act, even in the face of difficulties, is a necessary condition of genuine commitment (but not for sincerity of expression or genuine feeling), a person can be shown, without implausibility, to be sincere with respect to a commitment not genuinely held. Consider a father who, though he has a high-powered and demanding job which frequently finds him travelling for extended periods interstate and overseas, takes himself to be genuinely committed to his children. He often expresses regret to workmates, family and friends that he cannot be at home more often, that he misses his children and wishes he

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could be a part of their everyday lives more completely – getting them ready for school in the morning, playing with them in the afternoons, going to their weekend sports matches, taking them to the beach or just spending time with them at home. When he does come home, however, he professes himself too tired from his work and travel to do many of the things he would like to with his children, and tends to become irritated with them playing loudly, squabbling and constantly trying to get his attention, when he feels he needs to use the rare opportunity of a weekend at home to relax and unwind. When he does muster the energy to actively engage with his children, he quickly tires of them, and he generally excuses himself not only from participating in their games, reading them stories or engaging with their current projects and preoccupations but also from involvement in the daily round of bathing, feeding, clothing, settling disputes, supervising homework and so on. On the other hand, the lucrative salary he earns ensures that his children are well fed and healthy, go to the best schools, have the latest toys, games and top-of-the-line sports equipment, as well as plenty of books to read and videos to watch. They get to live in a big house in an exclusive neighbourhood and mix with the children of the social elite. When he reflects on the reasons he works so hard and travels so much, foremost in his mind are these advantages in life he can offer his children – advantages he himself did not have as a child. This man is sincere in expressing a commitment to his children – he emphasises in self-reflection the fact that he spends a significant portion of his income on his children, he persuades himself and others that he works as hard as he does primarily for the benefit of his family, and he reasons that not being intimate with his children is a (regrettable) sacrifice necessitated by the hard work he does – hard work which he does because the financial support maintains the commitment to his children. In short, it is his sincere self-understanding that a commitment to his children is one of the central, defining features of his life and character. However, on at least one plausible interpretation of both what it is to have a commitment to one’s children and what his behaviour towards them amounts to, this father does not hold the genuine commitment to his children that he sincerely avows. To have a commitment to one’s children is in part to engage in their day-today lives, to have a certain intimacy with them, to directly support their projects and interests, to play an active part in their emotional, social and psychological growth – to consistently, unambiguously and directly show your commitment to them through your active presence in their everyday lives. And it is to do this even if it means the sacrifice

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of some other goods, such as a very large income and the social prestige that comes with the power and influence of a high-flying job. Arguably, this father is sincere yet self-deceived about the genuineness of his commitment to his children. He evades acknowledging to himself that his commitment is not genuine by using several distinctive techniques of self-deception. When he is faced, as happens in moments of self-doubt, with the fact that his place in his children’s lives is a distant and emotionally detached one, he focuses his attention on one of the rare occasions he has achieved intimacy with his children – for example, a certain trip to the beach some time ago when the weather was fine, the children were behaving well, they swam and played together, and he felt a genuine closeness to them – and rationalises that it is out of the commitment to them, and days like that, that he pushes himself so hard in his career. The truth is that he is committed to his career – he loves the travel, the influential circles he moves in, and applying the skills and knowledge of his profession – and although he has a conflicting desire to play a more intimate role in his children’s lives, this desire is not great enough to motivate him to do any more about it. That he pursues his career out of the commitment to them is, so to speak, his cover story. It is a convincing cover story, to the father himself, in part because he knows that the financial security and educational and social opportunities he does provide for his children through his hard work are typically expressive of the type of commitment he avows. That what he does for them is not a sufficient condition of genuine commitment to his children, and that his real motives do not match the thoughts he expresses on the matter, he purposefully evades, and he does this, while evading acknowledgement of the process, because to be aware that the reality of the situation is otherwise would be a devastating blow to his high self-esteem and would deal a death-blow to his cherished self-image as a committed parent. The example serves to show that in the father’s case the sincere expression of a commitment is not a reliable guide to whether a genuine commitment is held or not. This example, if persuasive, shows one way in which it is possible – and possibly common – for self-deception to enter between avowal and action, splitting sincerity from genuineness with regard to commitment. If people successfully evade self-acknowledgement about their actions and omissions, or the real motives they have in relevant contexts, then their self-understanding – and the sincerity of their avowal – is no guide at all to whether they hold a genuine commitment. Another necessary condition of genuine commitment emphasised by Cox et al. is that a person who holds a genuine commitment is disposed

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to act out of the commitment itself, rather than for other reasons (2003, 141–2). Commitments ground dispositions to act in the sense that ‘they supply the reasons through which an act comes about’ (Cox et al. 2003, 142). This second condition also serves to highlight the likelihood of sincerely expressed yet non-genuine commitments. Self-deceivers are apt to evade self-acknowledgement about the real reasons for their actions and supply false reasons which accord instead with their sincerely expressed yet non-genuine commitments. Consider again our sincerely but not genuinely committed father. It is his commitment to his career itself and the rewards it brings to him that supplies the reasons for his actions, rather than any commitment to his children. Yet, through his self-deception, he sincerely avows that the reason he pursues his career is out of a commitment to his children. However, consider the case in which, in a dramatic turn, he resigns from his highflying job and takes up a desk-bound position in his home city. The salary package is not quite so lucrative but is still generous enough to keep himself and his family in the style to which they are accustomed, and the new job does not have the travel, glamour or power of his former position, yet still requires – in a less demanding low-pressure context – the expert application of his specialised knowledge and skills. Since his office is close by, he has the opportunity to spend time with his children in the mornings and evenings, and is now home every weekend. Moreover, his less demanding job means not only that he is rarely away but also that he does not need to work unusually long hours or bring work home with him. He undergoes this change in career trajectory ostensibly out of his commitment to his growing children – they need their father around, being an active presence in their everyday lives, if they are to have the kind of happy, balanced childhood he wishes them to have. That he is committed to his children and has come to realise that his career has been undermining this commitment, is the reason he gives for this sudden, dramatic change. He has seen that his lifestyle did not allow him to follow through on his commitment properly and therefore he has made the necessary sacrifice. And it is indeed a personal sacrifice. It would seem that he really does have a commitment to his children after all. However, imagine that his real reason turns out to be the fear that his marriage may be failing and more deeply that if it does fail, then (among other things) he will lose one of the central sources of his high self-image and self-esteem, not to say his reputation in the eyes of the many people who are well aware of the image he has built of being a successful husband and father. The danger of his marriage failing is

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real enough but too difficult for him to directly confront, let alone the shallow vanity that drives his fear. The self-deceptive explanation is persuasive enough – it is obvious both that his children need him to be more involved in their lives than he has been in the past and that his action is consistent with a commitment to them – that he can evince this reason and evade his real reasons without difficulty. He is genuinely yet not primarily concerned for the interests of his children, especially, though this remains unacknowledged, for the potential effects on them if their parents’ marriage failed. However, a commitment to his children has not in fact brought about his action, even though his action is consistent with and would otherwise support such a commitment. The father fails once again to hold a genuine commitment to his children, because he has acted in this circumstance for reasons not generated by the commitment itself. And once again, he is sincere (yet self-deceived) about holding a genuine commitment to his children. The two conditions of genuine commitment which I have sketched are not together sufficient for a commitment’s genuineness. There are other conditions to be met for a commitment to be genuine, but anything approaching a complete account is beyond the scope of this book. There are conditions, for example, relating to belief sets of genuinely committed agents, the manner of acquisition and to circumstances in which genuine commitments are legitimately given up. A complete account of genuine commitment would delineate, for instance, necessary conditions which guarantee that a genuine commitment is never one that is given up wantonly or for trivial reasons by its possessor. To be accorded genuine status, a commitment to, say, a community project would never be given up just because its possessor does not feel like it any more or is involved in petty bickering which has held the project back or because the project has turned out to be unexpectedly but not terribly difficult to complete. Similarly, a commitment to moral lucidity would not have been genuine if it was given up because its findings tended to be a little awkward or embarrassing, or when it did not bring instant and reliably clear results or yet when it became clear that its pursuit was unfashionable.

The virtue of moral reflectiveness In this section I will be defending the notion that a genuine commitment to moral lucidity constitutes a virtue, which I call moral reflectiveness. To do this, I refer to the discussion of virtue in the previous chapter. I argue that a genuine commitment to moral lucidity satisfies

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the features of a virtue outlined there, survey some of the distinctive characteristics of the virtue moral reflectiveness, and respond to some of the more obvious objections regarding its status as a virtue. I suggest that moral reflectiveness is in fact a distinct and distinctively moral virtue of intrinsic moral worth and sketch its interconnectedness with an overarching desire to do well in a moral sense, including the way it motivates changes for the better even in morally bad and indifferent lives. Moral lucidity and moral reflection So far I have not said much about the execution of a genuine commitment to moral lucidity. I have stated what I mean by moral lucidity, the end of the commitment, but I have not examined the sort of agency to be expected from a person holding such a commitment. People who are committed to moral lucidity are committed to achieving a lucid understanding of their own past moral experience; to acquiring and developing critical capacities and skills relating to the moral judgement and evaluation of this experience and to overcoming confusion, ignorance, error and various manifestations of self-deception which are opposed to a lucid grasp of its moral character. A commitment to moral lucidity is expressed in a broad range of moral contexts, and one activity that distinctively expresses a commitment to moral lucidity is the practice I have already described – moral reflection. People who have a genuine commitment to moral lucidity are disposed to engage in moral reflection, and it is through excellence in moral reflection that I think lucidity is most likely to be achieved. I will now present the case for moral reflectiveness as a virtue by examining whether a genuine commitment to lucidity answers to the key elements of our definition of virtue, which I set out in the previous chapter. Natural capacities and skills Virtues are distinguished from natural capacities, talents and qualities of temperament which they can sometimes superficially resemble. We have seen that virtues differ from natural qualities of a person such as these on at least two separate grounds. Virtues are acquired through the agency of their possessor. Secondly, as Zagzebski puts it, ‘a virtue is a deep quality of a person, closely identified with her selfhood, whereas natural faculties are only the raw materials for the self’ (1996, 104). A genuine commitment to moral lucidity is clearly distinguishable from a natural capacity, talent or quality of temperament. Genuine commitments are not natural but acquired features of people, and they

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are motivations rather than capacities or talents. Moreover, a genuine commitment to moral lucidity is acquired through agency on the part of its holder and is a deep quality of that person, which is consistent with its being a virtue. A commitment to moral lucidity is likewise not a special type of skill. It is a specific moral motivation. Zagzebski (1996, 113–16) distinguishes moral skills and virtues along these lines, arguing that virtues, being part of a person’s motivational structure rather than directly actcentred, are psychologically distinct from skills and apply in a greater range of contexts. Commitments and skills are as different from each other as are commitments and natural capacities, and a genuine commitment to moral lucidity belongs on the side of virtues, not skills. Skills by themselves do not constitute motivations but, given certain motivations, tend to bring about effectiveness in action – success in achieving the ends of those motivations. A commitment to moral lucidity is a kind of motivation. However, it is important to clarify the connection between a commitment to moral lucidity and the skills in action with which it is associated. Zagzebski observes that certain skills ‘serve virtues by allowing a person who is virtuously motivated to be effective in action’ (1996, 113). Thus, the virtue of courage is served, according to Zagzebski, by skills of ‘knowing how to stand up to a tormentor’; the virtue of compassion is served by skills of ‘knowing what to say to the bereaved’ and the virtue of generosity is served by skills of ‘being effective in giving to others (e.g. in a way that does not embarrass them)’ (1996, 113). A commitment to moral lucidity is served in the same way by certain characteristic skills related to effectiveness in action. Effectiveness in action – success in achieving the end of the genuine commitment to moral lucidity – is determined by the achievement of lucidity about one’s moral experiences. A significant proportion of the skills which serve a genuine commitment to moral lucidity will, I think, be skills related to excellence at moral reflection. For example, skills associated with overcoming certain morally pernicious forms of self-deception in particular – and with overcoming confusion, ignorance and error about moral experiences in general (which commonly accompany and support these self-deceptive practices) – are central in the service of a genuine commitment to moral lucidity. Moral reflection is the action type under which such skills are deployed. Being effective in catching oneself out in self-deceptive practices – for instance, being able to see through oneself when evading acknowledgement of the morally salient particulars of a circumstance or in spotting the signs of self-manufactured confusion

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or rationalisation about a past action – constitutes one such morally reflective skill (or bundle of skills) central to success in achieving moral lucidity. Possession of such skills, however, is not simply a matter of having made or avowed a commitment to moral lucidity, nor is it an automatic or necessary consequence of engaging in moral reflection. Skills such as the ability to catch oneself out in self-deception typically take time and effort to develop. Moreover, although these skills typically develop alongside the motivations they serve, they are not guaranteed to develop in full – nor is success guaranteed – even given the best and deepest of motivations. As Zagzebski points out, Many virtues have correlative skills that allow the virtuous person to be effective in action, and thus, we would normally expect a person with a virtue to develop the associated skills. Still, it is possible for her to have a virtue and to lack the corresponding skills. Virtues are prior to skills and are strongly connected to motivational structure whereas skills are more connected to effectiveness in action. (1996, 116) This is precisely the connection that I think obtains between a genuine commitment to moral lucidity and the skills associated with moral reflection. People with such a commitment are disposed to morally reflect, and we would expect them in normal circumstances, given the genuineness of their commitment, to develop (for example) a modicum of skill in catching themselves out in self-deceptive conduct. We would expect them more generally to become good at moral reflection – to eventually do well at examining their moral experiences and succeed at seeing through their own self-deception and the various relevant forms of reflective error. However, such skill is not an inevitable consequence of morally reflective action, even though the genuine commitment is held. A person can be genuinely committed to moral lucidity, I think, without having become very good at achieving it. Habituation and entrenchment Another distinguishing mark of virtues according to Zagzebski is that they are gradually acquired, and once acquired, typically become a permanent feature of a person’s character; ‘a kind of second nature’ (1996, 116). Although I have argued that gradual acquisition is not a necessary condition of virtue acquisition, and that in some rare cases it would be possible for a virtue to be acquired quite suddenly, I have agreed that in the standard case virtues ‘take time to develop’ and eventually come to ‘form part of what makes a person the person that she is’ (Zagzebski

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1996, 116). The essential condition here for virtue acquisition is that it is achieved through the agency of its possessor. Again, this is precisely the standard manner of acquisition to be expected for a genuine commitment to moral lucidity. The ability to effectively engage in moral reflection and achieve lucidity can be expected to develop slowly in people, as their moral experience and agency in the world builds and unfolds. A genuine commitment to moral lucidity, undergirded by this developing morally reflective engagement with experience, emerges and gradually becomes entrenched through the agency – through the choices and moral efforts – of its holder. Once acquired, a genuine commitment to moral lucidity is also precisely the kind of state that becomes an entrenched part of a person’s character and life, the kind of state that comprises, in a deep sense, part of what makes morally reflective people the people they are. I have argued that a genuine commitment is a commitment that is acted on, even when it is difficult or personally costly to do so, and that this action is genuinely committed action only when it is motivated by the commitment itself. To have a genuine commitment is to have a reliable and abiding motivation deeply entrenched in one’s character and life. When people have a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, they are disposed to morally reflect – to critically examine their own moral past – even when it is difficult or costly to do so, and they morally reflect out of commitment to achieving lucidity about their moral experience. The motivation to morally reflect on their experience is generally reliable and abiding – it does not sputter out, or come and go or often suffer from neglect. Moreover, this commitment is not just about being disposed strongly and pervasively to do a certain kind of thing but is also about being or becoming a certain kind of person – someone who is morally reflective is usually the kind of person who is particularly interested in, occupied with, deeply concerned about – who takes seriously – morality and the moral life. A genuine commitment to moral lucidity is not just a part of what a person does but also partly defines and determines the kind of person they are. It is clearly the case that when it is genuine, a commitment to moral lucidity answers to these features of a virtue when it is deeply entrenched in the morally reflective person’s character and life. Moral motives and dispositional motivations Zagzebski offers a definition of the motivational component of virtues as motivations in a dispositional sense (1996, 132). She holds that these motivations, persistent and ‘almost continually operative’, and which

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operate ‘at moderate or even weak levels of intensity’, are emotions (1996, 131–32). Each virtue, in Zagzebski’s view, has an emotion specific to it, which accounts for the motivational component of the virtue. However, I have argued that motivations in this dispositional sense are not just emotions. Motivations not only drive but also provide the reasons for – explain – conduct, including moral conduct. Emotions, on their own, do not explain moral conduct. On this basis I have disagreed with Zagzebski, arguing that virtuous motivations are more than just emotions: they are full-blown moral motives. A moral motive is what both drives and explains moral action, and I have argued that moral motives have a broader range and are more psychologically complex than emotions. States that form and inform moral motives include psychologically complex states such as commitments, values, beliefs and judgements – the motivational states that, on their own and in combination, generate our moral action. A genuine commitment to moral lucidity, as I have been presenting it in this chapter, clearly and directly answers to this account of the motivational component of a virtue. It is a psychologically complex state that both drives and explains certain pervasive patterns of moral conduct, most notably engagement in moral reflection. A genuine commitment to moral lucidity is also likely to operate almost continually in a person who holds it, though for extended periods of time without the agent’s having much, if any, awareness of it. It is also the kind of motivation – complex, abiding, pervasive in the life of its holder and, arguably at least, essential to a good moral life – that qualifies for virtue status. A genuine commitment to moral lucidity makes the agent want to act effectively, and, as we have seen, in the case of virtues this has a twofold effect. Firstly, the virtuous agent desires in general to ‘gain knowledge appropriate to the area of life that is the focus of the virtue and to develop the skills associated with virtuous effectiveness in that area of life’ (Zagzebski 1996, 133). Secondly, the particular consequences include ‘the desire to find out the relevant nonmoral facts about the particular circumstances encountered by the agent in which action on the virtuous motive may be called for’ (1996, 133). Both of these consequences, in the case of a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, map the region covered in the earlier discussion of excellent moral reflection. People with a genuine commitment to moral lucidity seek to acquire the relevant knowledge and wide range of skills that may be needed for judicious engagement in moral reflection, including an openness to novel moral perspectives that is perhaps central to its effectiveness.

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Virtues and success The foregoing discussion appears to establish that a genuine commitment to moral lucidity could be counted as a virtue on my account of what constitutes a virtue. As I have already indicated, as a virtuous disposition or motivation of a person, moral reflectiveness is what I call a genuine commitment to moral lucidity. People holding a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, I consider morally reflective. My account of the nature of the virtues is concerned with the characterisation of what Zagzebski calls their ‘motivational component’. Virtues are excellences in moral motivation, possessing the characteristics I have outlined, and a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, as I have described it, answers to this definition. In Zagzebski’s view, however, virtues are not just excellences in moral motivation. There is also, for Zagzebski, the separate matter of success in achieving the ends of excellent moral motivation. According to Zagzebski, as far as successful action is concerned, the motivational component of a virtue (for her, an emotion) alone is not sufficient (1996, 133). The motivational component alone ‘does not reliably lead to success, although it reliably leads the agent to do as much as is in her power to be successful’ (Zagzebski 1996, 133). I have agreed with Zagzebski on this point (23), admitting that the possession of virtuous motivation alone does not ensure success in achieving its aim. However, I have disagreed with the conclusion Zagzebski draws from this observation (23–26), that the definition of virtue should therefore have a success condition built into it (1996, 133). I have argued that Zagzebski has already explicitly accepted the divide I posit between virtues themselves and success (15), in her discussion of the difference between virtues and skills. Virtues are the motivational force for action, and skills serve virtues by ensuring effectiveness in action (Zagzebski 1996, 113). However, Zagzebski introduces as part of the definition of a virtue a component guaranteeing ‘success in reaching the internal or external end of a virtuous motivation’ (1996, 134). This seemed to me to be a mistake, for if it is a person’s skills that bring effectiveness in action – ensure success – and if virtues are distinct from skills primarily for this reason, then effectiveness in action should not be considered a component of a virtue. I think Zagzebski is right to distinguish skills from virtues, but this means that virtuous action may fail. Zagzebski’s success condition, if accepted, would mean that people with a genuine commitment to moral lucidity would possess the virtue only given the extra condition that they also reliably achieved lucidity about their moral past. It is not clear how demanding Zagzebski’s success condition is in relation to each particular instance of virtuous

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action, but at its strongest it would demand that in every single instance of moral reflection, the virtuous agent actually achieves lucidity. I have argued that this is far too strenuous a condition for virtue possession in general and that success in achieving the ends of virtuous action does not belong properly to the definition of the virtues anyway. A virtue is a state of character and not a state of affairs. Furthermore, I have argued that the motivational component of a virtue provides a robust link between virtue and reliable success without the need to import and ensure success by definition. The consequence of the absence of a success condition for my account of the virtue of moral reflectiveness is that it is conceivable that a person possesses the virtue of moral reflectiveness without reliably achieving moral lucidity or, in the most extreme of imaginable cases, without ever achieving it at all. These would be examples of virtuous failure. There are other conceivable cases too, of course, where an agent achieves lucidity reliably without being morally reflective in the least. This would be an example of non-virtuous success. I hold, however, that neither of these extreme cases presents a problem for my account, either of virtues in general or of moral reflectiveness in particular. Firstly, in a typical human life it is implausible that someone with a genuine commitment to lucidity about her own past moral experiences, who engages habitually throughout her life in the critical examination of those experiences from moral points of view, trying to achieve lucidity, will not ever achieve a clear understanding of any of it sufficient to be called a state of moral lucidity. Nor can I see how someone who is deeply morally reflective throughout their life could fail to develop at least a modicum of the requisite skills to achieve lucidity about their moral experiences just as reliably as a person would develop the skills to attain any other demanding but achievable human end. Being morally reflective brings with it reliable success in achieving moral lucidity through the deep, lifelong disposition to moral reflection and also the concomitant strong desire to develop the skills and acquire the knowledge associated with success. The genuine commitment to moral lucidity alone ought to ensure reliable success, unless there are significant obstacles to its expression. The failure to reliably achieve some level of lucidity about one’s moral past despite genuine commitment to moral lucidity should in theory be uncommon. There are of course particular cases – even in a generally placid and uneventful life – in which exceptional conditions such as the magnitude, depth and complex nature of a particular life-changing event or the emotional turmoil caused by dire circumstances would

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defeat anyone’s attempt at a clear understanding of their moral features. However, the likely failure of morally reflective agency in exceptional circumstances does not argue against reliable success in unexceptional ones. Likewise, the possibility of an agent having reliable success in achieving moral lucidity throughout a lifetime without holding any genuine commitment to moral lucidity – perhaps through a freak natural talent for clarity in this area of life or a rare combination of talent and acquired skill – does not argue against my case. It seems unlikely, given the moral depth and complexity of the matter, that anyone would just ‘fall into’ states of moral lucidity reliably without any commitment to doing so. In any case, there is nothing in the argument for the virtue status of moral reflectiveness, or in my account of the nature of the virtues or genuine commitment, which needs deny the possibility of this type of exceptional case – I need only hold that they are likely to be scarce. Indifference, vice and moral reflectiveness There is, however, a potentially more serious difficulty for my account of moral reflectiveness as a virtue. Imagine the case of someone who, for whatever reason, lives a life with a morally indifferent character, but who is also deeply committed to achieving lucidity about his moral past. Also imagine the case of a person who, for whatever reasons and due to whatever influences, has become thoroughly vicious and lives a morally bad life (leaving open what this might entail) but who is also deeply committed to achieving lucidity about his own moral past. Are people such as these two morally reflective? The question here is whether there could be characterless or vicious yet morally reflective people – people who are moral blanks, or even thorough moral failures, but who also hold a genuine commitment to moral lucidity. If there could be such people, the question arises whether their case argues against the status of moral reflectiveness as a virtue. I have built an account in the previous chapter in which virtues are considered excellences in moral motivation that partly constitute a morally good life. This issue raises some deeper questions about the place of morally reflective motivation in a moral life and of what moral life it could plausibly be a part. The difference between moral reflectiveness and its non-virtuous doppelgängers appears similar to that between courage and mere bravery on a certain view. Some might argue that in the case of the virtue of courage and the non-virtuous disposition of bravery, there is more or less the same basic motivation – roughly ‘the defeat of fear’ – informed by different kinds of end – the former having positive moral content

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and the latter not so. In the case of courage versus bravery, it appears on this view as though the moral quality of ends is what distinguishes the two states of character from each other. The motivation to defeat fear put to bad use – its vicious manifestation – could be called foolhardiness. We might be tempted to assert the same sort of relation between moral reflectiveness and its doppelgängers: they consist of the same basic motivation – commitment to moral lucidity – informed by different kinds of end – the former having positive moral quality and the latter not. The indifferent person sits (as it were) in the middle, and the vicious person I have described thus sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to the ‘truly’ morally reflective agent. The motivation is a commitment to achieving moral lucidity in all three cases, but the further end to which the pursuit of moral lucidity is put varies. Not being informed by the worthy ends of ‘true’ moral reflectiveness, it might initially be argued that bad and indifferent morally reflective people are thus somehow in qualitatively different states. However, there is an immediate obstacle to this attempt at a solution. The virtues, on my account, are motivations, and moral reflectiveness is a motivation that takes moral lucidity as an end. The end, beyond this, to which they might be put does not figure in their definition. There is no valid distinction to be made between ‘true’ moral reflectiveness and its doppelgängers. There are thus no such doppelgängers: it is one and the same disposition – moral reflectiveness – in each case. The appeal to different ultimate ends to distinguish ‘true’ moral reflectiveness from its indifferent and bad manifestations is futile. Furthermore, since it, or its results, can conceivably be used towards various different further ends – good, bad or indifferent – it might seem questionable to call moral reflectiveness a virtue at all. However, despite its being conceivable that it could be a feature of morally indifferent or bad lives, I still hold that moral reflectiveness is a virtue. Firstly, the fact that moral reflectiveness is possible in bad and indifferent lives does not argue against its being an essential feature of a morally good life. The only qualification I need to add here is similar to that for the reliable achievement of lucidity without a commitment to it: moral reflectiveness in bad and indifferent lives must be rare. If, to be morally reflective, people must exhibit a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, including the strong disposition to engage in moral reflection – the critical examination of one’s own moral experiences – then the rarity of moral reflectiveness in bad and indifferent lives is not difficult to establish. It is conceivable that people who develop morally indifferent or bad characters happen somehow also to

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acquire a deep and enduring disposition to critically reflect on their own moral experiences in the manner I describe; but this is an extraordinarily unlikely outcome. It is especially difficult to imagine how anyone could be thoroughly bad, leading a moral life characterised by vice, while at the same time genuinely committed to and pervasively acting upon a disposition towards lucidity about the moral past, especially their own agency. The possession of moral reflectiveness appears by its very nature to be in tension with a life of moral indifference or badness. It would be exceedingly odd for someone who is doing very badly morally to have such a thoroughgoing interest in their own moral experiences and not also be either aware of or deeply upset by those failings. If people are genuinely committed to moral lucidity with all that it brings but are utterly defeated by circumstances – in the multifarious guises of unusually strong self-deception, error, ignorance or through comprehensively bad moral luck – then they are rare kinds of virtuous failure. If they are not victims of such circumstances and are also aware of at least some of their moral failings – presumably thanks to their moral reflectiveness – then it is safe to assume in the standard case that they are trying, and have been trying for some time, to reform … If on the other hand they are not bothered by self-awareness of their own moral turpitude, then one would have to wonder why they went to the extreme of devoting significant long-term effort to cultivating a deep, abiding, genuine commitment to lucidity about something that seems not to hold importance for them after all. None of these cases can be expected to crop up in the normal range of human experience. The last example applies doubly to a self-aware person living a morally indifferent – amoral, characterless – life. Why would such a person, who has grown into maturity without developing any positive moral character at all, have made all the effort to cultivate a genuine commitment to moral lucidity? If the moral features of experience are self-avowedly unimportant enough not to be taken to heart and learned from, then it is difficult to imagine how there can be sufficient interest to warrant the cultivation of moral reflectiveness in such a life. However, the kind of moral life a genuine commitment to moral lucidity fits best is a good moral life. My position is that to be strongly disposed to critically engage with one’s own moral past, to be the kind of person who is genuinely committed to getting to the bottom of their moral experience, making sense of and achieving lucidity about the moral features of experience, is also to possess a virtue which operates essentially and centrally in a good moral life. The foregoing discussion

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suggests, to me at least, that moral reflectiveness warrants at least contributory moral value: it deserves to be recognised in moral theory as an ineliminable feature of a good moral life. It is exceedingly difficult for me to imagine a moral life that could be lived well yet wholly without commitment to moral lucidity. Such a life, retrospectively blank, seems morally lopsided. As a moral life it seems to miss something central to its own meaning. The moral character of its subject is also lopsided and seems shallow and morally incomplete. Moreover, moral reflectiveness seems to be the kind of state that has even greater worth: intrinsic moral value. An intrinsically valuable state is not morally valuable just because in its absence a life makes less moral sense, or because its exercise helps correct recurring moral mistakes or even because it is an ineliminably central motivational feature of a good moral life. A state has intrinsic moral value if its cultivation still strikes us as a worthwhile pursuit and morally admirable accomplishment, even if it is not part of a moral life particularly well lived, and if good results fail to follow. I think the account in this chapter of moral reflectiveness is the account of an intrinsically valuable moral motivation. To be taken seriously in a moral theory is to be accorded an irreducible moral worth, and I think that moral reflectiveness should be recognised as such in any moral theory that takes virtues seriously. Morally reflective virtues and lives Apart from its intrinsic value as a moral motivation in its own right, moral reflectiveness also seems to constitute a retrospective element in other moral virtues, assisting in various ways their acquisition, cultivation, improvement – correction when their application goes awry – and retention. It is difficult to see how a person comes to live a life characterised by a significant degree of, say, fairness, honesty or trustworthiness without having as part of those states a deep-running disposition to critically reflect on their own experience in terms that seek a lucid grasp of what – in terms of these states – has happened in that life and especially of how their own conduct has measured up. As such, I think that moral reflectiveness is embedded in other virtues from the ground up, constituting one of the central enabling and supporting dispositions through and with which virtue is habituated and entrenched, and a source of the reflective resources feeding continued efforts at maintenance, improvement and adaptation of virtuous motivation through the changing circumstances of a whole moral life. Moral reflectiveness in this guise especially acts to guard against the loss or distortion of virtue that can occur in many ways – for example through crises of various

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kinds, changing circumstances, the many varieties of self-deception, the accretion of moral complacency, jadedness, misunderstanding and misremembering, and via the presumption that creeps into timeworn habit. In this light, the unreflective possession and exercise of virtue seems both mysterious and highly vulnerable, in that it is difficult to see how any genuinely virtuous disposition could reliably be acquired or retained without at least a modicum of critical reflectiveness towards the moral past from which virtuous dispositions must spring. It is easy to see how virtuous motivation can go wrong in the complex and often unpredictable course of a particular moral life, when it is not attended to in a critically reflective way. Integrity considered as an overarching virtue of character represents a key unifying example of the partly constitutive role moral reflectiveness can play in the cultivation of other virtues. On one view – represented by Cox et al. (2003) – integrity is conceived as a complex, multi-track, ‘thick’ virtue of character that integrates a wide variety of particular commitments, projects, goals and values, whose cultivation and retention in any single life entails the defeat of various deleterious tendencies, traits and practices. These integrity-undermining factors include both those of the ‘status quo’ that corrode integrity – ‘like arrogance, dogmatism, fanaticism, monomania, preciousness, sanctimoniousness, and rigidity’ – and those that directly block any attempt at a lucid grasp of one’s moral life on which the aspiration to integrity rests such as ‘capriciousness, wantonness, triviality, disintegration, weakness of will, self-deception, self-ignorance, mendacity, hypocrisy, indifference’ (Cox et al. 2005). The virtue of moral reflectiveness is clearly implicated in the fight against both species of integrity-related moral failure and is thus a basic element of the more complex virtue of integrity, in the twin aspects of commitment to defeating some of the most powerful threats against living a life of moral integrity and the broader defining commitment to achieving lucidity about one’s own moral past (which constitutes both a condition of, and core disposition within, such a life). The consideration of its interaction with the complex virtue of integrity highlights the fact that moral reflectiveness is also bound closely to other virtues in a different way, which recalls Anscombe’s original critique of modern moral philosophy’s moribund deontic concepts (Anscombe 1958). It seems (to me, at least) that virtue concepts themselves represent some of the most promising aspectual shape-forming moral concepts for the deeper kinds of moral reflection, in terms of which a genuine commitment to seeking moral lucidity expresses itself. Critically deployed, ‘thick’ aretaic concepts are capable of linking and

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unifying our specific moral experience – they can make moral sense of, and across, whole moral lives – in a way that deontic concepts cannot. This means, I think, that incipient morally reflective agents, as they develop concomitant moral skills and broaden their reflective horizons, are likely to gravitate strongly towards aretaic characterisations of their own past moral experience. They will be asking themselves ‘have I been honest?’, ‘was that loyal, or unjust?’, ‘have I proved untrustworthy?’, ‘have I conducted myself with integrity?’ rather than – much more thinly – ‘have I done my duty?’, ‘was this action right or wrong?’, ‘what was I obligated to do in that situation?’. This is not to say that such deontic questions have no place in moral reflection or a morally reflective character, but it is to say that their place is limited in comparison to critical inquiry in terms of virtue concepts. It is just that deontic concepts are inferior implements when we are seeking lucidity in meaningful – broad and deep – terms across and throughout our own particular, lived moral experience. Virtue (and vice) concepts tend to reflect and make much better sense of precisely the complexity and variety of moral experience that people actually have – typically and recurrently throughout their lives – than do deontic concepts. People live specific lives and have complex personal histories that distinctively express (more or less, better or worse, temporarily or permanently) varieties of moral motivation and response that are captured most accurately and vividly in aretaic terms, and those with a genuine commitment to moral lucidity will recognise this as crucial to the practical shape their own commitment should take. These considerations also raise the speculative possibility of a broader general conception of moral reflectiveness in the lives of moral agents – one that there is not room in the present book to pursue but which is worth gesturing towards in the current discussion. Just as a genuine commitment to lucidity about one’s past moral experience may be conceived in one aspect as a component of the complex virtue of integrity, it may also be conceived as a central element of a broader – this time temporally unqualified – conception of the virtue of moral reflectiveness. In the broader sense, the genuine commitment that defines moral reflectiveness is not retrospectively bounded but concerns one’s whole moral experience – it is moral reflectiveness concerning one’s whole moral life (past, present and future). The retrospective disposition I have described in this chapter, with the practice of moral reflection at its heart, concerns itself with one dimension of the more general commitment to achieving a lucid grasp of one’s whole moral experience. The other dimensions of this broader virtue will have their own core

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practices and associated moral skills, in light of the different aspects of moral experience with which they are concerned, and the overall virtue concept – in the manner of integrity – will be a complex, ‘thick’ one. Moral reflectiveness as a virtue in this broader sense is obviously also very closely and deeply connected with the virtue of integrity itself, amplifying the interconnectedness I have already outlined between integrity and moral reflectiveness in its purely retrospective sense. In this book, however, my interest is in the retrospective virtue of moral reflectiveness. As I have said, I think the account in this chapter of moral reflectiveness is the account of an intrinsically valuable moral state. I am interested in the remainder of the book in exploring – through three key points in the history of Western moral theory – whether, and the extent to which, moral reflectiveness emerges and is accommodated within moral theory given the claim that it should be accorded such status in any moral theory that itself takes virtues seriously. I am interested in the next three chapters in discovering whether Socrates (via Plato), Aristotle or Immanuel Kant have room in their theories to take moral reflectiveness seriously and accord it intrinsic moral worth, given suggestive hints at such a possibility at certain places in each philosopher’s account of virtuous moral agency.

3 Socrates and the Life of Examination

So far I have concentrated on providing a definition and description of virtues in general and an account of their moral value, and I have described the key elements and virtue status of moral reflectiveness. In the remainder of the book I will address a question that emerges in the light of my account of moral reflectiveness as a virtue in Chapter 2: how readily is the virtue of moral reflectiveness accommodated within moral theory? Although it might simply be added to a list of moral virtues couched in a custom-made theory, a deeper and more philosophically rewarding line of inquiry is into the interaction between moral reflectiveness and other important moral concepts and how it integrates with large-scale accounts of the nature and ground of moral value. It is noteworthy that moral reflectiveness does not emerge as a central component and is neither mentioned nor described in three significant contemporary moral theories that take virtues seriously: Michael Slote’s (2001), Rosalind Hursthouse’s (1999), and Christine Swanton’s (2003). I believe the failure of (versions of) moral reflectiveness to emerge in contemporary accounts may hint at an aporia in moral theory. However, tracing this suggestion further, the deeper question is whether moral reflectiveness has historically suffered similar neglect. In the remainder of this book I will pursue the question whether moral reflectiveness is readily accommodated in some of the more prominent and ambitious philosophical theories of ethics. In Chapters 3–5 I will turn my attention to three points in the history of Western moral philosophy where I believe moral reflectiveness might be expected to surface as a central ingredient of a moral life well lived. The three historical points I refer to are to be found in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and in Immanuel Kant’s ‘Doctrine of Virtue’. The framing question

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is whether these philosophers have room in their theories to take moral reflectiveness seriously and accord it intrinsic moral worth. A reader’s initial reaction to my description of moral reflectiveness in the previous chapter might be to say that what I am describing sounds familiar. Does Socrates not have something similar to say in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, about an ‘examined life’? Was it not that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’? The claim appears at 38a in Plato’s Apology, and in this chapter I inquire into Socrates’ claim and how his view compares with my conception of moral reflection and moral reflectiveness. Initially I survey the first two speeches of Plato’s Apology of Socrates, the textual (and historical) background against which Socrates’ statement is set. Next, I raise some important interpretative questions regarding Socrates’ statement at 38a, regarding what Socrates is saying and whether his claim is serious and introduce and analyse a common interpretation of the statement. On a plausible extrapolation of this reading, I argue that moral reflectiveness would indeed be a vital, integral feature of Socrates’ moral stance – in fact, that it could be regarded as a central virtue. However, I reject this conclusion. I argue that once Socrates’ statement has been properly translated and interpreted – with reference to his particular background assumptions – its actual meaning is quite unlike what it first appears to be. I conclude by comparing and contrasting the kind of moral life Socrates is really advocating with a morally reflective life.

Socrates’ characteristic activity Socrates’ speech (38a) in Plato’s Apology, in which he exclaims that an unexamined life (or a life without examination) is not worth living, is widely regarded as the statement of Socrates’ characteristic way of life. (It is not my present concern, however, to judge the difficult question of how closely Plato’s text reflects the historical Socrates. There is considerable disagreement on this matter (see for example Burnet 1963; Kato 1991; Vlastos 1991)). The Apology has traditionally been regarded as Plato’s lucid portrait of Socrates at his trial and as a justification of the character and actions of Socrates. However, on my reading, it is more than that. Socrates’ statement is not simply a description of his own life, nor simply an argument for, or justification of, the permissibility of his conduct in Athens. Nor is it simply praise of Socrates’ exemplary character. It includes these elements, but it is also an argument for, and a recommendation to others of, Socrates’ conception of a morally good life. Socrates’ statement constitutes a distinctive moral claim. It also

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appears that Socrates is referring to something closely akin to moral reflection and moral reflectiveness. To test these views, we must first set out the relevant content of the Apology in some detail. Much turns on the context in which the statement is set. Socrates’ defence: First speech How you, Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I don’t know; but certainly they made even me almost forget about myself, they were speaking so persuasively. And yet they have said virtually nothing true. The one I found most surprising among their many falsehoods was this, when they were saying that you ought to be careful I don’t deceive you, because I’m a clever speaker. Their failure to be ashamed at the immediate prospect of my refuting them in practice, when my utter lack of cleverness in speaking becomes apparent, this struck me as the very height of shamelessness – unless after all my opponents give the title of ‘clever speaker’ to one who tells the truth; if that’s what they’re saying I should agree that I’m an orator in a different league. As I say then, they have said little or nothing true; but from me you shall hear nothing but the truth. (Apol. 17a1–b8) Kato translates this last phrase as ‘the whole truth’ (1991, 360). The significance of this phrase, according to Kato, is that Socrates’ ‘whole truth’ is not directly relevant to the charges made against him but to the truth ‘understood only in the light of [its] whole causal context’ (1991, 361). With this kind of truth as his guide, ‘Socrates can assert that he will tell the whole truth, in so far as he is convinced that he has grasped the whole ground of the accusation against him – its origins, the course it has taken, and probably the end at which it is aiming’ (1991, 361). Socrates does not use elegant or ornate language at his trial but purports to speak the truth plainly, in ordinary language, as he habitually does when holding forth in the marketplace. To use impressive and formal language would, Socrates believes, be inappropriate and strange: ‘It wouldn’t indeed be fitting, gentlemen, for a man of my age to come before you like an adolescent, polishing arguments’ (Apol. 17c4–5). In all his life he has not been to court and so is not familiar with the style of oration. He asks to be treated as if he were a foreigner, who would justifiably expect the court to ‘pass over’ his style of speech. He expects to be judged on whether what he says is just, rather than fine: ‘That is indeed

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what makes a good judge; what makes a good orator is truth-telling’ (Apol. 18a4–5). Socrates’ strange style of speech is further qualified by a difficulty he faces in the formal setting of the court, as he introduces his accusers’ accusations: But those who tried to persuade you with malicious slanders, and those who are actually persuaded themselves before trying to persuade other people, these are all very hard to deal with. That’s because it’s impossible even to bring any of them into court or examine him; one has straightforwardly, as it were, to shadow-box in one’s defence and examine with no-one answering the questions. (Apol. 18d1–7) He faces a difficulty already: his accusers have assembled their ‘slanders’ over a long period, and he cannot call them up here to be examined. He must, then, conduct a rhetorical defence in his dialectical style, whilst trying to erase from the minds of the Athenians the impressions of him built up over the years of his activity by his detractors: ‘Well: it’s right, then, to offer a defence, Athenians, and to try to remove from your minds in this short time the slander you took in over a long time’ (Apol. 18e4–19a2). Socrates considers his defence against the ‘old accusers,’ whose slanders have built up over a long period, to be more important than the formal charges under which he has been brought to trial. Kato comments: We might almost say that this first part constitutes the main body of his defence. For it points out the real cause of the accusation brought against him, and this is the ‘whole truth’ which he wants to reveal in his speech ... Once this has been done, the charges Meletus and others have brought do not trouble him any more. (Kato 1991, 361) I would go further and argue that the first part is the main body of Socrates’ defence. In relation to the statement (Apol. 38a5–6) under examination here, and also in relation to an ethical reading of the Apology, this section is crucial, whereas the refutation of Meletus is of secondary importance. Socrates’ defence will take the form of an explanation and justification of his characteristic activity. This activity has led to Socrates’ reputation both for being a subversive and a wise man. It has led to the accusations before the court: this ‘activity’ has led the first accusers to say: ‘Socrates is an offender and a meddler, in studying things below the

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earth and in the sky, and making the weaker argument the stronger and instructing people in these same things’ (Apol. 19b3–c2). His activity has also led to his ridicule in a play by Aristophanes, where he is characterised as ‘claiming to walk on air and talking a great deal of other rubbish’ (Apol. 19c5). He states his aim, however he has been portrayed, as truth-telling, and urges the Athenians to take him at his word: Now listen: I shall perhaps strike some of you as joking; but you should know that I shall be telling you nothing but the truth. I have, Athenians, acquired this reputation on account of nothing other than a sort of wisdom. What kind of wisdom is that? The very one which is perhaps human; in truth I probably am indeed wise in that. (Apol. 20d4–8) This is Socrates’ first claim about himself in the Apology: he possesses ‘a sort of wisdom’ and that wisdom is particularly a, or the, ‘human wisdom’. How has Socrates acquired, or come to possess, or come to be aware of, this ‘human wisdom’ he claims to have? He explains it thus: his friend Chaerephon went to the Oracle of Delphi and asked the god if there was anyone wiser than Socrates. And to Chaerephon’s question the ‘Pythian priestess’, the mouthpiece of the god, replied ‘that no-one was wiser’ (Apol. 21a6–7). This claim of the god puzzled Socrates. In no way did he believe he was wise; but, on the other hand, the god could not be speaking falsely (Apol. 21b6). With this puzzle in mind, Socrates set about his ‘activity’: And to begin with for a long time I was in doubt about what on earth he [the god] was saying. Then, with great difficulty I made up my mind to inquire into it in some such way as this: I went to see one of those who appear to be wise, on the grounds that there, if indeed anywhere, I should refute the prophecy and show the oracle, ‘This man here is wiser than me, but you said I was.’ In examining this man, then, ... and in my discussion with him this man struck me as being thought wise by many other people and especially by himself, but not as being wise. (Apol. 21b7–c7) Socrates tried to show this first allegedly wise man, a politician, ‘that, though he thought he was wise, he wasn’t’ (Apol. 21c8). This was the catalyst for the ‘slanders’ to which Socrates refers, and this activity of Socrates has led to the charges against him by the ‘old accusers’ (Apol. 19b–c).

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The Athenians reacted badly to Socrates’ examination of the man who thought he was wise: ‘So, as a result of this, he and many of the people who were there took a dislike to me’ (Apol. 21c8–d1). The second result of Socrates’ first examination, however, began the revelation of the Oracle’s meaning: ‘[b]ut I thought to myself as I went off that I was wiser than this person at least: probably indeed neither of us knew anything fine and good, but he thought he knew something he didn’t know, whereas I, just as I didn’t know, didn’t think I knew’ (Apol. 21d2–5). And it was in this that Socrates found he was wiser than the putative wise man: Socrates was aware of his own lack of knowledge, whereas the politician was both unaware of his own ignorance and thought he knew something he did not. Socrates had found what he thought was the reason for the Oracle’s pronouncement: ‘I seemed likely therefore to be wiser than him by virtue of a small thing, this very point, that what I didn’t know I didn’t think I knew either’ (Apol. 21d5–7). However, the examination of just one man would not satisfy Socrates, nor remove his doubt of the Oracle’s pronouncement. He went immediately to another putative wise man and repeated his ‘activity’ with him. But Socrates ‘arrived at the very same opinion’ about the second so-called wise man, and attracted a wider dislike among the Athenians. He went on in order, examining and refuting the allegedly wise, becoming widely disliked in the process. What he discovered throughout his preliminary examinations and refutations was just what the results of his first examination had intimated to him: And, by the Dog, Athenians – to tell you the truth, as I must – I swear something like this happened to me: those with the highest reputation struck me almost as the ones most deficient, as I made inquiries in relation to the god, and others, thought to be less significant, as being abler with respect to good sense. (Apol. 22a1–6) Therefore, Socrates set himself the exhaustive task of finding all the reputedly wise men in Athens and examining them with respect to the wisdom they claimed to possess. First, he examined the politicians and secondly, the poets. However, the poets displayed the same deficiencies as the politicians. The handcraftsmen, next in line, knew many fine things about their particular craft – things Socrates did not know – and Socrates was impressed by this. However, the handcraftsmen failed his examination also: ‘But, Athenians, they struck me, the good workmen too, as making just the same error as the poets: because of their fine mastery in their arts, each claimed to be very wise in other – and the

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most important – matters too; and this inconcinnity of theirs covered up their actual wisdom’ (Apol. 22d4–e1). Each of the reputedly wise people Socrates examined he found deficient in one of two ways: either they thought they were wise due to their position in Athenian society when they were not (the politicians and the poets) or thought their particular wisdom in one area gave them wisdom in others (the handcraftsmen). The result was that Socrates had found the Oracle unrefuted and had also ‘acquired widespread dislike, and of the most troublesome and unpleasant kind’ (Apol. 22e5–23a1). Moreover, Socrates claims that his examination and refutation of the reputedly wise has led to a mistaken belief on the part of many Athenians who have witnessed his examinations: he is wise in the subjects on which he has refuted the reputedly wise. He claims that this belief is mistaken and that the real meaning of the Delphic Oracle has been revealed to him through his activity: But the probability is, gentlemen, that in truth the god is wise, and that in that oracle he is saying this, that human wisdom is worth little or nothing. He seems, moreover, to be talking about this Socrates, and to be using my name in addition, by way of constituting me an example, as if he were to say: ‘That one of you, mortal men, is wisest who, just like Socrates, has realised that in truth he is worth nothing in respect of wisdom.’ These, then, as I go about, are the inquiries and explorations I am still even now, as I go around, putting in accordance with the god to any fellow-townsman or foreigner that I think wise. (Apol. 23a4–b6) Not only that, but many of the rich young Athenians have begun to imitate Socrates, copying his activity, and examining those who think they know something, often finding that they do not. Those who fail these examinations lay the blame at Socrates’ feet, rather than blaming themselves for their ignorance. They say he is a villain and is corrupting the youth (Apol. 23d1). When, through their ignorance, they cannot find any real justification for their accusations in Socrates’ activities, ‘they use the answers that lie ready to hand against all philosophers’ – the accusations we have already heard. (Apol. 23d4–5). With this, Socrates concludes the explanation of his activity and considers that it is a sufficient defence against the first accusers. However, the second, more recent accusers, have brought new charges against Socrates. These new charges have brought Socrates to court to face trial. Socrates states the second, formal charges: ‘It runs something like this: he [Meletus, Socrates’ chief accuser] says Socrates is an offender

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in that he corrupts the young men and does not accept the gods the city accepts, but other superhuman beings’ (Apol. 24b7–c2). This second part of Socrates’ first speech involves a dialectical refutation of the second accusers, but throws no new light on Socrates’ activity. Briefly, Socrates engages Meletus in a dialectical argument, in which he refutes the charge that he corrupts the youth by refuting the claim that he does not accept the city’s gods. He argues that he has not intentionally done any harm to the youth of Athens and so, if he has done harm, he deserves instruction rather than charges in the court (Apol. 24d–26a). Secondly, he elicits from Meletus the reason why he is supposedly corrupting the youth: it is ‘by teaching them not to accept the gods the city accepts, but other new superhuman things’ (Apol. 26b4–5). That is, Socrates is meant to be corrupting the youth by persuading them to believe what he allegedly believes: according to Meletus, there are no gods. Socrates refutes both charges at once, by arguing that the second accusers’ claim about him is contradictory: how could Socrates not believe in the gods (and persuade the youth of Athens that this is so) when he believes in, and teaches about, ‘superhuman things’? Surely, for there to be ‘superhuman things’, there must be superhuman beings who make them possible, that is, the gods (Apol. 26c–28a). Socrates thus makes short work of the second accusers – ‘even this much is enough’ (Apol. 28a5). Ultimately, however, it is the longstanding slander against him, outlined above, which Socrates considers to be his greatest difficulty, rather than the more superficial charges of the second accusers. Socrates therefore changes his argumentative angle: assuming, naturally, that he has done nothing wrong in his activity per se, why has he, nevertheless, put his life in danger by continuing with it (Apol. 28b)? This is a useful rhetorical manoeuvre. Socrates refers at length to legend, and to the service he has given to Athens through his activities (Apol. 28c–35d). Ultimately, it is because he believes his activity is of vital importance to Athens and the Athenians that he is unwilling to give it up: I think you have never in the past had a greater good for you in the city than my service of the god. There is nothing else I do, as I go about, than persuading both younger and older among you not to concern yourselves with your bodies nor with money above or even so deeply as with the best possible condition in future of your souls. What I say is: ‘Goodness does not arise as a result of money, but as a result of goodness money and other things, all things personal and public, become good for human beings’. (Apol. 30a6–b4)

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This is a subtle shift, and although he still refers to the Oracle and the god, Socrates now concentrates on the good he has done for the city and its citizens, rather than on the divine command. He praises his own courage, piety and justice in the service of Athens and makes a particular point of his refusal to beg for mercy (Apol. 34c–35d). He is determined to continue behaving in his characteristic way and to be concerned only with the just and the true, regardless of the bad impression this may make in front of the citizen jury (Apol. 35b–c). Socrates concludes the first speech by imploring the Athenians to judge him ‘as is likely to be best both for me and for you’ (Apol. 35d8). A life of examination: Second speech The Athenians judge Socrates guilty, and the penalty set by his accusers is death. He must now set, and argue for, the penalty he believes he deserves. It is in this, his second speech, that Socrates makes his statement. What penalty does Socrates believe he deserves? He believes he deserves ‘something good’, because: I did not take the direction in which I should have been in all likelihood no use to you or myself, but rather towards personally conferring on each man the greatest benefit as I see it, that direction I took, trying to persuade each of you not to care about anything belonging to him before he cared about himself with a view to being as good and prudent as possible, and not to care about what belongs to the city before the city itself, and to care about other things in just this same way. (Apol. 36c1–d1) This ‘something good’ he sets himself as a penalty befitting his ‘crime’ is ‘the receipt of food in the Pyrtaneum’ (Apol. 37a2). This is a confronting passage, surely, for the judges. Rather than admitting his guilt and suggesting a realistic penalty, Socrates seems to be openly challenging the validity of the court’s decision in finding him guilty. He admits that he may be thought, as before, arrogant, but he is convinced he has done right, and no wrong, and therefore should not be punished but rewarded. Socrates goes on to dismiss each of the realistic penalties he could set himself instead of death: imprisonment is dismissed; a fine too, since he could not pay, and would therefore go to prison anyway (Apol. 37b–c). Exile, in particular, does not appeal to Socrates. If the Athenians, his fellow citizens, find his ‘conversations and arguments’ so ‘annoying and invidious’ as to exile him, what could he expect from strangers elsewhere (Apol. 37c–d)? He could expect the same treatment as in

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Athens: if he does not continue his activity, and drives the youth away, the youth will persuade the city to throw him out; if he continues, ‘their fathers and their other relatives will drive me out just on their account’ (Apol. 37e2–3). Why cannot Socrates simply ‘hold his tongue’ and discontinue his characteristic ‘activity’, his examinations, which have got him into so much trouble in the first place? This leads to the crucial point in his speech, the point he has been trying to get across throughout his defence: If, first, I tell you that this is disobedience to the god, and for that reason I cannot lead a quiet life, you will not be convinced, but will think I’m putting it on. If, secondly, I say that this is the greatest good for a human being, every day to discuss goodness and the topics on which you’ve heard me conversing and examining myself and others, and that life without examination is not worth a man’s living, that you will believe even less from me. These things are just as I claim, gentlemen, but to make them convincing is not easy. (Apol. 37e6–38a7) The jury will not believe that he cannot discontinue his activity because of the god’s command, since they have already convicted him of not believing in the gods of Athens. If, on the other hand, he claims it to be his personal belief that his activity is not only of the greatest good for himself but the greatest good for every human being to participate in, the jury will presumably conclude that he is simply being arrogant. Socrates once again refers to the difficulty of convincing his audience in the context of the court and in such a short response to many years’ slander in Athens.

Which life? What examination? A common interpretation In this section I will raise and answer some important interpretative questions regarding Socrates’ statement and suggest briefly how moral reflection and moral reflectiveness as I have described them in the previous chapter harmonise with a common interpretation of Socrates’ claim. Firstly, I argue that moral reflectiveness would indeed be vital to a Socratic moral life, given a plausible extrapolation of his statement and could even be regarded as a central virtue. Two interpretative questions F. J. Church, who represents what E. de Strycker calls the ‘traditional translation’ (1994, 375) of Socrates’ statement at Apology 38a, has

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translated it as ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ (1956, 45). Stokes translates it as ‘life without examination is not worth a man’s living’ (1997, 87). Hugh Tredennick is more specific about the practice Socrates refers to: ‘life without this sort of examination is not worth living’ (1961, 23). De Strycker argues that the statement, ‘which deserves better than to be constantly mistranslated as “the unexamined life is not worth living,” ’ (1994, 197) translates more accurately into ‘a life without examination is not bearable for a man’ (1994, 13). These four translations present subtly but importantly different interpretations. The translation of Church seems to suggest that the object of examination is to be the life of the subject. It suggests that the life of the subject is to be put under scrutiny against the ideal of human excellence and otherwise that that life is worthless. The latter translations seem, on the other hand, to suggest ‘examination’ is of crucial importance in a life, but not specifically or exclusively examination of the life of the subject. It is, instead, the examination of oneself and others in a life, regarding goodness or virtue – among other things – that is important. Tredennick’s translation goes further, specifying not just any attempt at examination but particularly Socrates’ own sort of examination (I shall return below to this question, which revolves around the correct rendering of the Greek α ´ νεξε´ταστo§: ‘unexamined’ or ‘without examination’). Another notable difference is that between de Strycker’s translation and the others on the evaluation of a life without examination: between its being ‘not worth living [for a man]’, and its being ‘unbearable for a man’. The translations of Church, Stokes and Tredennick suggest that the whole of a ‘life without examination’ has been a waste of time but not that it has caused particular harm to the subject during that life – there is no strong implication that the kind of life being criticised is also ‘unbearable’ for the subject while it is being lived. De Strycker’s translation asserts just this – that the life without examination is ‘unbearable’ for the subject. If a life without examination is ‘not worth living’ or even worse ‘unbearable’, it seems evident that Socrates is articulating, and attacking the lack of, something he takes to be central and essential to a good life. On the evidence we have before us, it does not look like a case of mere rhetorical self-defence or persuasion. As de Strycker (1994, 197) points out, this is the focal point of the whole Apology, and the speech at 38a represents Socrates’ fundamental position. It is not just plausible but is most reasonable to assume that Socrates is making a serious philosophical claim for such a view. However, could Socrates’ statement, ‘life without examination is not

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worth a man’s living’ really just be a rhetorical turn, neither made, nor to be taken, seriously in any philosophical or moral sense? Perhaps, despite our original construal, the statement is simply the crowning statement of Plato’s eulogy to Socrates the man, and Socrates’ use of it here represents part of his attempt to persuade the jury rather than to make a serious statement of belief. De Strycker raises this possible objection to a serious reading of Socrates’ statement and the Apology in general: A superficial reading of the Apology might leave us with the impression that it is just a portrait, a vivid representation of the unique personality of Socrates. This has led not a few scholars to the conclusion that it is not a philosophical work. (1994, 14) On this reading, Socrates’ statement has the same force, say, as a great footballer saying ‘life without football is not worth a man’s living’ – which would clearly not deliver the meaning it is popularly taken to have. Prima facie evidence for a non-serious interpretation of Socrates’ statement does exist. When we consider the issue from the point of view of his audience, we can be tempted to interpret Socrates’ words as those of a condemned man struggling to persuade an audience of his innocence through clever rhetoric. Perhaps Plato’s aim here is to reproduce Socrates’ clever speechmaking rather than to make a serious ethical claim. C. D. C. Reeve (1989, 7–8) draws attention to the similarity between Plato’s Apology and Gorgias’ Defence of Palamedes, an epideictic speech designed to persuade and deceive rather than to reason and enlighten. In particular, Reeve draws attention to the similarity between the statement under examination here and Gorgias’ Palamedes’ statement: ‘ “a life without trust is not worth living” (Pal. 21)’ (Reeve 1989, 8). Palamedes is making a plea for sympathy from the citizens of Athens, one designed to persuade them to be lenient, rather than to persuade them of any serious ethical purpose his behaviour may have served. The inference is that, since Gorgias’ Apology of Palamedes is prior to Plato’s Apology, and since Plato’s Apology resembles Gorgias’ Apology in several other places, Socrates’ statement should naturally resemble Palamedes’ statement in philosophical seriousness: it has very little. On this reading, Socrates is simply pandering to the audience’s sentiments through a clichéd sympathy-seeking rhetorical turn – all in an attempt to escape serious punishment. In response to this reading of Socrates’ statement, however, Slings contends that ‘The meaning, the purpose and the context of the two

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passages are totally different’ (1994, 375). Slings points out that the expression of ‘a life without X is not worth living’ occurs frequently in ancient Greek texts; far too frequently for this prima facie evidence from Gorgias’ Apology of Palamedes to carry any interpretative weight in the reading of Socrates’ statement (1994, 375). Stokes agrees with Slings: ‘Gorg. Pal. is doubtless part of the literary ancestry of Pl. Ap. but is not a specially significant part; and the idea of a life in certain circumstances not worth living is a Greek literary cliché’ (1997, 177). It would be bizarre if Socrates, at this crucial point in the Apology, were to be seen in seemingly expressing his ‘conception of life’ (Slings 1994, 375) to be abandoning that very conception. To presume this amount of irony – if not rhetorical perversity – on Socrates’ part, would be unreasonable. Socrates has spent his time examining himself and others, the reputedly wise, on various subjects for many years. Furthermore, despite the resentment he has caused, and the slanders against him from those who have resented his characteristic activity, he has continued his examinations over a long period. Thirdly, he has continued his activity even though it has led to his being charged, put on trial and sentenced to death. Fourthly, and most crucially, even when he has been faced with the death penalty itself, Socrates has not retracted his claims about his activity but has put his argument in its strongest terms yet. This raises two suggestions: one internal to the Apology and one external. The first is that Socrates is committed to the ‘life of examination’ and believes it to be the only life worth living – not just for himself but for all Athenians. The second is that Plato, in representing the trial of Socrates thus, means to emphasise above all the importance of Socrates’ characteristic activity – examination – and to place it centrally in Socrates’ defence. Socrates’ statement, then, seems likely to be made in all seriousness. If Socrates is continuing to speak consistently with his professed ‘conception of life’, which seems clearly to be the case; if he is trying to persuade all Athenians to examine themselves with respect to ‘goodness’ (Stokes 1997, 87) (or ‘virtue’ (de Strycker 1994, 13) or ‘human excellence’ (Church 1956, 45)) if their lives are to be worth living (or ‘bearable’ (de Strycker 1994, 13)) and if this is the central feature of Socrates’ life, which Plato is both trying to explain and endorse throughout the Apology, then any claim to the effect that Socrates is not making a serious statement and is only indulging in a rhetorical flourish is clearly implausible. Such a reading would ignore the evidence. That is not to say, however, that Socrates (and, in representing Socrates thus, Plato) is not trying to persuade his audience. Nor is it to say that there is no element of rhetorical flourish

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in his words. He says that he is offering ‘instruction and persuasion’ in his defence (Apol. 35c2). What he is not offering, however, is persuasion exclusively in his own defence. He is trying to persuade the jury not only of what he believes in but also that they should believe in it too. If Socrates were simply speaking whatever would most likely persuade the jury of his innocence, then he would choose something he knew would immediately appeal to their sentiments. Instead, he has chosen to try to persuade them on the basis of something, certainly unattractive to the crowd, which does not. Reeve concludes that ‘Socrates aims to persuade the jury of his innocence ... but he is not willing to do so at the expense of truth, justice, or his own deepest convictions’ (1989, 8). We can conclude that Socrates is to be taken seriously when he makes his statement and is not purely indulging in a rhetorical flourish to win his audience over. However, given that he is to be taken seriously, what precisely is Socrates claiming? Just what kind of life does Socrates favour, when he tells his audience that ‘the unexamined life’/’life without examination’ is ‘not worth living’/’unbearable’? The four translations I have considered do not appear to support a univocal answer to this question. I will now consider a common interpretation of Socrates’ statement which fits best with the translation represented by Church here that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’. This reading has it that an ‘examined life’ for Socrates is a life of self-examination and especially moral self-examination. Moreover, if we extrapolate the common interpretation through a certain background assumption of Socrates, the examined life appears to be a morally reflective one. On this plausible rendering of the common interpretation, an ancient Greek version of moral reflectiveness may indeed be the virtue to which Socrates’ statement refers. A common interpretation: ‘The examined life’ There is a common interpretation of Socrates’ statement, based on the translation ‘an unexamined life is not worth living,’ which has it that Socrates exhorts his fellow Athenians (and Plato his readers) to a particular type of self-examination – the examination of our own lives, especially or primarily in moral terms. On this interpretation, it behoves us each to examine our own life or else it has been worthless, presumably in moral terms (contra de Strycker’s ‘unbearable’). Peter Dalton refers to this reading when he comments that, on acquainting themselves with Socrates’ statement, ‘readers nearly always assume that Socrates is exhorting us to examine our own lives’ (1992, 159). On the basis of the translation, ‘an unexamined life is not worth living,’ there is

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no surprise in this. The eschewal of (especially moral) examination of one’s own life appears to be precisely what Socrates believes renders such a life not worth living. Moreover, this reading of Socrates’ statement appears to fit well with both the Delphic Oracle’s command to ‘Know Thyself’ and with Socrates’ comments at Apology 29d–30b that there is nothing else he does than go about encouraging and persuading his fellow Athenians to above all concern themselves ‘with the best possible condition in future of your souls’. Indeed, before his statement, Socrates appears to re-emphasise the importance of concern about oneself, both moral and prudential. He is trying to persuade the Athenian citizenry that an individual must not care about what belongs to him before he cares ‘about himself with a view to being as good and prudent as possible’ (Apol. 36c5–6). Edward G. Ballard also claims that Socrates’ questioning of the judgement of the Oracle of Delphi, that Socrates is the wisest man, reveals a central feature of Plato’s ethical position: ‘the whole of the Socratic dialogues testifies to the conviction that a life of self-examination is the means to that knowledge which is virtue and is, therefore, the just life for a man to lead’ (1965, 15). This reading gains further support from Socrates’ prophetic warning to those who condemn him to death: ‘For you now have done this in the thought that you will be free from rendering an account of your lives, but the very opposite will happen to you, as I say’ (Apol. 39c5–7). The implication here is that Socrates has over his lifetime both led by example and exhorted others to account for their own lives through self-examination and that the judges are trying to avoid being forced to examine their own lives by getting rid of him. However, the opposite will happen because Socrates’ young followers will take up his cause and badger the Athenians all the more fervently because they are young and enthusiastic (Apol. 39c–d). Another indication that Socrates exhorts us to a life of self-examination is his final request of the judges who have condemned him that they punish his own sons ‘with the selfsame pain I kept inflicting on you, if they strike you as caring ... for anything else above goodness; and if they think they are of some significance when they are not’ (Apol. 41e2–5). Socrates, it appears, hopes that others will prompt his sons to self-examination if they appear to care less than they ought to for goodness or if they display any overestimation of their own status. The evidence presented here strongly suggests that Socrates refers to self-examination, especially of the moral sort, when he condemns the ‘unexamined life’. What shape would such self-examination, and the life it characterises, take? Thomas G. West’s comment that ‘such examination is nothing

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more than the soul’s conversation with itself’ (1979, 217) sheds little light. According to Dalton (1992, 159), such self-examination is prefaced by two questions: ‘What is a life? How does one go about examining it’? However, Dalton is pessimistic about the prospect of satisfactorily answering either of these questions and is thus pessimistic about the credibility of any exhortation to an examined life. Dalton argues that when considering precisely what a life is we cannot avoid also considering the right way to go about examining it; but we cannot decide how to go about examining a life unless we have already settled on what it is we are to examine. Thus we are caught in a conceptual circle: ‘One wishes that one or the other of the questions could be settled independently of the other, but that doesn’t seem possible’. In the absence of a non-circular set of answers, Dalton claims that the best Socratic self-examination can offer is ‘that a person can’t examine a life, but only fragments of a life tied tenuously together in a sketch,’ and so ‘Socrates’ hope for the examined life realized in practice’ is in vain (1992, 170–1). On Dalton’s view, the examined life does not take any shape because neither it nor its characteristic self-examination is credible. Dalton’s view, however, is overly pessimistic. The interpretation I have outlined shows that we need not get ourselves into such difficulties about the examined life if we pay attention to Socrates. It seems fairly clear from Socrates’ statement at 38a, other statements in the Apology, and the Apology in general – if not Plato’s early (Socratic) dialogues in general – that there is a distinctive and easily identifiable conception of a life to which Socrates refers. There is also a readily identifiable way of going about living an ‘examined life’ as it is commonly understood. A life, in the context of an ‘examined life,’ is a moral life, and one goes about examining it in view of moral concepts which frame and make sense of such a life. For Socrates, these are goodness, and virtues such as justice, courage, temperance and – especially important to Socrates – wisdom. These are the topics Socrates has raised in his discussions and debates with fellow Athenians, to whom he has, albeit unsuccessfully, looked for wisdom. It is self-examination in terms of the concepts which frame our moral understanding and our conception of a moral life to which the ‘examined life’ of the common interpretation most plausibly refers. Even a desultory glance at the rest of the traditional translation of his statement suggests as much: ‘And if I tell you that no greater good can happen to a man than to discuss human excellence every day and the other matters about which you have heard me arguing and examining myself and others, and that an unexamined life is not worth living, then you will believe me still less’ (Apol. 38a; my emphasis).

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On the common interpretation, then, the examined life is a life characterised by moral self-examination. On this rendering of it Socrates asserts that there is no greater good than moral self-examination and that a life which is not morally self-examined is so bad that it is not worth living. What constitutes moral self-examination? I described an agent in Chapter 2 who, primarily interested in his moral status and self-image, engages in moral self-examination when he tests his moral self-evaluation against his own motivations, a selection of his past experiences and the impressions of a friend. What Socrates intends on this rendering is clearly a more robust self-examination than this agent’s narrow, self-serving effort. Socrates’ examined life, on the common interpretation, seems clearly to require higher critical and interrogative standards than the agent of my example realises – a character worthy of Socrates’ standards will covet the unalloyed truth of the matter above all and will not settle for a cheaply bought comforting impression. Still, the impression is that one’s moral status is primarily at stake in moral self-examination – an impression only strengthened by the Delphic Oracle’s command to ‘Know Thyself’ and Socrates’ emphasis on the good condition of one’s own soul (Apol. 30a–b; 36c–d; 41e). Moral reflection, as I have described it, is the sceptical, interrogative examination of one’s own experiences from a moral point of view, with a view to achieving lucidity about their moral features. I have said that the primary concern in moral reflection is not moral self-analysis but moral experience, and its most important questions are not about oneself but are about one’s experiences. If moral self-examination in the Socratic sense is primarily about self-image rather than actual concrete moral experience, then the examined life does not have moral reflection at its heart, although a modicum of moral reflection would probably still be an essential feature of it. After all, if an agent is serious about moral self-examination in Socrates’ manner, then getting to the bottom of the matter – through accuracy of recollection and clarity and incisiveness of critical response – will have special significance, even if it is ultimately a matter of status-care. However, we can go further than this. There is evidence in what we have already observed of Socrates’ own view, coupled with a background insight, for an interpretation of the examined life which favours moral reflection. On this interpretation, if there is an authentically Socratic version of moral self-examination – still consistent with an ‘examined life’ reading of his statement – then moral selfexamination in terms of status-care is secondary to moral reflection. Socrates’ references to the care of ones’ own soul in the context of an examined life are not, according to W.K.C. Guthrie, exhortations to

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examination in terms of status-care at all (1971, 150). Guthrie argues that statements such as those at Apology 29d–30b are exhortations to seek wisdom about one’s own moral life, rather than to critically review one’s own moral status (Guthrie 1971, 150). Guthrie interprets Socrates’ view of the soul or psyche to be ‘the true self,’ whose ‘proper virtue is wisdom and thought, and to improve the psyche is to take thought for wisdom and truth’ (1971, 149–50). To take care of one’s soul for Socrates turns out not to be a matter of engaging in robust moral self-examination in a status-focused sense but is a matter of seeking ‘wisdom and truth’. The soul’s virtue is wisdom, and to care for your soul is to try to gain wisdom. On the current interpretation of Socrates’ statement, wisdom about one’s own life is to be gained by examining it. There is a subtle but important difference between this examined life and a status-focused version. One does not care for ‘truth and the best possible future condition of [one’s] soul’ (Apol. 29e3) ‘with a view to being as good and prudent as possible’ (Apol. 36c6) by examining one’s moral status; one cares for one’s soul by gaining moral wisdom through examining one’s life. Excellence in the care of one’s soul for Socrates, on this reading, is excellence in the gaining of moral wisdom through morally examining one’s life. If we grant that moral wisdom is to be gained at least partly by the kind of reflectiveness about one’s moral experience that I have been advocating, then moral reflection and moral reflectiveness will be integral elements of the examined life. It is clear that moral reflection and the genuine commitment to moral lucidity it expresses would be an integral feature of such a life – that the examined life on this interpretation would be a morally reflective one. At its most excellent, the search for moral wisdom in one’s own life through its critical examination is characterised by moral reflection. Such a search, if it is essential to the good life, moreover if life is ‘not worth living’ without it, requires the kind of dedication I have described as a genuine commitment to moral lucidity. Moral reflection may belong at the heart of Socrates’ moral scheme after all; it may be integral to the Socratic moral life well lived. On this interpretation, moral reflectiveness is not only an essential feature of a morally good life – it appears to be a central virtue. On this reading, an unexamined life is not worth living and an examined life is a morally reflective life. Is Socrates ultimately claiming, then, that a life without moral reflectiveness is not worth living? Is moral reflectiveness the crucial Socratic virtue? I will argue that it is not, that Socrates is not exhorting his fellow Athenians to moral reflection and nor is he advocating moral

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reflectiveness. The common interpretation of Socrates’ statement upon which the identification of an examined life and a morally reflective life relies is mistaken. The best evidence available suggests that Socrates’ statement ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’ is a mistranslation, misleading us not only about what ought to be examined but also how we ought to examine it. What the Socrates of the Apology really intends to convey, when a more accurate translation is given, and when we subsequently take full account of Socrates’ background assumptions, leaves little if any room for moral reflectiveness.

Care of one’s soul: Knowledge and desiring the good It may appear from the common interpretation that Socrates’ conception of the examined life strongly resembles my conception of a life lived with a commitment to moral lucidity; perhaps Socrates’ life of examination is the morally reflective life par excellence. However, a reading of Socrates’ statement in the light of a more convincing interpretation and of his background assumptions undermines this view. The importance of leading a ‘life of examination’ for Socrates lies in the knowledge of virtue and the good life he believes it can bring. The wisdom that Socratic examination is ultimately aimed at, and which determines the character of the examination, is knowledge of virtue and the good life for a human being. This knowledge is crucial because of Socrates’ remarkably strong association of the good moral life and virtue with knowledge and wisdom. An accurate account of Socrates’ statement – and of why the life of examination is not a morally reflective one – depends on a closer reading of Socrates’ statement in the light of his background assumptions. It is to this task I now turn. A life of examination, elenchus and moral philosophy Translations into English of Socrates’ statement do not support a univocal interpretation of what he is in fact saying, but the weight of evidence supports a translation that is at odds with the traditional interpretation of Socrates’ statement. The central matter of translation into English is perhaps settled by de Strycker (1994), whose own translation of the original Greek α ´ νεξε´ταστo§ differs subtly but significantly from the ‘unexamined’ rendering of Church. De Strycker argues that ‘the traditional translation of α ´ νεξε´ταστo§ as ‘unexamined’ implies that the word should be taken only in its passive sense’ (1994, 375). However, according to de Strycker, α ´ νεξε´ταστo§ is both passive and active, translating

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more accurately as ‘without examination’: ‘Adjectives formed [in this particular way] have in themselves both active as well as passive force’ (1994, 375). De Strycker’s claim finds support in A Greek–English Lexicon (1996), where α ´ νεξε´ταστo§ is given two definitions, the first of which accords with the traditional translation: ‘not searched out, not inquired into or examined’ but the second of which uses this passage of Plato’s Apology as its reference, rendering the phrase distinctively as ‘without inquiry or examination’ (1996, 133). The former sense of α ´ νεξε´ταστo§ reflects the common usage of the phrase in Greek literature, but it is clear that in Socrates’ case its meaning is distinctive: ‘without examination’ is intended and not ‘unexamined’. This puts an entirely different complexion on Socrates’ statement. A life without inquiry or examination is what Socrates rejects, not specifically a life that is itself unexamined. But then what does ‘examination’ mean on this translation? Both Stokes (1997, 24) and de Strycker (1994, 13–16; 197) agree that it means what goes on in Socrates’ own characteristic activity, his ‘elenchus’ or interrogative examinations (de Strycker 1994, 374) about the nature of goodness and virtue. In short, to engage in examination is ‘to discuss goodness’ (Stokes 1997, 24). Interpreted at its broadest, de Strycker thinks that ‘examination’ for Socrates in fact more or less means the activity of doing moral philosophy, making the Apology ‘an exhortation ... to philosophy’ (de Strycker 1994, 15) rather than to any form of moral self-examination. Terence Irwin offers a neat description of the Socratic elenchus: Socrates tests an ordinary moral rule – that, say, courage is endurance – against beliefs about examples – that this or that kind of action would not be brave – and against general assumptions about virtue – that it is always admirable and worthwhile. He revises the rules to conform to these other beliefs, and especially to the general assumptions. The elenchus adjusts our conceptions of the virtues to our view of what is worth while over all. (1977, 6) When Socrates asserts that ‘life without examination is not worth a man’s living’ he really means to hold himself as exemplar and to refer specifically to his own life and the critical examinations of the concepts of ethics – goodness and virtue – which he has habitually undertaken with others. On this interpretation, Socrates claims that doing moral philosophy is ‘the greatest good for a human being,’ that life is not worth living unless we literally do what Socrates has done and sally forth ‘every day to discuss goodness’.

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Nonetheless, Socrates does indeed hold himself as exemplar of the life of examination. The fact that his own kind of life is the life to which he also exhorts others is consistent with both the spirit and the content of the Apology as a whole. Socrates says as much in the Apology (30a6–8): ‘I think you have never in the past had a greater good for you in the city than my service of the god.’ Socrates’ ‘service of the god’ is of course his elenchus, taken up in response to the Delphic Oracle, and the ‘good for you in the city’ is the good that constitutes being examined about goodness and virtue by Socrates. Despite its great plausibility, this interpretation confronts a number of difficulties. What of the care of one’s soul with reference to goodness, of moral self-knowledge and all the evidence for the common interpretation of Socrates statement? How can Socrates be living in line with the Delphic Oracle’s command to ‘Know Thyself’ by arguing with his fellow Athenians and arguing over definitions of virtue and goodness? And how could it plausibly be argued that engaging in the critical examination of the definition of ethical concepts is the central and essential feature of a morally worthwhile life? What Socrates is really claiming might seem to be a case of a philosopher’s stubborn self-assertion. Background assumptions I have claimed that Socrates is claiming at Apology 38a that time spent critically examining and being examined about ethical concepts – as he has lived himself – is of crucial importance to living a good moral life. The strongest reason to accept this interpretation is that it harmonises best with Socrates’ wider assumptions about morality and human psychology. The most important of these assumptions for my purposes is Socrates’ conviction that virtue is a kind of knowledge and his supposition that everyone desires the good. These assumptions are two elements of the so-called ‘Socratic paradoxes’, which Gerasimos Santas succinctly summarises: Plato’s ethics in the earlier dialogues (at least up to the Republic) is characterized by two doctrines commonly known as the Socratic paradoxes. The first of these is that no one desires evil things and that all who pursue evil things do so involuntarily; the second doctrine is that virtue is knowledge and that all who do injustice or wrong do so involuntarily. (1979, 183) The source of such involuntariness, for Socrates, is ignorance – all those who desire and pursue evil do so in ignorance of this fact; and all who will and do wrong, do so in ignorance that it is so.

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Irwin points out that for Socrates the possession of knowledge is both necessary (1977, 90) and sufficient (1977, 77) for the possession of virtue. Norman Gulley agrees with both Santas and Irwin: One of Socrates’ fundamental doctrines is the book that virtue is knowledge. This is the book that knowing what is good is a necessary and sufficient condition of possessing goodness and hence of doing what is good. (1968, 83) Irwin refers to the Apology 29d–30a and Plato’s Laches for evidence that Socrates holds knowledge to be necessary for possession of virtue. He argues that the Apology passage at 29d–30a, where Socrates exhorts his fellow Athenians to care for their souls is underpinned by the assumption that ‘someone’s ability to give an account [of a particular virtue] will decide not only whether he has knowledge but also whether he has virtue’ (Irwin 1977, 90). It is therefore also the kind of knowledge of a virtue sufficient at least to satisfactorily define that virtue which is at stake for Socrates. If it cannot be defined by someone to Socrates’ strict elenctic standards, then it cannot have been possessed by that person either. The failure of his various interlocutors to define their terms implies for Socrates not just a definitional but also a moral failure on their part. An example of this to which Irwin draws attention is the Laches 93d–e, where the discussion is of courage. Socrates has got Laches to contradict himself about the correct definition of courage and immediately draws the implication that, even if they have appeared courageous in action, Laches and he have shown themselves not to really have courage simply due to the fact that they cannot define it consistently: ‘Anyone would say that we had courage who saw us in action, but not, I imagine, he who heard us talking about courage just now’ (Lach. 193e3–4). Later, Socrates gets Nicias to agree with Laches and himself that, in relation to ‘fearful’ and ‘hopeful’ things in the future, courage is ‘the knowledge of these things’ (Lach. 198c8). However, how can knowledge of the nature of a virtue also be a sufficient condition for its possession? Even if we accept the prima facie questionable assumption that knowledge of a virtue (sufficient to define it) is necessary for its possession, it is far from obvious that this kind of knowledge also by itself makes a person virtuous. The answer to this question is closely bound up with Socrates’ analogy between virtues and the specialised knowledge of a craftsman – what Irwin calls Socrates’ ‘craft-analogy’ (1977, 71–3). Socrates finds the craft-analogy of virtues initially useful, according to Gulley, because of the very close

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association in ancient Greece of moral terms with functionality, so that ‘the association of ‘good’ and ‘excellence’ with expert knowledge in their application to professional skills readily prompts the idea that in moral behaviour too knowledge is at least a necessary condition of successful practice’ (Gulley 1968, 83). Virtue is like a craft whose product is the good life. As we have seen above (Apol. 22b–d), and as Irwin points out, in his many examinations around Athens Socrates has found that ‘only craftsmen show knowledge of their craft – though not of other areas – by giving an account of what they do’ (Irwin 1977, 71). Hence Socrates believes that since ‘the expert in a particular craft offers authoritative guidance, supported by a rational account ... we should seek someone equally authoritative in morals’ (Irwin 1977, 71). That is, we should seek someone who has craftsman-like knowledge of virtue. The crucial difference between the knowledge necessary for possession of a virtue and every day craft knowledge for Socrates is that we may or may not desire the product of a craft, and so may or may not use craft knowledge that we possess; yet he assumes that we all desire the product of virtue – the morally good life. Therefore, since knowledge of virtue is knowledge of the means to that which we all desire, we will use the knowledge we have – automatically, as it were. Thus knowledge of virtue, given Socrates’ other assumption that everyone desires the product of virtue, is also sufficient for virtue possession. Ultimately, craftsman-like knowledge of the good is sufficient for virtue possession because Socrates assumes we all desire the morally good life to which it is the necessary means. How can Socrates plausibly hold that we all desire the morally good life already, so as to make knowledge sufficient for virtue? He does it by identifying our own prudential good with what is morally good and what produces advantage for ourselves with virtue. Socrates makes this move explicitly in the Meno: SOCRATES: First then, is it virtue which makes us good? MENO: Yes. SOCRATES: And if good, then advantageous. All good things are advantageous, are they not? MENO: Yes. SOCRATES: So virtue itself must be something advantageous? MENO: That follows also. (Men. 87e1–7) Socrates sets the scene for this identification earlier in the dialogue (Men. 77b–78b), where he persuades Meno to agree that everyone desires

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good things, except for ‘those who through ignorance mistake bad things for good,’ who in any case really ‘don’t desire evil but what they think is good, though in fact it is evil’ (Men. 77e2–3). This is reasonably uncontroversial when taken in the prudential sense, and Meno appears to understand virtue in this sense, as the ‘power of acquiring good things’ (Men. 78c3). Yet how does Socrates come to identify prudential virtue with moral virtue? Socrates simply points out to Meno that he would not call virtuous someone who came about good things (i.e. prudentially good things such as wealth) unjustly (Men. 78d–79a), and so ‘to have such goods is no more virtue than to lack them. Rather we may say that whatever is accompanied by justice is virtue, whatever is without qualities of that sort is vice’ (Men. 78e8–79a1). Socrates relies in the Meno on a prior understanding of virtue in a moral sense to bring the prudential understanding of virtue into line with the moral one. Yet it does not appear that there is any strong independent Socratic argument for identifying the two. Irwin argues at length through his interpretation of the Protagoras that identifying moral and prudential virtue results from Socrates’ unargued background commitment to hedonism, both psychological and ethical (1977, 102–14). Moreover, Irwin holds that Socrates requires the truth of hedonism to defend the position that knowledge is sufficient for virtue (1977, 104), but that ultimately – unsurprisingly – ‘his hedonism undermines his defence of justice’ (1977, 113). If the value of justice and the other moral virtues for Socrates resides only in their tendency to produce pleasure or happiness, then they cannot have unqualified Socratic support unless they necessarily produce it or are somehow constituents of it, which in the case of justice is notoriously difficult for Socrates (for example, in the Gorgias against Callicles) and Plato (in the Republic) to establish. Regardless of whether Socrates and Plato are successful in their defence of justice as prudentially worthwhile, or whether Socrates really is a strict hedonist (see, for example, Vlastos’ response to Irwin’s conclusion that Socrates values the virtues only instrumentally (Vlastos 1991, 200–32)), Socrates does assume throughout Plato’s early dialogues that knowledge is both a necessary and sufficient condition for virtue. The result is well put in Vlastos’ commentary: ... there can be no virtue without knowledge. This is what gives such intensity to Socrates’ arguments, such urgency to his quests for definition. He makes you feel that the failure to sustain a book or find a definition is not just an intellectual defeat, but a moral disaster. At

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the end of the Euthyphro that gentleman is as good as told that his failure to make good his confident claim to know ‘exactly’ (5a, 15d) what piety is, means not just that he is intellectually hard up, but that he is morally bankrupt ... No less extreme is the mate to this doctrine that if you do have this kind of knowledge, you cannot fail to be good and act as a good man should, in the face of any emotional stress or strain. The things which break the resolution of others, which seduce or panic men to act ... will have no power over the man who has Socratic knowledge. He will walk through life invulnerable, sheathed in knowledge as in a magic armour which no blow from the external world can crack or even dent. No saint has ever claimed more for the power of faith over the passions than does Socrates for the power of knowledge. (Vlastos 1980, 6) Socrates assumes that virtue is knowledge of the good and that everyone desires the good. Once we have uncovered these background assumptions, we can see how Socrates’ claims for a life of examination make sense. Examination in Socrates’ sense of searching critically for a satisfactory definition of each virtue is of crucial importance in a worthwhile life because it is through this kind of activity Socrates believes knowledge of virtue is to be discovered. With this knowledge the virtues will materialise in himself and his interlocutors, because virtue just is that knowledge at which Socrates’ elenchus is aimed, and for which Socrates has elenctically searched all along. The Apology reviews Socrates’ elenctic mission to discover the knowledge that is virtue. And proper care for one’s soul just is engagement in elenctic examination of oneself and each other with respect to the proper understanding of virtue and the good life because these examinations provide the best chance of acquiring virtue, both for oneself and for one’s interlocutors. Elenctic examination of ethical concepts is the ‘greatest good for a human being’ because for Socrates it is the means to virtue through knowledge. We can see that Socrates is speaking quite literally about his own activities when he makes his claim: If, secondly, I say that this is the greatest good for a human being, every day to discuss goodness and the other topics on which you’ve heard me conversing and examining myself and others, and that life without examination is not worth a man’s living, that you will believe even less from me. (Apol. 38a2–6) On the further question whether Socrates’ faith in the elenchus is warranted – whether it is viable as the method for seeking the knowledge

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of virtue we all desire – Irwin argues that Socrates has some grounds for optimism. Although Socrates repeatedly denies having knowledge himself, and even though the actual examples of elenctic definition Plato presents merely remove ‘false pretensions to knowledge’ and expose ‘the interlocutor’s ignorance,’ nevertheless success in the elenchus is not precluded (Irwin 1977, 38). Irwin argues that if we allow a distinction (which Socrates does not explicitly state but implicitly relies on) between true belief and knowledge, and if we can rank beliefs not threatened by critical examination above those which are shown to be inconsistent with other beliefs, then the elenchus is at least not outright self-defeating in the search for knowledge and virtue (Irwin 1977, 40–1). The defensibility of the elenchus itself and Socrates’ claims for it, however, are not of primary concern here. Our primary concern now is where they leave us in relation to a morally reflective life. A life with examination When we understand Socrates’ statement in the light of the background assumptions he makes about the nature of the virtues and our desire for the good, it seems as though there is little if any room for moral reflectiveness in a Socratically examined life. When Socrates asserts that life without examination is not worth living, he means life without Socrates’ own characteristic elenctic activity is worthless. Socrates means ‘not worth living’ both morally and prudentially – as we have seen, he thinks they come to the same thing. It seems plausible that in asserting this, Socrates is claiming that his own disposition to engage his fellow Athenians in such discussions – his mission from the Oracle at Delphi – is a kind of virtue, or at least an essential condition for virtue acquisition, in itself. When he mentions that he has acquired his reputation through ‘a sort of wisdom ... the very one that is perhaps human; in truth I probably am indeed wise in that’ (Apol. 20d6–8), it is not implausible that he means to refer not only to his famous denial of knowledge (for example Apol. 23a–b) but also to the elenchus he practices. Thus, although he denies true knowledge of virtue (which only the gods are thought to possess), Socrates does claim a certain ‘human wisdom’ – perhaps a ‘human virtue’: knowledge of how to go about critical examination regarding goodness and virtue. Socrates may be asserting that he possesses a virtue, but it is not moral reflectiveness. Socrates’ background assumptions rule out a central role for moral reflectiveness in the life of examination. Yet in the Socratic dialogues as a whole – taken as exemplifying the elenchus – there are some echoes of moral reflectiveness. There is in particular an element

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of what I have called the social aspects of moral reflection. Socrates and his interlocutors offer definitions of virtues or other aspects of the good life and measure them against examples, many from their own past experience, moulding, remoulding, and editing their understanding of the topic under discussion to the dictates of their common understanding – again often drawn from their own experiences – and reason. However, in contrast to moral reflection, they do this not to come to an understanding of those moral experiences themselves, but to gain knowledge, or remove false beliefs, about the moral concepts they are using. The primary object of the examination is quite different from the object of moral reflection. Socrates’ avowed central concern for the truth of the matter about virtue and the good life also resonates with the commitment to moral lucidity of morally reflective people, which I dwelt on in Chapter 2. However, Socrates’ truth of the matter lies in a different area of inquiry from moral experience. Although theory and experience are intertwined, Socrates is more interested in conceptual truth – in philosophical rather than moral lucidity; lucidity about concepts rather than experiences. Lucidity about one’s moral experiences is perhaps a foreseeable consequence of Socratic knowledge and virtue possession, but it does not feature prominently in the motivation to possess it, or in the conduct which is supposed to bring it about. Socrates and his interlocutors tend to assume the veracity of their moral experience as a basis of philosophical argument towards definitional truths about (or at least the removal of false convictions about) moral concepts. This is like moral reflection in reverse and a commitment to moral lucidity turned upside-down: using (an assumed lucidity about) moral experiences, Socrates and his interlocutors critically examine their moral conceptual foundations. What is in question is their grasp of the concepts that they are using, but, as happens for example in the Laches with both Laches himself and Nicias, the interlocutors’ original presupposition that they have either witnessed or participated in genuinely courageous actions in the past, and that these sorts of experiences truly exemplify courage, remain foundational and without serious challenge in the discussion, just as the concept to which they answer is shaped and re-shaped around them. In moral reflection, it is the conceptual foundation which is used to shape and re-shape one’s understanding of moral experiences, and it is the veracity of the experience, rather than the concepts, that is of primary interest and import. Likewise, a commitment to moral lucidity takes as its object moral experience and expresses a desire for lucidity about that experience from a moral point

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of view, rather than expressing the Socratic desire for the right moral point of view from lucid moral experiences. Ultimately, the evidence is overwhelming that a Socratic life of examination is not really a morally reflective life but something else. Socrates is ultimately convinced that life without examination is not worth living for a human being, but moral reflection is not quite the kind of examination he has in mind. It seems that a life of moral reflectiveness misses Socrates’ mark for a life well lived.

4 Moral Reflectiveness in Aristotle’s Ethics

I found in Chapter 3 that the search for abstract moral knowledge rather than wisdom about one’s own moral experience is at heart of Socrates’ exhortation to the life of examination. Examination for Socrates is an abstract, philosophical task rather than a morally reflective one. Moreover, Socrates’ background commitment to the thesis that knowledge is virtue and that everyone most strongly desires the good leaves little or no room in his conception of the morally good life for moral reflectiveness. Aristotle, however, accords a central place in his ethical theory to a concept of practical wisdom or phronesis, which seems to promise a role for moral reflectiveness as a virtue. In contrast to Socrates, Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics appears to be primarily concerned with the practical moral life, with the structure and function of human moral faculties in a flourishing life. It seems reasonable at first to surmise that since Aristotle’s interest in phronesis expresses a concern with moral life well lived rather than abstract philosophical knowledge that moral reflectiveness will be central in his moral theory at this point. We might reasonably expect that moral reflectiveness is one of the primary sources for and constituents of practical wisdom – a central element in the acquisition and proper functioning of Aristotle’s key intellectual virtue. On the basis of this expectation, I inquire in this chapter into Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, focusing especially on his understanding of phronesis or the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom in Book VI, and akrasia and enkrateia, or moral failure and moral success in Book VII. One might assume that wisdom in moral matters relies heavily on a lucid grasp of one’s past moral experiences and that the genuine commitment to moral lucidity as I described it in Chapter 2,

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of which this grasp is a product, would be central to an account of such wisdom. Since Aristotle accords practical wisdom a central place along with the virtues of character in a flourishing life (eudaimonia), perhaps one would also expect moral reflectiveness to be an essential feature of such a life, to be accorded intrinsic worth along with the other virtues. However, I will argue that Aristotle’s virtue of practical wisdom has little to do with moral reflectiveness, and we must look further, to his discussion of ordinary, everyday failure-prone moral agency to elicit a central role for moral reflectiveness. Even here, however, Aristotle does not acknowledge a role for moral reflectiveness. I will argue that within Aristotle’s theory, moral reflectiveness is a necessary condition of ordinary non-virtuous moral success or enkrateia. Further evidence for the necessity of moral reflectiveness in Aristotle’s picture of successful moral agency also emerges, I shall argue, in a passage of the Magna Moralia on friendship. The argument for the necessity of true friendship in the Magna Moralia passage adds further weight to the conclusion that moral reflectiveness is an unacknowledged necessary condition of enkrateia. Ultimately, my discussion reveals that Aristotle does not explicitly endorse or even clearly recognise moral reflectiveness as a component in his moral theory and that Aristotle’s failure in this regard stems from his insistence on presenting an idealised model of moral agency far removed from the range of ordinary human lives.

Aristotle’s moral virtue, phronesis and moral reflectiveness I have briefly outlined Aristotle’s account of moral virtue in Chapter 1, emphasising the dispositional nature of the virtues – they are for Aristotle states of character – and their relation to eudaimonia or human flourishing. For Aristotle, as we have found, ‘What really matter for happiness are activities in accordance with virtue’ (EN 1100b11–12). Furthermore, the virtues are valuable not only thanks to their contributory role in eudaimonic activity but have intrinsic worth: ‘Honour, pleasure, intellect, and every virtue we do indeed choose for themselves’ (EN 1097b2–3). In Chapter 1, I have not described Aristotle’s conception of the moral virtues much apart from this, and have not discussed the pivotal intellectual virtue of phronesis at all. I shall now briefly revisit Aristotle’s account of the moral virtues and subsequently sketch the intellectual virtue phronesis itself.

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Moral virtue Aristotle tells us about the nature of the virtues at the beginning of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics. Firstly, there is the distinction between moral and intellectual virtues. Virtue, Aristotle holds, ... is of two kinds: that of the intellect and that of the character. Intellectual virtue owes its origin and development mainly to teaching, for which reason its attainment requires experience and time; virtue of character (eˉ thos) is a result of habituation (ethos), for which reason it has acquired its name through a small variation on ‘ethos’. (EN 1103a13–17) It is the moral virtues with which Aristotle is concerned in Book II, the virtues of character which arise through habituation and which are concerned with moral action. Aristotle contends that virtues, like skills, ‘we acquire by first exercising them’ (1103a31–2). By this Aristotle means that the moral virtues are acquired through habitual action in accordance with what the virtues themselves determine: The same is true with skills, since what we need to learn before doing, we learn by doing; for example, we become builders by building, and lyre-players by playing the lyre. So too we become just by doing just actions, temperate by temperate actions, and courageous by courageous actions ... In a word, then, like states arise from like activities. This is why we must give a certain character to our activities, since it is on the differences between them that the resulting states depend. (EN 1103a32–b24) However, this initial advice is peculiarly unenlightening unless Aristotle tells us precisely what the moral virtues are and how to act in accordance with them. We are, after all, inquiring not just to acquire knowledge, as in theoretical branches of inquiry, but ‘to become good people – otherwise there would be no point in it’ (EN 1103b29–30). To this end, Aristotle warns us that we are inquiring into ‘the spheres of actions’ which ‘have nothing fixed about them,’ so that his account will of necessity lack the precision expected of purely theoretical knowledge (EN 1104a4–5). One thing which can be said about the kind of state we are inquiring into, however, is that according to Aristotle’s theory it occurs between excess and deficiency relative to its possessor: ‘states like this are naturally corrupted by deficiency and excess ... and preserved by the mean’ (EN 1104a11–24). A virtue is a mean, then, but

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what is it a mean with regard to? According to Aristotle, a virtue of character is a state which strikes the mean between excess and deficiency in a person’s feelings or emotions and actions (EN 1104b–1105a). Moral virtue for Aristotle involves striking a mean with regard to our emotional responses in particular practical circumstances. In order to establish that virtues are states of character, Aristotle distinguishes them from mere capacities and feelings – the only other two ‘things to be found in the soul’ (EN 1105b18–19). Virtues are not capacities or feelings because we do not have ‘rational choice’ with regard to either feelings or capacities, and we are not praised or blamed merely for having them (EN 1105b30–1106a3). Thus, by elimination, the moral virtues are states of character. Furthermore, a virtue is not just any state of character but a state of excellence in character: ‘the state that makes a human being good and makes him perform his characteristic activity well’ (EN 1106a23–4). Having made these distinctions, Aristotle characterises the virtuous agent as one who manifests excellence in emotional responses and actions: I am talking here about virtue of character, since it is this that is concerned with feelings and actions, and it is in these that we find excess, deficiency and the mean. For example, fear, confidence, appetite, anger, pity, and in general pleasure and pain can be experienced too much or too little, and in both ways not well. But to have them at the right time, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the mean and best; and this is the business of virtue ... Virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, in which excess and deficiency constitute misses of the mark, while the mean is praised and on target, both of which are characteristics of virtue. Virtue, then, is a kind of mean, at least in the sense that it is the sort of thing that is able to hit a mean. (EN 1106b16–28) The essential intellectual corollary to each virtue of character for Aristotle – essential to being able to ‘hit a mean’ in one’s particular moral responses – is the intellectual virtue phronesis or practical wisdom. Aristotle alludes to the role it plays in virtuous action, highlighting the relationship of virtue with reason and rational choice: ‘Virtue, then, is a state involving rational choice, consisting in a mean relative to us and determined by reason – the reason, that is, by reference to which the practically wise person would determine it’ (EN 1106b37–1107a2). This brief reference to practical wisdom, however, does not lead Aristotle

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directly to a detailed discussion of its role in virtuous activity. Instead, Aristotle defers his discussion of phronesis to Book VI. It is worth noting in the present discussion that Aristotle’s conception of virtue differs significantly from my own account in Chapter 1. Firstly, my account of moral virtue does not commit me to Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. Secondly, on my account virtues are states of character which constitute moral motivations in the dispositional sense, involving a deep and enduring motivational excellence essential to living a good moral life. My account differed from Linda Zagzebski’s (1996) in that I argued virtues of character were not just excellent action-guiding emotions of various sorts but are typically psychologically complex and deep moral motivations,and that reliable success is not a definitional element of a virtue. My account also diverges from Aristotle’s in the present discussion, with significant ramifications for our divergent approaches to describing the virtues. For Aristotle as for Zagzebski, virtue terms are success terms. A courageous person is not just motivated to overcome fear in the right kinds of circumstances but actually does overcome it and reliably acts courageously at the right time and in the right way. The just person is not merely motivated by justice but achieves just outcomes. Ultimately, since moral virtue ‘makes a human being good and makes him perform his characteristic activity well’ (EN 1106a22–3) and, moreover, since ‘what really matters for happiness are activities in accordance with virtue’ (EN 1100b11–12), possession of the virtues for Aristotle is a necessary condition of eudaimonia. Moreover, if people are not successful in achieving the ends of the virtues, and do not realise eudaimonia, then they cannot have been virtuous. Success – in the achievement of a flourishing, eudaimonic life – is a necessary condition of virtue possession as well. This holds for Aristotle in the sphere of intellectual virtue too. If agents do not achieve the end of a virtue for Aristotle, moral or intellectual, then they cannot have the virtue. If they do not possess virtue they cannot flourish, and if they are not flourishing they do not possess the virtue. One consequence of the success condition is that Aristotle’s account tends to be unenlightening about what being virtuous in practical life actually consists in. Since virtuous agents behave virtuously for Aristotle by achieving their ends, they can be identified by having achieved those ends: the just person is the one who achieves just outcomes; the temperate person is the one who achieves temperate outcomes; the courageous, courageous outcomes and so on. Each lives a flourishing life. Unfortunately, as we shall see shortly, the same lack of practical descriptive content appears to hold for Aristotle’s phronesis

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or practical wisdom, which he ties inextricably with moral virtue in the successful pursuit of eudaimonia. The practically wise agent – the phronimos – determines effectively the means to eudaimonia by possessing excellence in deliberation about what is best to do. What does excellence in deliberation consist in? It consists in successfully determining the means to eudaimonia – that is, in successfully bringing about a flourishing life. Perhaps more worrying still, Aristotle’s phronimos eventually appears not to be a genuine practical example at all, but instead a far from practical idealisation of a moral agent. I will pursue this point following a brief survey of Aristotle’s account of phronesis itself and a discussion of its relation to moral reflectiveness. Practical wisdom In Book VI, Aristotle sets out to discuss the intellectual virtues and, in particular, ‘Since we have already stated that one should rationally choose the mean, not the excess or the deficiency, and that the mean is as correct reason prescribes, let us now analyse this prescription’ (EN 1138b19–21). Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is to be his central concern. Aristotle repeats the metaphor of EN 1106b, of a target for each state of character which its possessor has an eye to, and repeats the claim that ‘it is with his eye on this that the person with reason tightens or loosens his strings’ (EN 1138b23–4). It is here he also states that he is talking about ‘a sort of standard for the mean states, which, as we say, lie between excess and deficiency and are in accordance with correct reason’ (EN 1138b24–6). It is now up to Aristotle ‘to determine what correct reason is and what its standard is’ (EN 1139b35–6). Aristotle clears the ground for his description of phronesis by first discussing some of the distinctions to be made within the intellect in general and between intellectual virtues: ‘When we had classified the virtues of the soul, we said that some are virtues of character, others of thought. We have discussed the virtues of character; so let us now speak as follows of those that remain’ (EN 1139a1–3). First, assuming that there are two ‘sub-parts’ of the reasoning part of the soul, Aristotle says that these are distinguished by the fact that one part is ‘scientific,’ the part ‘with which we contemplate those things whose first principles cannot be otherwise’, that is invariable things, and the other part is ‘calculative’ or deliberative, concerning the practical, variable world (EN 1139a5–16). There are five ‘ways in which the soul arrives at truth by affirmation or denial, namely, skill, scientific knowledge, practical wisdom, wisdom, and intellect’ (EN 1139b18–21). Aristotle briefly describes ‘scientific knowledge,’ which pertains to ‘what cannot be otherwise’

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(EN 1139b22–9). He then distinguishes in the practical sphere between production and action, a distinction which is crucial in distinguishing skill, which concerns production, from practical wisdom, which concerns action (EN 1140a). In Book VI, chapter 5, Aristotle embarks on the discussion of phronesis. Our introduction to a proper understanding of practical wisdom, as is usual for Aristotle, is through a preliminary consideration of ‘the sort of people we describe as practically wise’ (EN 1140a24–5). Excellence in deliberation, with a view to eudaimonia, according to Aristotle, appears to be the key element in these common attributions of practical wisdom: It seems to be characteristic of the practically wise person to be able to deliberate nobly about what is good and beneficial for himself, not in particular respects ... but about what concerns living well as a whole. ... An indication of this is the fact that we call people practically wise in some particular respect whenever they calculate well to promote some good end ... so, where living well as a whole is concerned, the person capable of deliberation will also be practically wise. (EN 1140a25–34) And again later, in chapter 7: Practical wisdom ... is concerned with human affairs, namely, with what we can deliberate about. For deliberating well, we say, is the characteristic activity of the practically wise person above all ... The person unqualifiedly good at deliberation is the one who tends to aim, in accordance with his calculation, at the best of the goods for a human being that are achievable in action. (EN 1141b11–18) Thus, practical wisdom cannot be identified with either scientific knowledge or skill, since ‘one cannot deliberate about what is necessary’, which is what scientific knowledge is concerned with and because ‘action and production are generically different’; yet skill is concerned, as we have already seen, with production not action (EN 1140a–b). Practical wisdom is also distinct from ‘intellect,’ since it is concerned with practical action whereas intellect ‘remains as the state concerned with first principles’ (EN 1141a9–10). Nor is practical wisdom the same as wisdom itself, since wisdom is in fact a mix of two other states, ‘intellect

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in combination with scientific knowledge; it is scientific knowledge of the most honourable matters which, as it were, “retains its head” ’ (EN 1141a21–3). If to possess practical wisdom is to be good at deliberation, then what, according to Aristotle, is that good deliberation? Aristotle holds that deliberation is ‘a kind of deliberation,’ and that someone who is deliberating ‘is engaged in inquiry and calculation’ (EN 1142b2–3). To be good at deliberation is not to be good at guesswork or have a ready mind, because guesswork and ready-mindedness are immediate ‘whereas people deliberate for a long time, and ... one should ... deliberate slowly’ (EN 1142b4–9). Nor is it a kind of belief, though it involves ‘some kind of correctness’: the correctness of good deliberation is correctness in reasoning or thought, rather than in knowledge or belief (EN 1142b10–15). Then again, correctness in reasoning in good deliberation is not just any correctness, since incontinent – akratic – and bad or vicious people reason correctly towards bad ends yet cannot be said properly to be deliberating well (EN 1142b). Ultimately, ‘if ... it is characteristic of practically wise people to have deliberated well, good deliberation will be correctness with regard to what is useful towards the end, about which practical wisdom is true supposition’ (EN 1142b44–7). This is a typical example of both the opacity and the paucity of practical explanation to be found throughout Aristotle’s account, to which I referred above. Where we might expect an explanation of the practical elements, structure and typical everyday functioning of phronesis, Aristotle instead refers to the end at which the state by definition already successfully aims. Aristotle’s approach to practical reality is notably elliptical. How does Aristotle characterise the way practical wisdom – involving excellent deliberation about what actions to take, aimed at a true grasp of eudaimonia – relates back to the moral virtues? According to Aristotle’s views on the nature of moral virtue, as we have seen, the person of practical wisdom appears to set the standard for virtue, which strikes the correct emotional response, by determining through reason the mean relative to themselves in feelings and actions (EN 1106b–1107a). Practical wisdom plays its role for Aristotle by being a state of excellence in deliberation with a view to what is good. Aristotle now restates the point of EN 1106b–1107a in slightly different terms: ‘Again, our characteristic activity is achieved in accordance with practical wisdom and virtue of character; for virtue makes the aim right, and practical wisdom the things towards it’ (EN 1144a8–10). In explaining this point more fully, but perhaps no more enlighteningly, Aristotle makes a distinction between practical wisdom and mere cleverness: cleverness is

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the tendency to be able to achieve our ends, whatever they may be; practical wisdom involves cleverness, but the only kind of end this applies to is the best end – eudaimonia. Virtue makes the aim right – presumably, Aristotle means the particular end of action, through an appropriate emotional response to any particular circumstance – and practical wisdom ‘cleverly’ determines through excellent deliberation the best action. This means that practical wisdom and moral virtue are interdependent: virtues of character presuppose practical wisdom in striking the mean, and practical wisdom, or as Aristotle puts it at EN 1144a ‘this eye of the soul,’ requires the virtues of character in ‘reaching its developed state’ (EN 1144a34). As Aristotle concludes Book VI: ‘It is clear from what we have said, then, that we cannot be really good without practical wisdom, or practically wise without virtue of character’ (EN 1144b35–7). Practical wisdom and moral reflectiveness? Although we might have assumed that wisdom in practical moral matters relies heavily on a lucid grasp not only of the present but also of one’s past moral experiences, and that the commitment to moral lucidity (as I have described it in Chapter 2) of which this grasp is a product ought to be valued for its own sake even apart from this, what evidence there is argues strongly against such a conclusion in Aristotle’s case. Aristotle’s practical wisdom, phronesis, has little to do with critical reflection on the phronimos’s own moral experience and much to do with the calculation of the most effective means to present and future success in light of the present and future requirements for eudaimonia or human flourishing. A review of some commentators’ views of phronesis confirms this impression. According to J. L. Ackrill, for example, ‘the phronimos is good at deliberation: he can sum up a situation, weigh up various factors, and work out what to do to promote or achieve his objectives’ (1973, 28). Richard Sorabji broadly concurs, emphasising that what distinguishes the phronimos from ordinary moral agents is that he tends to act directly from his (correct) conception of human flourishing, rather than from moral experience: Whatever other roles of practical wisdom may or may not play, I suggest that one role is this. It enables a man, in the light of his conception of the good life in general, to perceive what generosity requires of him, or more generally what virtue and to kalon [the fine] require of him, in the particular case, and it instructs him to act accordingly. A

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picture of the good life will save him from giving away too much, or too little, or to the wrong causes, in particular instances. (1980, 206) Sorabji also argues that practical wisdom for Aristotle has a particularly strong element of direct moral perception or perceptiveness (1980, 206). The person who is practically wise sees or perceives in each particular choice-making situation where the mean lies and acts accordingly, and although this seems in some places to be due to independently correct reasoning or using ‘the right rule’ – orthos logos – ‘it is finally revealed that orthos logos is in accordance with, or actually is, practical wisdom’ (Sorabji 1980, 206). To do what is right through practical wisdom ‘calls for something like perception’, and ‘in Book 6 practical wisdom is compared with sense-perception five times,’ culminating in the analogy of how ‘a man stumbles without sight’ (Sorabji 1980, 206). We might expect that since practical wisdom for Aristotle involves not just excellence in deliberation about what is best to do but also an acute moral perceptiveness that moral reflection must be also involved somewhere – if not in the perception itself, then in its production and maintenance. After all, would correct moral judgment not be, in the more difficult cases at least, a matter of having critically reflected on one’s past experiences in order to perceive the current saliencies properly? Sorabji and Ackrill, for example, both make some concession to past moral experience in Aristotle’s conception of phronesis. However, these concessions are hardly what could be called admissions of a central place for moral reflectiveness. Ackrill observes of Aristotle’s phronimos that, ‘often enough, because of his experience and wisdom, he can see straight off the best thing to do, without having to go through a process of deliberation’ (1973, 28). This use of experience appears to be simple and direct lucidity, and does not imply any filtering of the memory through critical internal processes which would raise the possibility of moral reflection. Sorabji, expanding on the theme of perception, concedes that ‘such perception can come from mere experience (6.11. 1143b11–14). But practical wisdom is contrasted ... with experience, because it involves perceiving what to do in particular cases in the light of knowledge of something more universal’ (1980, 207). Neither commentator thinks that the experience of the phronimos is critical – what is critical in practically wise moral perception is, rather, ‘something more universal’. This something is what Aristotle refers to in the passage at the start of Book VI (EN 1138b) in the analogy of the archer tightening or loosening his strings, which I have discussed above, and according to Sorabji, ‘consists in a very general conception of the good’ (1980,

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207). The phronimos does not have in mind moral saliencies gleaned from critical examination of his experiences when deliberating about or perceiving the best thing to do. Moral lucidity in this sense has no central place. The Aristotelian phronimos instead has a lucid, occurrent grasp of abstract moral ideals: ‘the best’ (to ariston) (Sorabji 1980, 207), the ideal of eudaimonia. Moral reflection, as I have described it, involves the critical, sceptical examination of one’s own experiences from a moral point of view. A commitment to moral lucidity expresses itself through a pervasive tendency to engage in moral reflection. Moral reflectiveness is the moral disposition which expresses itself through such a commitment. None of these elements, nor anything closely similar, is prominent in Aristotle’s discussion of practical wisdom, moral virtue, or their interrelation. Moral experience itself, as Ackrill and Sorabji testify, does not even appear to have a prominent role in the activity of the Aristotelian phronimos. Indeed, the past in general not only appears not to be of interest to Aristotle in his description of practical wisdom or moral success in general, but in the second chapter of Book VI Aristotle himself appears to rule out any interest in past moral experiences for the state of phronesis, let alone a central place for critical moral reflection. The past, Aristotle characteristically holds, is past, and only the future is deliberated upon. It appears as though phronesis, involving excellence in deliberation about the future, may be altogether incompatible with moral reflectiveness, with its interest in ‘what has been done’: Nothing that is past is an object of rational choice; no one, for example, rationally chooses to have sacked Troy, because nobody deliberates about the past, but rather about the future and what can turn out in one way or another; and it is not possible for the past not to have happened. So Agathon was right to say: Of this one thing is even god deprived, To make what has been done not to have happened (EN 1139b8–14) Aristotle’s state of phronesis directs moral attention outward – away from its possessor and forward into the future – whereas moral reflectiveness turns moral attention inward (at least partly) – towards its possessor, and into the past. It is noteworthy that Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom and the phronimos, slight as it is on practical detail and remote from

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considerations of moral reflectiveness, is also unsatisfactory in a more telling sense. Aristotle’s practically wise agent possesses all the virtues of character and lives a perfectly flourishing, eudaimonic life. The phronimos makes all the right practical moral choices in every circumstance throughout life. The life of the phronimos is characterised by perfect affective response to all moral contingencies. The phronimos is the ideally practically wise moral agent, whose command of effective deliberation encompasses an almost unfeasibly broad range of practical moral calculations. Possessing all the virtues of character, agents possessing practical wisdom are morally flawless, their past is morally faultless and their perfect moral future is assured. In short, the phronimos represents Aristotle’s idealisation of practical moral agency, rather than a real moral agent. Phronesis is a state of someone who lives a perfect moral existence, indeed the perfect human existence, deficient in nothing. In this case, it is no surprise that moral reflectiveness plays little or no role in phronesis – it is understandably difficult to see the central requirement for retrospective critical moral examination in a moral life that is already by definition ideal. Any critical examination of the morally reflective sort will result swiftly, decisively and inevitably in complete moral self-approval. If we are inquiring into these matters not just to have some kind of abstract understanding of the relation between moral concepts, but as Aristotle claims ‘to become good people’ (EN 1103b29), then Aristotle fails in his account of phronesis. He has told us nothing about how to become good in the ordinary, less-than-ideal moral life human beings actually live. All we know for certain is the structure of and formal relation between virtues of character, phronesis and eudaimonia in an idealised picture of perfect moral agency in a perfect life. What we require of Aristotle is an account of a more plausible moral life, with all of the real life complexities, pitfalls and possibilities it entails: how to become good in a life which happens not to be blessed with the illustratively near-useless Aristotelian moral perfection of phronesis, moral virtue and eudaimonia. What we require is an account of a phronesis-like state accessible to ordinary, mistake-prone moral agents living less than ideal human lives – a version of practical wisdom for mere moral mortals. And indeed, Aristotle does recognise that ordinary moral lives are not like that of the phronimos, and that ordinary moral agents are more likely than not prone to moral mistakes and misadventures (for example, at EN 1149b–1150a). In fact, Aristotle devotes the majority of Book VII, immediately following his discussion of phronesis, to the ordinary human states of less than fully vicious moral failure (akrasia) and less than fully virtuous moral success (enkrateia). His primary

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interest is in furnishing an account of how everyday moral failure in the form of akrasia proper – moral weakness due to appetite – comes about, contra Socrates, even in the face of moral knowledge. It is from Aristotle’s discussion of ordinary, everyday moral failure that we can extract an account of the phronesis-like non-virtuous state we are interested in, that is enkrateia or self-control. It is against this background that the need for moral reflectiveness emerges in Aristotle’s theory, unacknowledged. It is therefore to Aristotle’s views on the nature of failure and success in ordinary non-virtuous moral agency I now turn.

Aristotle on moral failure In this section I will analyse Aristotle’s discussion of everyday moral failure in general, including akrasia proper, which is now commonly but inaccurately referred to as weakness of will. Aristotle’s discussion of akratic agency is the pivotal argument in the Nicomachean Ethics for considerations of moral reflectiveness in Aristotle’s theory. Firstly, however, I will survey the background to Aristotle’s discussion, which concerns his rejection of Socrates’ own views on the relation between knowledge and virtue, which was investigated in some depth in Chapter 3. Aristotle and Socrates: Knowledge, virtue, phronesis and akrasia Aristotle’s account of the association between the moral virtues and practical wisdom brings his views on the association between knowledge and virtuous moral conduct close to those of Socrates, examined in Chapter 3. There, we found that Socrates thought that virtue just is knowledge of the good and that since everyone always (most strongly) desires the good, if we simply know the good we will always act in pursuit of it – that is if we have knowledge of virtue then we will always do the morally right thing. Socrates’ stance on this issue played the major role in ruling out a place for moral reflectiveness in the Socratic life of examination. The path to a worthwhile moral life according to Socrates is through a philosophical search for a certain kind of knowledge, not through a commitment to moral lucidity and critical reflection on one’s moral experiences. If we consider Aristotle’s phronesis to be a state which reliably produces knowledge of the right thing to do in particular moral choice-making situations – in applying a lucid general grasp of the highest good or eudaimonia through moral perceptiveness and excellent deliberation – and if this state both implies moral virtue and produces right action, then Socrates’ conclusion seems almost to follow.

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Aristotle himself appears to see the closeness between his own theory and Socrates’, referring explicitly to Socrates’ views and carefully distinguishing his own in a key passage in Book VI. Having mentioned in passing much earlier in Book III, chapter 8 that Socrates for example held the belief ‘courage is knowledge’ (EN 1116b6) (from the Laches), Aristotle acknowledges that he and Socrates speak of the same state when he claims that Socrates was wrong to think that ‘all of the virtues are forms of practical wisdom’ (EN 1144b21–3). The distinction he draws between his own and Socrates’ view, it appears, is that whereas Socrates thought that practical wisdom or knowledge alone constituted virtue, Aristotle holds that the virtues are not wholly constituted by but only ‘involve practical wisdom’ (EN 1144b23). There is also for Aristotle the vital element of a fully developed, habituated excellence in emotional response – virtue of character – which was described in the first section of the present chapter (EN Book II), a state which Socrates did not consider essential. For Socrates, knowledge alone is strong enough to counter emotional confusion and weakness of will. Aristotle’s inclusion of a major affective dimension to the virtuous life, and his combinatory analysis of moral virtue and practical wisdom, paves the way for divergence between his own and Socrates’ stance. It is a consequence of Socrates’ commitment to identifying virtue with knowledge and the assumption that we all most strongly desire the good, that he also holds both that all wrongdoing is due to ignorance and that knowledge of the good cannot fail to produce right action. In other words, Socrates denies the possibility of akrasia – which is translated commonly either as moral weakness, moral failure, incontinence or weakness of will. Socrates denies the possibility of akrasia explicitly in Plato’s Protagoras, and it is to Socrates’ denial of akrasia that Aristotle responds in Book VII, immediately following his discussion of phronesis. Book VII is also of great interest because Aristotle’s analysis of moral failure and success, when divorced from his direct account of moral virtue and phronesis, reveals that everyday good but non-virtuous Aristotelian moral agency relies more heavily on moral reflectiveness than Aristotle allows in his discussion of phronesis in Book VI. I will use ‘akrasia’, ‘akrates’ and ‘akratic’ in the following sections to describe not only manifestations of akrasia proper but moral failure in general as Aristotle construes it. Similarly, I will use ‘enkrateia’, ‘enkrates’ and ‘enkratic’ to describe moral success in general and not just enkrateia in the strict sense – that is the contrary of akrasia in the strict sense.

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Aristotle on moral failure Aristotle embarks upon a discussion of the problem of akrasia in Book VII. The core puzzle for Aristotle, inherited from Socrates and Plato, is to explain what kind of ‘correct supposition’ the morally weak agent can have of the good, if it is not acted upon (EN 1145b30). It was Socrates’ position, represented in the Protagoras, that what people think of as action due to akrasia, where ‘they just think of knowledge as a slave, pushed around by all the other affections’ (Prot. 352b–c), is actually due to ignorance. Aristotle takes this as his starting point: Someone might raise the puzzle of what kind of correct supposition a person has when he acts incontinently. ... Some people deny that he can have knowledge, because it would be strange, as Socrates thought, for knowledge to be in a person, but mastered by something else and dragged around like a slave. Socrates was wholeheartedly opposed to this view, since he thought there was no such thing as incontinence [akrasia]: no one who acts against what is best does so on the supposition that he is doing so; rather it occurs through ignorance. (EN 1145b30–8) Aristotle, with the resources of his own moral theory, must somehow solve this conundrum. As usual, he sets out to do justice in his analysis both to what the wise hold and to popular opinion; he is looking to discover how matters are best resolved between prima facie contrasting views: As in our other discussions, we must first set out the way things appear to people, and then, having gone through the puzzles, proceed to prove the received opinions ... at best, all of them, or, failing that, most, and the most authoritative. For if the problems are resolved, and received opinions remain, we shall have offered sufficient proof. (EN 1145b4–9) First, Aristotle explains the place of the contraries enkrateia (continence or self-control) and akrasia in his typology of moral states. There are three types of undesirable moral state to be avoided: vice, the contrary of virtue; akrasia, the contrary of enkrateia; and ‘brutishness’, the contrary of ‘superhuman virtue’ (EN 1145a15–21). Brutishness and superhuman virtue are states that go beyond the normal range of human character; vice and virtue Aristotle has already discussed. Enkrateia and akrasia are his present interest (EN 1145b). Enkrateia and akrasia

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are not full virtue and vice for Aristotle but fit in the gap in between, where ordinary imperfectly virtuous moral agency, with its tendency to temptation and aberrant appetite, resides. The distinction between the akrates and the enkrates is thus generally characterised by Aristotle: ‘The incontinent person [akrates] knows what he does is bad, but does it because of what affects him, while the self-controlled person [enkrates], knowing that his appetites are bad, because of reason does not follow them’ (EN 1145b15–17). The problems to be resolved include what we have already seen raised – what kind of correct supposition the akrates has – and others, including the difference between the self-controlled enkrates and the full-blown temperate (i.e. virtuous) agent, and whether the practically wise agent can ever behave akratically (EN 1145b). Book VII, chapter 3 (EN 1146b–1147b) constitutes the core of Aristotle’s account of moral failure, and modern commentaries focus closely on the discussion to be found here. It is also the discussion of crucial interest for considerations of moral reflectiveness in Aristotle. The most pressing concern for Aristotle about akrasia is answering the puzzle arising between the views of Socrates and ‘the way things appear to people’, and so, ‘First, then, we should consider whether they [akrates] do act with knowledge or not, and with knowledge in what sense’ (EN 1146b11–12). In this chapter, Aristotle describes moral failure of the sort relating to akrasia in four different ways. The first description is a general picture of the akrates, who possesses knowledge but fails to attend to it; the second puts moral failure in practical syllogistic terms (which I will explain below); the third description is of familiar cases of akrasia proper and the fourth is a psychological description of akratic reasoning, again using the practical syllogism. There is disagreement between modern commentators on whether, for Aristotle, these four descriptions each constitutes a distinct type of akrasia or whether three of the four constitute a background to the actual discussion of only one version of the state. J. O. Urmson, for example, takes the latter view, claiming that the first two apparent explanations are not solutions themselves but only ‘necessary preliminaries to a solution. Commentators have not always seen that these are preliminary,’ Urmson claims, ‘but it is clear that neither makes any reference, or needs any reference, to appetite’ (1988, 91–2). The latter two descriptions, according to Urmson, are not separate but constitute a two part solution to Aristotle’s original question at the beginning of chapter 3 (EN 1146b) (Urmson 1988, 93). Since it is supposed to be occurrent weakness of will with regard to appetite that characterises akrasia proper, Urmson concludes that in the first two examples Aristotle cannot be referring to akrasia yet (1988, 92).

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Alfred Mele, against Urmson and others, asserts that such an interpretation of Aristotle, in the light of both Aristotle’s focus on knowledge here and elsewhere, and the prominent later use he makes of the first three descriptions, ‘is unacceptable’ (1999, 201). The concern about versions of akrasia is also reflected in many commentaries on Aristotle’s discussion in Book VII, which generally centre on akrasia proper. For an exhaustive survey of the many and complex philosophical questions raised around akrasia in Book VII, see James J. Walsh’s comprehensive Aristotle’s Conception of Moral Weakness (1963) and Norman Dahl’s Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will (1984). A more recent treatment is to be found in Sarah Broadie (1991, 266–312). Our interest in Aristotle’s discussion here is an interest in moral failure – the ways Aristotle thinks people can go wrong morally when they have a kind of ‘correct supposition’ – and not exclusively in the defining sense of akrasia regarding appetite in particular. Whether or not Aristotle’s discussion leading up to akrasia proper is to be taken separately or as only preliminary, what it does reveal in either case is the fact that, in contrast to Socrates, Aristotle allows room for varieties of moral failure in the face of knowledge, and this is where moral reflectiveness will enter the analysis. There is at least one dissenter to the argument that Aristotle genuinely allows for moral failure, in Ronald D. Milo (1966). Milo argues that Aristotle only appears to disagree with Socrates about the possibility of akrasia, since all of Aristotle’s alleged cases involve ignorance in some sense, and thus ‘Aristotle’s disagreement with Socrates and Plato is, as we shall see, more apparent than real’ (1966, 74). However, as emerges from the discussion here, I agree with most commentators that Aristotle’s view represents a quite distinct development from Socrates’ arguably crude rendering of the problem and its solution. Milo’s argument only goes through if we allow an interpretation of the concept of ignorance much more particularised, psychologically sophisticated and nuanced than Socrates ever considered or intended. Early in chapter 3, before embarking on his account of moral failure, Aristotle notes the critical difference between the intemperate agent, who is vicious, and the akratic agent who is not vicious yet fails morally: ‘The intemperate is led on by rational choice, believing he ought always to pursue the present pleasure, while the incontinent thinks the opposite, but pursues it nevertheless’ (EN 1146b28–30). The akrates does not share the intemperate belief that it is actually morally good or worthwhile or best to indulge in whatever pleasure is at hand but nevertheless does what the intemperate person does. Aristotle then

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dismisses the proposed easy solution that ‘people are incontinent in the face of true belief but not knowledge’ as ‘irrelevant to our argument’(EN 1146b31–2), since people are acting against their own (true) conviction in the former case just as much as in the latter, and this fact is the salient one with respect to moral failure. However, Aristotle points out that there is another epistemic distinction which is crucial. It is not that between true belief and knowledge but that between having and using knowledge. This is the first kind of moral failure Aristotle contemplates: But since we speak of knowing in two senses (the person who has knowledge but is not using it, and the person who is using it, are both said to know), it will make a difference whether someone doing what he should not has knowledge but is not attending to it, or is attending to it. The latter seems extraordinary, but not if he is not attending to it. (EN 1146b39–43) This is Aristotle’s central statement of how moral failure is possible. It is often observed that people do what they would not have thought best if they had been paying attention properly but that they are not attending – for whatever reason – to their knowledge at the time. It is to accounting for the possibilities of what causes and constitutes ‘not attending’ in this sense that Aristotle turns his attention, rather than to alleged cases of direct attentiveness to knowledge. If people at the same time attended to the knowledge which would make them explicitly aware that what they are doing is wrong, yet do it anyway, then one would have to wonder what good and bad, right and wrong meant to them. We should remember that for Aristotle, as for Socrates, there is no salient practical distinction to be drawn between one’s own good and the moral good – prudence and morality – since they are both achieved in the one activity or state, human flourishing or eudaimonia. Thus, the obvious modern explanation of direct self-awareness of akratic moral conduct – that one’s own interest trumps morality more or less explicitly – is not available to Aristotle. To be explicitly aware that some course of action conduces against eudaimonia and still to pursue it is irrational for Aristotle, and hence ‘seems extraordinary’. The former explanation, therefore, is the one to be pursued. When Aristotle says ‘attending to’ or ‘bearing in mind’, the verb is theorein, ‘which is the active consideration of what one knows’ (Hughes 2001, 150). Therefore, the moral failure in general is one who fails somehow to actively consider what is already known.

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The second description Aristotle offers constitutes the typical way people fail to attend to their knowledge when they fail morally. The characterisation of this failure requires reference to the practical syllogism, which is Aristotle’s abstract schematisation of human action. The practical syllogism broadly resembles a theoretical syllogism, containing one universal premise and a particular premise, but it concludes in action rather than abstract knowledge. The practical syllogism is like an Aristotelian master plan which explains any and every human action. For example, a practical syllogistic explanation for someone eating something sweet – which Aristotle himself uses in the current chapter (EN 1147a) – is that the person has the universal premise ‘sweet things should be tasted’, the particular observational premise ‘this thing is sweet’ and the further conclusion ‘therefore, this should be tasted’, which (usually) concludes in action. Practical reasoning, however, is upset in akratic conduct, and the practical syllogism does not work as it ought to and usually does: Again, since there are two kinds of premise, it is quite possible for someone to have both of them and to act contrary to what he knows, by using his knowledge of the universal but not that of the particular – because things to be done are particulars ... Between these two ways of knowing, then, there will be a huge difference, so that to know in one way seems not at all strange, while in the other way it would be quite remarkable. (EN 1147a1–12) In this type of case, the agent does not recognise the particular properties of the situation which are crucial to responding appropriately. It is a failure of moral perception. The response misses moral saliencies in the particular situation at hand owing to its agent’s inability to perceive them properly. Thus, a beachgoer might hold always to rescue people in danger but fail to recognise that the person out in the water waving energetically towards the beach is in imminent danger of drowning, and hence fail to act on the universal premise when conditions for its fulfilment in action have arisen. Or a person who believes respect is due to all people in all situations may, when attending to some urgent piece of business, fail to treat colleagues with respect because he is not currently seeing them as full human beings but merely as humanshaped obstacles. The particular premise ‘this is a person’ is not being attended to, so respectful treatment is not forthcoming. It would be strange if the beachgoer were committed to rescuing those in danger and occurrently recognised the person as being in danger yet still did not

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attempt a rescue, and it would be strange if someone was disrespectful to colleagues while keeping in mind the fact that these counted as people under the principle of respect. The third description of moral failure introduces Aristotle’s discussion of akrasia proper, which instances a particular type of wrongdoing due to aberrant appetites. This concerns the explanation of familiar cases of moral failure, where agents seem to have explicit knowledge or awareness – are apparently attending to the salient details– at the same time that they are behaving against that knowledge: Again, human beings can have knowledge in another way besides those that have been mentioned. In the case of having knowledge without using it we see a different kind of having, so that one can in a sense both have and not have it – for example, if one is asleep, mad or drunk. Now this is the condition of people under the influence of the ways they are affected; for spirited feelings, sexual appetites, and some other such things clearly alter our bodily condition as well, and in some people even produce attacks of madness. (EN 1147a13–20) The akratic agent who seems to be explicitly aware that what he does is wrong or bad but does it anyway is like someone who is asleep, or drunk or mad, whose words have the relevant meaning but who does not or cannot fully grasp the import of what they say. Being spirited – this is often translated as ‘angry’ – or being in the grip of sexual passion also brings on this type of forgetfulness or inattentiveness to moral saliencies. People in the grip of such strong feelings might even mouth the moral principles they act against, seeming to know directly what is going on. However, Aristotle does not think this constitutes genuine explicit awareness: It is obvious, then, that we should say that incontinent people have knowledge in a similar way to these people. The fact that they use words that have their origin in knowledge proves nothing. For people under the influence of these feelings even recite proofs and verses of Empedocles, and those who have just begun to learn can string words together, but do not yet know; it must grow into them, and this takes time. So we must suppose that incontinent people speak just like actors. (EN 1147a21–7) And so there are further cases, where people espouse moral knowledge even at the time but do not understand it properly or have not had it ‘grow into them’.

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Aristotle’s fourth description of moral failure is a difficult psychological explanation, in practical syllogistic terms, of what typically goes on in the agent in the act of moral failure in general, and, for akrasia in particular, when appetite takes hold of the reasoning process: Again, one could look at the cause as follows, in relation to facts of nature. One belief is universal, while the other is concerned with particulars, a sphere controlled by perception. When a single belief emerges from the combination of these two, the soul must in one kind of case affirm the conclusion, while in matters of production it must immediately act. If, for example, everything sweet must be tasted, and this is sweet, in that it is one example of particular sweet things, a person who is capable and not prevented must act on this immediately. But when the one universal belief is present in the person deterring him from tasting, along with the other that everything sweet is pleasant, as well as the belief that this is sweet – and it is the latter that is activated – and when appetite happens to be present within him, one belief bids him avoid this, but appetite leads him on, since it can move each of our bodily parts. So it happens that reason and belief in a way make him act incontinently; and the belief is not in itself contrary to correct reason, but only incidentally so, since it is appetite, not belief, that is contrary. (EN 1147a28–b3) Hughes explains Aristotle’s point here by expanding on Aristotle’s example of sweets, in which Aristotle himself has neither explicitly set out the akratic’s practical syllogism nor given the competing, correct syllogism (2001, 151; 153–4). In the first, correct practical syllogism, there is the universal premise something like (a1) ‘What contains sugar is bad for me’ and particular premises stating that (a2) ‘This contains sugar’ and (a3) ‘I ought not to eat this’(Hughes 2001, 150). The akratic’s competing practical syllogism goes: (b1) ‘What contains sugar is pleasant to eat’, (b2) ‘This contains sugar’ and (b3) ‘This would be pleasant to eat’ (Hughes 2001, 150). Both (a2) and (b2) are the same particular premise – what is ‘activated’ in practice for Aristotle. However, for the akratic, ‘appetite leads him on’ to the universal premise (b1) in conjunction with (b2/a2), and hence to (b3) ‘This would be pleasant to eat’, and the eating, smothering (a3) and restraint. As Hughes puts it, ‘in a moment of weakness he pays no heed to that conclusion [(a3)] or indeed to that argument as a whole’ and since none of the argument (b1)–(b3) is

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false and since it does not in itself contradict correct practical reasoning (a1)–(a3) ‘there is, then, nothing wrong with the argument in (b1)–(b3) in itself’ (Hughes 2001, 153). The only thing that is wrong with (b1)– (b3) is that it is not morally salient in the situation at hand: ‘What has happened is that the person’s desires have led him to focus upon what is true but in that situation is either not morally significant or certainly not morally decisive’ (Hughes 2001, 153). Aristotle concludes the chapter by referring to Socrates again. The question he had set out to answer had been raised by the disagreement between the best of popular opinion and Socrates, the former holding that moral failure is an everyday happening, the latter that there is no such thing, and all apparent akrasia is ignorance. Aristotle has resolved the problems, showing how the popular opinion is upheld through explaining the manner of ‘correct supposition’ the akrates has, and subsequently ‘received opinion remains’: there is such a thing as moral failure. What, then, of Socrates’ assertion? Previously (in Chapter 3), I described what Socrates means by ‘knowledge’ when he says that knowledge is virtue – he means the kind of knowledge that is discovered through the philosophical investigation of moral concepts. This clearly equates with what Aristotle has been calling ‘universal’ knowledge – that which provides the first premise of the practical syllogism. Now, Aristotle points out that even Socrates’ conclusion about knowledge not being ‘a slave, pushed around by all the other affections’ (Prot. 352b–c) turns out to be vindicated. The kind of knowledge Socrates meant – knowledge of universals – is not pushed around, but perceptual knowledge which generates particular premises of the practical syllogism is. Thus, in a sense Socrates was also correct: And because the last term does not seem to be universal, or related to knowledge in the same way as the universal term, the result Socrates was seeking seems to follow. The knowledge present when someone comes to be affected by incontinence, and that is ‘dragged about’ because he is affected, is not what is thought to be real knowledge, but only perceptual knowledge. (EN 1147b15–20) It is moral perception that is ‘dragged about’ in moral failure, rather than the abstract, philosophical moral knowledge to which Socrates refers. Aristotle’s whole case for moral failure hinges on the realisation that one’s perception of morally salient particulars is not going to be reliable when one is an ordinary, less-than-fully-virtuous moral agent. One can easily tend to lose sight of what is morally important, fail to

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have a lucid grasp of what is going on morally and of what one ought to be doing, and be led, especially by appetite, to moral failure in spite of having knowledge of the relevant universal premise.

Akrasia, Enkrateia and moral reflectiveness Aristotle describes four different ways in which moral failure operates against ‘correct supposition’ which is not borne in mind. It should be noted that I do not take Aristotle’s account of moral failure to be exhaustive of the concept, nor indeed would I defend Aristotle’s account as either convincing or satisfactory in the light of contemporary views on the matter. However, this is not my present concern. My primary interest in Aristotle’s fourfold description of moral failure is in the implications of Aristotle’s account of moral failure, and enkrateia or ‘self-control’ – non-virtuous ‘moral success’ – for the role moral reflectiveness might play in Aristotle’s theory. I argue in this section that moral reflectiveness is a necessary but unacknowledged condition in Aristotle’s conception of ordinary non-virtuous moral success, enkrateia. In order to make the case effectively, I must briefly revisit self-deception. Aristotle’s akrasia and self-deception We have seen the ways in which Aristotle thinks akratic action comes about, and what is common to all of these ways of failing morally is the failure of moral perception – the failure to perceive morally salient properties of the situation at hand. This failure is for Aristotle culpable, since the akrates in a morally relevant sense ‘knows what he does is bad’ (EN 1145b15), and the action is fully ‘blameworthy’ in the case of akrasia proper, and ‘bad and to be avoided’ in other types of moral failure (EN 1148b4). When we consider the phenomenon of self-deception, to which I briefly referred in connection with sincerity and genuine commitment in Chapter 2, the familiarity of Aristotle’s fourfold description of moral failure is striking. In Chapter 2, I followed Fingarette and Martin in characterising self-deception as a common feature of everyday human agency – the purposeful evasion of self-acknowledgement, where both the object of evasion and the evasion itself remain unacknowledged by the self-deceiver (Fingarette 1969, 1998; Martin 1985, 1986). Selfdeceivers can have various motives and can engage in self-deception in manifold ways, all without occurrent awareness that this is what they are doing. A psychological explanation for this ability is proposed

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by Fingarette, who points out that it is not the case ‘that everything of which we are currently taking account and to which we are responding intelligently must be within our field of attention’ (1998, 294). Essentially, Fingarette argues that self-deceptive agents can take account of what they do not wish to acknowledge to themselves but can also turn their attention away from it and focus narrowly on something else, not allowing the undesirable feature into their field of attention as they respond to the situation. The turning of attention away from some undesirable feature of a particular situation – whatever that feature might be – and narrow focus instead upon other features is the essence of the self-deceptive move. Aristotle’s account of moral failure is of course not a contemporary one, and it is perhaps controversial to use contemporary psychological concepts to describe it. Notwithstanding this concern, it is clear that Fingarette’s and Martin’s account accords strongly with Aristotle’s central notion of knowing but not bearing in mind, where the akratic agent ‘has knowledge but is not attending to it’ (EN 1146b42). The motive for inattention in akrasia proper is bodily appetite, and it is the agent’s narrow focus on the pleasure to be had from one course of action that allows inattention to the moral saliencies of the situation, and wrong action, as we saw in Hughes’s ‘sweetness’ example above. In other cases of moral failure, there can be various reasons for an agent’s turning attention away from what is morally salient and which they could otherwise recognise. Aristotle’s conception of the psychological underpinning of akratic action closely resembles self-deception, and its manifestations are particularly conducive to analysis as self-deceptive practices. Aristotelian moral failure, arguably in the majority of instances, consists in precisely what Fingarette describes as self-deception. I shall therefore treat Aristotle’s moral failure – the akrates – as a typically self-deceptive character. Aristotle’s akratic agent is typically a self-deceptive character who avoids paying attention to what is morally good or best in the circumstances of everyday life and agency. How the Aristotelian akrates – someone who tends to habitually fail morally – successfully engages in self-deceptive practices as easily as Aristotle appears to allow is explained by Mele (although Mele is not concerned with establishing this particular connection) (1999). Typical imperfectly virtuous Aristotelian moral agents do not assiduously keep their conception of the good life, eudaimonia, in mind and appraise every practical situation in its light just in case there is some serious deficiency in their agency. According to Mele, Aristotle’s ordinary moral agents are not

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the sort of people to go about everyday life with a constant and vivid picture of eudaimonia shining before them, relevant to any and every choice of action. Nor is their access to this conception straightforward even when an important choice is to be made. Although the typical akrates has the ‘correct conception’ somehow, it is not an easy task to apply it in practice. Most agents do not have eudaimonia in sight most of the time. Instead, even our morally correct practical conclusions tend to be grounded in lower-level projects and desires rather than our overall conception of the good life. This has the result that motives other than those towards what is morally best can very easily come out on top given subtle self-deceptive shifts in focus and attention. According to Mele, ... for Aristotle, deliberation typically begins with occurrent desires for lower-level ends. Just agents deliberate with a view to what is just, while physicians and statesmen aim in their professional deliberation at health and social order ... These agents might appeal to happiness if asked to justify their desires for these lower-level ends; but considerations of happiness typically do not explicitly enter into their deliberations (though they may when ends conflict). (1999, 194) In everyday conduct, our ordinary ends are not expected by Aristotle to be vividly connected with our overall conception of the flourishing life or what is finest or best – they compete with each other at a lower level than this. A consequence of this feature of agency is that acquiring and retaining one’s grasp of the prevailing moral saliencies of any given practical situation, and of one’s life in general, is a very difficult task for ordinary moral agents. Working out how best to respond to the myriad of practical uncertainties which inevitably arise, while keeping firmly in mind at every step one’s highest moral ideals, their relation to the situation at hand and deliberating effectively on this basis, is not a realistic picture of moral practice. To acquire and then maintain such a grasp would be a great moral achievement. Moreover, in this practical environment what the akrates typically lacks – and Mele argues that moral failure is a weakness of moral character (as Aristotle puts it at one point, ‘a sort of vice’ (EN 1148a4)) – is not anything like self-control in the sense of a ‘strong will’ but a grasp of the moral saliencies of the particular circumstances: the akrates lacks moral perception. Aristotle’s akratic agents fail morally because the moral complexity of everyday human agency allows for them to focus their attention on inappropriate objects and to be inattentive to what is morally important, all

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without being occurrently aware of the fact that this is what they are doing. James J. Walsh describes this aptly as ‘loss of effective moral purpose’: ‘What is lost in akrasia is the understanding of a premise which expresses a moral perception. The morally weak man does not lose either his productive or his practical cleverness ... even though he does lose his sense of moral relevance (1963, 158). On the other hand, to attend to what is morally important – to have moral perception – is not simply to have retained one’s existing moral purpose or sense of moral relevance. With this more realistic picture of Aristotelian agency in place, the burden of explanation shifts from why the akrates goes wrong – which we now see is a predictable and unsurprising response to everyday moral experience – to explaining how the successful Aristotelian moral agent gets things right in these same circumstances. As Sarah Broadie argues from her own perspective on Aristotle, since the nature of human experience often determines that ‘a rational agent must remain cognitively and affectively open to unforeseen aspects of the unfolding situation ... the general possibility of incontinence lies at the heart of human practical rationality’ (1991, 279). Broadie also recognises that the observation to be drawn here is that enkrateia is in greater need of an explanation than akrasia: Granted Aristotle’s conception of practical reason, the phenomenon of incontinence is only to be expected. It may seem now that continence is the greater mystery. Since in the nature of the case the rational agent is liable to temptation, how is it possible not to give way? (1991, 279) Undistorted moral perception in complex and unpredictable circumstances requires its own explanation, even if Aristotle himself misperceives the requirement. Aristotle’s enkrateia and moral reflectiveness The connection between Aristotle’s account of akrasia and self-deception is clear, as is the connection between Aristotle’s akrasia and the failure of moral perception. That these connections hold is not surprising in the light of what I have already said about moral reflection and genuine commitment to moral lucidity in Chapter 2. There, I claimed that people who are genuinely committed to moral lucidity – morally reflective people – are committed to achieving a clear and accurate understanding of their own past moral experience and to overcoming confusion, ignorance, error and the various manifestations of self-deception which

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are opposed to a lucid grasp of the moral character of their experience. If we consider Aristotle’s ‘self-controlled’ enkrates – one who tends to be a moral success – in the light of this account of moral reflectiveness, a crucial yet unacknowledged role for morally reflective agency emerges in Aristotle’s ethics. Aristotle does not much discuss the nature of enkrateia or self-control, taking a primary interest in the ‘puzzles’ of moral failure. Before Aristotle’s discussion of moral failure, one might have thought that the nature of akrasia’s contrary would be simple enough: as the translation suggests, ‘self-control’ should simply be a matter of consciously defeating one’s recalcitrant appetites and other aberrant desires. However, as my account of Aristotle’s discussion made clear, and as the akratic agent’s problems with self-deception and complex lower-level ends further shows, enkrateia constitutes far more than only a kind of conscious self-control. Its chief element, I hold, is not strength of will, but moral perception. And its origination and preservation is owed to an underlying state of moral reflectiveness. Aristotle does not discuss the enkrates independently of the akrates in any depth. He does not seem to perceive the need for a separate account of enkrateia at all. However, it is possible to piece together Aristotle’s views on the enkrates. Firstly, the akrates and the enkrates are both defined by their tendency to be strongly tempted by pleasure or appetite against their better judgement. The defining distinction between them is that whereas the akrates is typically led by pleasure or appetite to do what is wrong, the enkrates ‘knowing that his appetites are bad, because of reason does not follow them’ (EN 1145b16–17). There is no distinction between the two states on the basis of the strength of the aberrant desires or appetites with which they contend. I have argued that, in doing what is bad, the Aristotelian akrates fails a test of moral perception rather than of will: on Aristotle’s account, akratic agents typically fail to grasp the moral saliencies of particular situations, typically through self-deceptive agency. Aristotle at one point comments that most people in fact have a tendency to moral failure rather than success: ‘The state of most people lies in between [virtue and vice], though they may incline more in the direction of the worse states’ (EN 1150a18–19). This is unfortunately just the way things are, since temptations to moral failure are pervasive and insidious: But appetite is like what they say of Aphrodite: ‘a weaver of guile, sprung from Cyprus’; and what Homer says of her embroidered girdle: Allurement, which steals the mind of the wise, shrewd though it is. (EN 1149b18–20)

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The enkrates, as Rorty puts it, ‘is tempted by pleasure: he can be affected by it as much as the akrates. The difference is that he does not act from his reactions: he holds out against them and continues to act in accordance with his ends’ (1980, 274). However, the salient difference lies deeper: to identify it properly, we need an account of how the enkratic agent ‘holds out against them’ in a practical environment, where, as we have seen, it is rarely clear which actions are akratic ‘reactions’ and which ones are enkratic. This is where I believe moral reflectiveness becomes an essential but unacknowledged ingredient in Aristotle’s theory. Moral reflectiveness is the disposition which expresses itself through a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, whose characteristic action is the critical, sceptical examination of one’s own experiences from a moral point of view. Ordinary people – caught up in balancing and deliberating on the basis of everyday lower-level ends with no clear view to the ultimate moral status of their choices – are tempted by ‘strong and bad’ desires and appetites, which they very often fail to distinguish as such. If some of these ordinary people still dependably get things right in terms of eudaimonia, then there must be an explanation for their success. Aristotle does not offer a positive account of moral success, or enkrateia, according to Gerasimos Santas, because he does not think he needs one: as long as one’s knowledge is ‘fully explicit’ and not concealed by the machinations of moral failure, then one ‘will act continently even though the [strong and bad] motivation may also be fully explicit’ (Santas 1969, 185–6). Norman Dahl also cites this as the reason Aristotle does not concentrate on an account of moral success (1984, 185). Broadie asserts that ‘the general Aristotelian answer would be, I think, that nature has endowed us with the general capacities needed for realising our good’ (1991, 279). However, my discussion has shown that in Aristotle’s own view this is not the full story. There is an explanatory gap which Aristotle overlooks – how the enkrates identifies successfully when, where and how desires and appetites are wont to skew moral perceptions, especially given the everyday remoteness of eudaimonia. Moral reflectiveness is a disposition which plugs precisely this gap in Aristotle’s account of moral success. It does so because it is concerned with critical examination of its possessor’s experiences from a moral point of view, to discover the moral meaning of those experiences. It is precisely the kind of backward-looking and inner-directed state which will help the enkratic agents identify and act in situations where they are particularly vulnerable to akratic self-deception. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, the most important questions for moral reflection

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are questions about one’s experiences and what, morally, they mean. Within the limits of Aristotle’s moral theory, moral reflection becomes the critical, interrogative examination of one’s experiences in terms of whether one has been just, temperate or courageous, or ultimately, from the point of view of human flourishing or eudaimonia, whether one has been living well. Moral reflectiveness is the ingrained state, aimed at producing lucidity about one’s moral experiences, which expresses itself through such critical inquiry. It is out of precisely this kind of state that we can expect Aristotelian enkratic agents to build and maintain the grasp of moral saliencies required for the occurrent recognition of the ways in which aberrant desires and appetites threaten to skew moral perceptions. If enkratic agents tend to see what kinds of moral pitfalls and traps to which they are prone, they must have the critical ability to see where they have tended towards or have been prone to these pitfalls in the past. Likewise, for Aristotle, the akrates must lack something of this critical ability. Both, according to Aristotle, have the theoretical knowledge to do the right thing in situations where desire and appetite lead them astray, but the akrates fails to have the enkrates’ grasp of the moral saliencies of the situation. What akratic agents crucially fail to possess, the absence of which causes their failure to exercise moral knowledge, is (successful) moral reflectiveness. Aristotelian akrates typically fail because they are morally unreflective and thus fail to recognise in the complex web of everyday lower-level activity that ‘this is a situation in which I tend to be tempted away from what I ought to do’. The akrates does not have the crucial particular moral perception that moral reflectiveness aims to produce, which defeats the inattention to moral saliencies and provides a lucid moral view of circumstances. Given Aristotle’s account of imperfect moral agency, moral unreflectiveness is central to akrasia, and moral reflectiveness, to enkrateia. In other words, I hold that moral reflectiveness is a necessary condition of Aristotle’s concept of ordinary moral success, enkrateia. Furthermore, becoming morally reflective should be crucial to overcoming moral failure: if typical akratic agents were determined to overcome their failings, then engagement in moral reflection – to discover and understand how, when and where he tends to go wrong – would be essential. It might be argued that moral reflectiveness is not the only candidate to fill Aristotle’s enkratic explanatory gap and that it is not a necessary condition of Aristotle’s enkrateia. Let me therefore consider alternative Aristotelian explanations of the distinctive features of enkrateia. One might hold that the right thing to do in the light of eudaimonia is obvious

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to any ordinary Aristotelian moral agent who has moral knowledge in the form of the major premise of a practical syllogism and who is not being simultaneously distracted by strong aberrant desires or appetites. Perhaps, then, the enkrates simply does not tend to be distracted by desires such as these. However, this cannot be the case in enkratic agency: the point about enkrateia is that its agent has precisely the same kind and degree of aberrant desires and appetites as the akrates. It is essential to these desires that they tend to attract the attention of their possessors and distract them from their moral purpose. Whatever tends to distract the akrates’ attention equally tends to distract the enkrates. The difference is that enkratic agents overcome the distraction, not that they are not distracted. The agent who is not distracted by any aberrant desires and appetites is in fact in Aristotle’s view already practically wise: it is characteristic of the phronimos to excel in moral deliberation. But if the enkratic agent is not susceptible to the effects of strong and bad desires, and has moral perception and deliberates correctly, then there appears to be no substantial distinction for Aristotle between the enkrates and the phronimos. Consider one other alternative explanation. One might hold that the enkrates has the means to overcome distraction because of a special skill in seeing clearly ‘straight off’ the right thing to do, without the need for any morally reflective underpinning: enkrateia might be a kind of acquired outward-looking moral perception of the circumstances in the light of eudaimonia, and what the everyday akrates might lack is this kind of excellent moral perception. However, this is surely another description of the function of phronesis itself in concert with virtues of character – ‘for virtue makes the aim right, and practical wisdom the things towards it’ (EN 1144a9–10) – which is precisely what enkratic and akratic agents, ex hypothesi, fail to possess in Aristotle’s typology of moral states. They are both caught up in a complex web of lowerlevel ends, with no clear vision of eudaimonia. The akrates and enkrates alike are stuck in ordinary, imperfect moral lives usually far removed from considerations of eudaimonia, and this is the distinction between them and those possessing phronesis and moral virtue. If Aristotle does indeed wish to hold that the enkrates possesses such excellence, then it is difficult to see how the enkrates and the phronimos can be properly differentiated without inconsistency infecting the account. Thus, the chief alternative Aristotelian explanations to an enkratic need for moral reflectiveness fail in an Aristotelian view. It is the inward-directed and backward-looking element – due to moral reflectiveness – which is a necessary condition of ordinary moral success and which ultimately

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distinguishes enkrateia from akrasia on the one hand, and phronesis, on the other. Enkrateia is a kind of understanding found in ordinary, imperfect moral agency – agency pursued without the benefit of perfect virtue and phronesis – which has moral reflectiveness as a necessary condition.

The value of self-knowledge in the Magna Moralia There is at least one other place in Aristotle’s ethical writings (if the Magna Moralia is to be counted as such) where he turns his attention to an intrinsically valuable feature of human agency requiring moral reflectiveness. This feature is self-knowledge, by which Aristotle clearly means moral self-knowledge. Interestingly, the value of self-knowledge is raised in a discussion of the value of friendship for the person who is blessed with eudaimonia – who is also the morally virtuous phronimos whom I described earlier. It is John M. Cooper (1999) who brings to light Aristotle’s discussion of the relation between self-knowledge and friendship in the Magna Moralia. My interest in Cooper’s own discussion revolves around his argument, on the basis of a passage from the Magna Moralia, that friendship is partly constitutive of a flourishing eudaimonic life. The evidence which supports Cooper’s conclusion supports, a fortiori, an argument for moral reflectiveness having more than merely instrumental value in Aristotle’s theory. However, I believe Cooper’s argument overstates the case in attributing contributory value to friendship in Aristotle, and ultimately moral reflectiveness too remains only instrumentally valuable, though it proves again to be a necessary condition of ordinary moral success – enkrateia – in Aristotle’s theory. Cooper’s task is to show that there are grounds in Aristotle to establish the conclusion, ‘that true friendship is an essential constituent of a flourishing human life’ (1999, 293). In contrast, my task is to explain what value-relation holds between moral reflectiveness and a flourishing human life for Aristotle. Coincidentally, however, the first of two Aristotelian arguments Cooper constructs in support of his case for true friendship also provides the background for my own conclusion about the worth of moral reflectiveness. In the passage from the Magna Moralia, Aristotle sets himself the question Cooper has put, ‘the question being whether the self-sufficing man will require friendship or not’ (MM 1213a). Aristotle’s answer appears to be that a flourishing life does require friendship: friendship does partly

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constitute eudaimonia. What Aristotle relies on is the value of knowing oneself: If, then, when one looked upon a friend one could see the nature and the attributes of the friend, [what is his character and quality] ... such as to be a second self, at least if you make a very great friend, [if we figure a friend of the most intimate sort] as the saying has it, ‘Here is another Heracles, a dear other self.’ Since then it is both a most difficult thing, as some of the sages have said, to attain a knowledge of oneself, and also a most pleasant (for to know oneself is pleasant) – now we are not able to see what we are from ourselves (and that we cannot do so is plain from the way in which we blame others without being aware that we do the same things ourselves; and this is the effect of favour or passion, and there are many of us who are blinded by these things so that we judge not aright); as then when we wish to see our own face, we do so by looking into the mirror, in the same way when we wish to know ourselves we can obtain that knowledge by looking at our friend. For the friend is, as we assert, a second self. If, then, it is pleasant to know oneself, and it is not possible to know this without having some one else for a friend, the self-sufficing man will require friendship in order to know himself. (MM 1213a10–27) I have inserted in square brackets Cooper’s own translation (1999, 281–2) in two places where he translates phrases differently from Stock (Aristotle 1925). However, I do not think the differences are crucial to either Cooper’s or my own argument. Here, we have an explicit argument for friendship being a necessary means to eudaimonia, because we only gain an accurate reflection of our own character and conduct by studying the character and conduct of a ‘very great’ friend ‘of the most intimate sort’. To attain this kind of self-knowledge is ‘most pleasant’ for a human being. However, Cooper observes that Aristotle does not explicitly state in the above passage that self-knowledge is ‘actually indispensable to the good and flourishing person’ (1999, 282). All we know from this passage is that it is ‘most pleasant’, and that ‘the self-sufficing man will require friendship in order to know himself.’ But does flourishing, or ‘self-sufficiency’, also require him to know himself? Cooper contends that ‘on general Aristotelian grounds’ it can be granted that eudaimonia requires self-knowledge and that this is probably the reason why Aristotle emphasises its pleasantness: It is certainly plausible to hold, and Aristotle presupposes throughout, that a person’s life could not be called flourishing unless, in

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addition to leading the sort of life that is a matter of fact best (doing acts of kindness and courage and so on) he knew what sort of life he was leading and chose it partly for that reason. Human flourishing, in short, does not consist merely in conformity to natural principles, but requires self-knowledge and conscious self-affirmation. Selfknowledge is thus an essential part of what it is to flourish. As such it is an extremely pleasant thing, and this is perhaps why in our text so much emphasis is laid on its pleasantness. (1999, 282–3) Thus, Cooper argues, the ‘indispensability of self-knowledge’ that Aristotle’s argument needs ought to be granted. That only close friendship and not just any acquaintance with others will do when one wishes to, as the flourishing person does, ‘attain the same objectivity about oneself that is so comparatively less difficult about others’ is also explained by Cooper (1999, 283–4). To have a great friend who is a ‘second self’ is to have someone closely similar to oneself, but who is not oneself, to study. As Cooper argues, such a friendship is ‘the needed bridge by which to convert objectivity about others into objectivity about oneself’ (1999, 284). Flourishing friends are drawn to each other ‘intuitively’ by the similarity of their good characters, of which each is at first not fully cognisant. Yet by studying the other’s conduct and character, each friend can then ‘come to know his own’ (Cooper 1999, 284). According to Cooper, ‘Here the presumption is that even an intimate friend remains distinct enough to be studied objectively; yet, because one intuitively knows oneself to be fundamentally the same in character as he is, one obtains through him an objective view of oneself’ (1999, 284). Cooper thus seeks to establish that self-knowledge is an essential part of the flourishing life for Aristotle. He seeks to establish this conclusion in order to argue that since true friendship is a requirement of self-knowledge, and self-knowledge partly constitutes eudaimonia, that friendship too is ‘an essential constituent’ of eudaimonia. However, is Cooper successful? This is where my own argument about self-knowledge and moral reflectiveness joins Cooper’s Aristotelian picture. Moral reflectiveness is intimately connected with the kind of self-knowledge to which Aristotle and Cooper refer. What is essential about friendship for selfknowledge in Cooper’s argument is that it provides, or can provide, an objective view of one’s own conduct and character through the study of the character and conduct of one’s friend. In Chapter 1, I emphasised the fact that other people and their experiences are crucial resources for moral reflection and that moral experiences are often shared in the

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sense that we find our own experiences have their reflection in the lives of others. Yet this appears to be more or less exactly the feature to which Aristotle attributes the worth of friendship. What we seek in moral reflection is a clear moral understanding of our experiences, and although the experiences themselves are of primary interest, what also should emerge in a life permeated with such examination is an understanding of our own moral character and life. In other words, what should emerge is the self-knowledge to which Aristotle attributes such pleasantness in the Magna Moralia passage. And moral reflectiveness is again the necessary background condition, driving an agent’s efforts towards self-knowledge. Moral reflectiveness appears even more important for this purpose than mere friendship, since friendship provides only one dimension of morally reflective inquiry. As Cooper admits, his own argument about the value of friendship ‘hardly exhausts the sources of self-knowledge’. Yet if the overall thrust of my book is correct, and if self-knowledge here is taken to mean moral self-knowledge, moral reflectiveness might come close. However, the self-knowledge argument for the value of moral reflectiveness (or for Cooper, friendship) does not work for a person living a perfectly flourishing eudaimonic life. As we have seen in the present chapter, and as Cooper has pointed out above, the eudaimonic agent is ‘already leading a perfect, completely fulfilled life’ (Cooper 1999, 278). Moreover, the eudaimonic agent is already perfectly virtuous and practically wise: eudaimonia is available only to such a morally perfect person. But if the flourishing person is already morally perfect, then Aristotle is confused in the Magna Moralia if he means to argue that this person needs true friends to identify flaws in his agency. By definition, there are no flaws for Aristotle’s flourishing person to identify and overcome. The agent to whom Aristotle refers requires friendship – and according to my argument moral reflectiveness – in order to see through his own distorting favours and passions and ‘judge ... aright’ (MM 1213a). As Nancy Sherman observes of the Magna Moralia passage, ‘Aristotle makes it clear here ... that we look outward to others because of our own tendency toward self-deception’ (1997, 211). Yet eudaimonic agents, already necessarily virtuous and practically wise, will never ‘blame others without being aware that we do the same thing ourselves’ and, as we already know, are distinguishable from ordinary moral agents through their special ability not to be ‘blinded by these things’ (MM 1213a). Only imperfectly virtuous ordinary moral agents are prone to self-deception. If the only reason we are not able to ‘see what we are from ourselves’ for Aristotle is that our own recalcitrant favours and passions tend to

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distort our self-perception, then flourishing people need no friendship – or moral reflectiveness – because, being morally perfect, they neither have nor even need our self-knowledge distorting emotional defences. Not having or ever needing such defences, it must be Aristotle’s conclusion that they can already see what they are from themselves – unaided by moral reflectiveness or the examples furnished by true friends. Since there are no internal impediments for the flourishing person, and unless there are other impediments Aristotle fails to mention, selfknowledge appears in Aristotle’s view not just to be possible without moral reflectiveness and friendship, but to be inevitable regardless of their presence or absence. Aristotle cannot consistently be referring to the eudaimonic agent at MM1213a, and so Cooper’s argument seems to fail. Friendship really is only instrumentally valuable for Aristotle’s flourishing people, because awareness of the virtue of true friends is valued ‘as an overflow from the good man’s self-consciousness, not as something needed to create it in the first place’ (Cooper 1999, 281). Moreover, Aristotle’s perfect, flourishing people do not require a backward-looking state like moral reflectiveness, except perhaps to glean more pleasure still from the reflective glow of their own perfect moral agency. However, they should already know straightforwardly that they are now and have always been morally perfect anyway: why would Aristotle require them to go to the effort of being morally reflective about it as well? Aristotle cannot consistently be referring to the eudaimonic agent at MM 1213a, yet his argument clearly does work if we take him to be referring not to a perfect flourishing life but to an imperfect, ordinary one. It seems clear to me that Aristotle’s reference must be once again to the enkrates at MM 1213a – the kind of agent who has moral faults, is prone to self-deception but is committed to overcoming these shortcomings. It is aberrant passions, desires and appetites which tend to skew enkratic moral perception, and this is no less the case when attention is self-directed. Enkratic agents find it difficult to see themselves from themselves, just as they find it difficult to clearly pick out moral saliencies when their attention is outward-directed. And since they tend to be led astray morally in the special sense that they tend to have difficulty seeing their own moral flaws, true friendship is crucial in just the way Aristotle and Cooper argue. For any ordinary imperfect moral agent, who is also committed in general to getting things right, the tendency not to know one’s own moral faults is itself usually one’s most significant moral fault. If one has very close friends, in general character similar to oneself and with whom one closely identifies, and yet one

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can see more lucidly their moral faults, then the argument for the value of friendship in attaining self-knowledge gains plausibility. Moreover, in the enkratic pursuit of self-knowledge, moral reflectiveness is once again a pivotal state. If one has moral faults and knows it, and is susceptible to self-deception not just when these faults manifest themselves in practical circumstances but also when one tries to introspect on moral character, then moral reflectiveness is invaluable. It is just this kind of sceptical, interrogative state, focusing on particular experience, which catches out self-directed moral self-deception. Aristotle and Cooper are correct in identifying close friendship as one of the morally reflective means by which the unmasking of self-directed moral self-deception is most likely to be achieved. Once again, moral reflectiveness becomes a necessary but unacknowledged condition of successful ordinary moral agency in Aristotle’s theory, this time in the Magna Moralia, as a means to moral self-knowledge.

Conclusion Ultimately, Aristotle does not explicitly recognise or find room in his ethical writings for the consideration of a state like moral reflectiveness as a virtue. In his account of practical wisdom or phronesis, where we might reasonably expect a comprehensive description of morally reflective agency to be found, we instead find that Aristotle is concerned with describing an ideal whose perfection purges his account of much practical moral significance and relevance. Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom is too remote from a description of real people and their moral lives to accommodate moral reflectiveness. However, as I have established in this chapter, when it comes to describing more realistic moral character types and circumstances in the non-virtuous states of akrasia and enkrateia, moral reflectiveness – albeit under deep cover – enters the Aristotelian moral picture. In the Aristotelian account of ordinary non-virtuous moral success, moral reflectiveness partially emerges as a necessary yet unacknowledged condition of enkrateia. This observation is reinforced in one passage of the Magna Moralia, where Aristotle again relies on moral reflectiveness without acknowledgement in making an argument about the need for friendship in the pursuit of self-knowledge. Here again, Aristotle’s enkratic agents need moral reflectiveness, this time in the specific form of critical reflection on themselves in the light of a friend’s conduct, in order to gain intrinsically valuable self-knowledge. In the end, however, Aristotle fails to entertain moral reflectiveness as a necessary element of a successful ordinary moral life,

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let alone to accord it a place as a virtue in its own right. This lack seems at least partly due to Aristotle’s concentration on an idealisation of moral agency and its concomitant outward-oriented and forward-looking image of a morally perfect human life. Yet Aristotle’s perfect image is achieved at the cost of ignoring an equally important dimension of a worthwhile moral life – that part where the focus of moral attention is one’s past experience and its moral significance.

5 Kant’s Morally Reflective First Command?

In Chapters 3 and 4, I argued that neither Socrates (as Plato represents him) nor Aristotle, both seminal figures in ancient Greek ethics and the history of moral theory, leave theoretical space in which to properly recognise moral reflectiveness or take it seriously as a virtue. Another central figure in the same history, whose views still heavily influence much contemporary moral philosophy, is Immanuel Kant. Kant’s theory, in contrast to the ancient Greeks, accentuates and accords a central place to the roles of conscience and critical examination – including self-examination – in moral agency. Kant holds that we are obliged to critically assess the moral status of our proposed actions and the maxims they express through his famous categorical imperative. Seen from this perspective, Kant’s theory, accommodating as it is to the general concept of critical moral assessment, appears to be fertile ground for consideration of moral reflectiveness. Since Kant takes critical moral examination to be central in moral agency, perhaps he leaves room too for taking moral reflectiveness seriously as a virtue. As we shall see, Kant comes closer than either Socrates or Aristotle to according moral reflectiveness its full value. However, before moral reflectiveness comes into consideration, there is an obstacle to overcome: the traditional view of Kant, especially among those sympathetic to the revived virtue tradition, is that he does not accord any virtue irreducible moral value. We cannot meaningfully question whether moral reflectiveness is taken seriously as a virtue by Kant until we have decided whether his theory can take virtues seriously at all. Thus, before embarking on any examination of Kant’s views on moral reflectiveness, I will first consider whether Kant accords virtue a serious place, and, if so, what place it takes in his theory. It is to the first of these questions I now turn.

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Kant’s ethics: Virtue? It is the traditional view of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy that the picture of moral agency he presents is anathema to serious consideration of the virtues. Kant is supposed to be, as Robert Louden aptly puts it, ‘deontology personified’ (1986, 473). By reputation, Kant is exclusively preoccupied with moral rules and principles of right action and is held responsible in no small part for the modern state of moral philosophy, the aretaic paucity of which virtue theorists decry. Recently, however, this picture of Kant’s moral philosophy has begun to be challenged. A radically different picture of moral agency is emerging in Kantian scholarship – represented by Kantian moral philosophers including Onora O’Neill (1989), Allen Wood (1999, 2002), Barbara Herman (1993), Marcia Baron (1995) and Nancy Sherman (1997) – which is much more conducive to serious reflection on the moral importance of agency over and above rules of action, and more conducive to a place for aretaic considerations in Kantian ethics. There is direct textual evidence, particularly in Kant’s own Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals, which appears to support such a reorientation of interest in his practical morality. In this section, I will briefly explore some of the best evidence for an aretaically refocused reading of Kant, both directly from his own writings in the Groundwork and from an argument concerning Kantian maxims by Onora O’Neill. The Groundwork: Good will and moral worth At the beginning of Section I of perhaps his best-known work in moral philosophy, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant makes a striking statement about the value of one particular quality of moral agency, a good will. A good will is the only thing, Kant asserts, that is valuable no matter what the circumstances in which it is manifested. Its worth, far from being challenged by the value of other much-vaunted and generally desirable features of a good life, both inner and outer, far outshines the worth these other features might have: It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will. Understanding, wit, judgment and the like, whatever such talents of mind may be called, or courage, resolution, and perseverance in one’s plans, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable for many purposes, but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the will which is to make use of these

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gifts of nature, and whose distinctive constitution is therefore called character, is not good. It is the same with gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health and that complete well-being and satisfaction with one’s condition called happiness, produce boldness and thereby often arrogance as well unless a good will is present which corrects the influence of these on the mind. (G 393) A good will is the foundational moral value for Kant, and even seemingly admirable background qualities and capacities which support it, such as ‘moderation in affects and passions, self-control, and calm reflection’, are in fact inherently worthless without a good will (G 393–4). A good will is also clearly a feature of the motivational structure of agency for Kant: it is an inner moral state. As Louden points out, ‘what is unqualifiedly good, according to Kant, is not an end-state such as pleasure or the performance of certain atomic acts in conformity to rules, but a state of character’ (1986, 477). Kant is at pains to reiterate and confirm the worth he attaches to this state of character: A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition, that is, it is good in itself ... Even if, by a special disfavour of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a stepmotherly nature, this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose ... then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself. (G 394) Further, it appears in these opening passages as if Kant understands the good will to be the source of value for other valuable things. Not only is a good will the only thing ‘that has its full worth in itself’, but otherwise desirable talents, gifts, external goods and even happiness itself, remain dependent on a good will to be considered at all valuable or worthwhile. Christine Korsgaard argues that the whole thrust for Kant in the opening passages of the Groundwork is that ‘the good will is the source of value, and without it, nothing would have any real worth’ (1996, 239). Kant is especially concerned throughout his moral philosophy to divorce what has foundational or primary value from the value of ‘objects of inclination’ – the things we happen to want or desire as human beings independent of a good will but which have no real value except in relation to a good will (Korsgaard 1996, 240). Allen Wood argues that for Kant the good will not only does not rely on our own inclination-based attributions of value for its worth but is itself

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the ‘sole determinant of the value of all other things’: ‘From what Kant says elsewhere, there is no doubt that he believes that the good will’s goodness stands in this conditioning relation to the goodness of other goods’ (1999, 25). This is brought out by Lawrence Pasternak (2002, 119), who argues that for Kant a good will is both conferrer of moral value and the only bearer of intrinsic value. If this is so, then the concept of a good will lies well and truly at the heart of Kant’s view of moral worth. Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (2002, 50–2) is a dissenting voice on the good will’s status as lone intrinsic value-bearer. Hill argues that ‘good without qualification’ means for Kant the weaker position that other things can and do have irreducible value but that ‘when one must choose between a good will and any other good, the latter must be abandoned’ (2002, 52). Hill’s argument is that a good will ‘conditions’ other goods for Kant not in the sense that it is the source of their value but more minimally that they are or must be ‘compatible’ with a good will (2002, 52). However, Hill does not deny what seems to be beyond doubt, that Kant means to hold that a good will has intrinsic value and is the sole source of the moral worth of anything else, even if there might be other sources of other kinds of value. Indeed, when we consider the direction of the conditioning relationship of moral worth between a good will and all other things, it is consistent with Kant’s claims that actions too derive any moral worth they may have from a good will. If a good will is a (morally admirable) state of character – Robert Audi calls it ‘roughly the master virtue’ (1995, 451) – and the moral worth of actions (and of all other morally worthy things) exclusively derives from it, then it seems as if Kant might be according virtue not just intrinsic worth but primary moral value. On this basis, Kant appears to take one virtue, possession of a good will, very seriously indeed. Kant’s first declaration in the Groundwork about the foundations of morality constitutes an extended reference to the unrivalled value – intrinsic or ‘unconditioned’, unlimited and foundational – of a feature not of dutiful actions or moral principles but of inner moral motivation. Kant’s assertion of the unconditioned and overriding value of a good will furnishes one good reason for a re-evaluation of the place aretaic concepts have in his ethics. His opening claims about the good will in the Groundwork thus cast doubt on the picture of Kant as the arch deontologist he is traditionally supposed to be. There are also further preliminary grounds to be found in Kant’s ethics for an aretaically sympathetic reading. For an exploration of these, I turn to Onora O’Neill (1989).

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Maxims and virtues A second basis for aretaic interest in Kant’s ethics is provided by Onora O’Neill in her article ‘Kant after Virtue’ (1989). O’Neill concludes, on analysing Kant’s concept of a maxim, that what he offers is ‘primarily an ethic of virtue rather than an ethic of rules’ (1989, 154), although she retreats from this strong conclusion in a postscript (1989, 161–2). What O’Neill has to say in her article about Kantian maxims not only broadens the basis for aretaic exploration of Kant’s ethics but also helps pave the way for my own more specific interest in Kant – whether and how he recognises and values moral reflectiveness. With the overarching aim of answering these questions, I will in the remainder of this section discuss O’Neill’s argument concerning Kant’s maxims. O’Neill’s article responds to Alasdair MacIntyre, who in his wellknown treatise After Virtue decisively rejects Kantian ethics as a provider of any satisfactory account of practical reasoning for what he sees as our morally fractured, postmodern social and cultural predicament. O’Neill’s response is that MacIntyre badly misconstrues Kant’s account of practical reasoning and thus fails to notice that Kant has much to offer MacIntyre’s own project of ‘refurbishing Aristotelian ethics’ for our times (1989, 148). O’Neill’s central argument constitutes a defence of Kant against ‘venerable criticisms’ dating back all the way to Hegel, rather than an attack on MacIntyre’s own interpretation of Kant in particular. The crux of her case is that the tradition of interpretation which generates these kinds of criticism focuses too heavily on Kant’s illustrations of his ethical theory to the detriment of a superior reading which ‘is based more on Kant’s account of the structure and capacities of his theory’ (1989, 148). I will not dwell on the detail of the four criticisms of Kant O’Neill outlines and attributes to MacIntyre. They include the charge that Kant ‘has tried to write an ethic of rules rather than an ethic of virtues’; that Kant is guilty of rigorism, allegedly contending ‘that there is a unique set of moral rules for all men and all time’; contrastingly, that Kant is a formalist, his theory lacking ‘substantive moral implications’ and finally, that Kant’s ethics represents ‘a misguided attempt to base ethics on an impoverished conception of human reason’ (O’Neill 1989, 148–9). O’Neill’s response to these criticisms revolves around her interpretation of Kant’s central concept of practical reasoning – a maxim. Early in the Groundwork, Kant defines a maxim as ‘the subjective principle of volition’ (G 401n) which O’Neill argues does not mean a specific conscious decision or intention to act but ‘the underlying principle by which the

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agent orchestrates numerous more specific intentions’ (1989, 151). One reason maxims are not intentions is that specific intentions to act are likely to be ‘transparent to consciousness’ in normal circumstances, and this fact jars with much of what Kant asserts about maxims: But Kant insists that agents are not always aware of, nor ever infallible about, what their maxims are ... The human heart is opaque and self-knowledge is not reliable. We cannot even know whether there has ever been a truly moral act. We cannot even be sure about our own maxims. And the source of the obscurity is ... our uncertainty about the maxims that lie behind our own and others’ acts. (O’Neill 1989, 151) These facts about human moral agency – opacity, introspective unreliability, failures of self-knowledge – will be important later, when I consider the role of moral reflectiveness in Kant, and I will have much more to say about Kant’s view of them there. The main point for the moment is that Kant’s concept of a maxim, according to O’Neill, is one of underlying motivation, rather than the traditional interpretation as a specific conscious intention to act. Being underlying principles rather than more superficial intentions as they are traditionally construed, O’Neill argues that it is also clear why Kant thought that it was ‘difficult to tell on what maxim a given act is performed’ (1989, 152). An outward act can obviously be ‘ancillary to more than one underlying maxim’ (1989, 152). Since maxims are underlying principles which make sense of specific intentions in this psychologically deep way for Kant, it is ‘misleading to think of them as adoptions of moral rules, in the sense of rules that prescribe or proscribe certain actions’ (O’Neill 1989, 152). Rather, O’Neill argues that maxims for Kant are much more a part of an agent’s long-term moral motivational structure, supplemented by specific intentions, than concerned with the specific rightness and wrongness of actions: ... maxims can have little to do with the rightness or wrongness of acts of specific types, and much more to do with the underlying moral quality of a life, or aspects of a life. In adopting maxims of a morally appropriate sort we will not be adopting a set of moral rules at all, but rather some much more general guidelines for living. To have maxims of a morally appropriate sort would then be a matter of leading a certain sort of life, or being a certain sort of person. The core of morality would lie in having appropriate underlying

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principles rather than in conforming one’s actions to specific standards. (1989, 152) O’Neill emphasises that Kant ‘distinguishes at all times’ between actions done from ‘morally appropriate maxims’ and mere ‘outward conformity’: the difference between an action’s being ‘morally worthy or virtuous’ and being merely morally right (O’Neill 1989, 153). Furthermore, and interestingly for my case, she makes the connection between morally worthy actions and Kant’s concept of maxims of virtue: maxims of virtue are for Kant ‘only those maxims to which no single more specific outward performance is indispensable’, and, moreover, ‘for such maxims the notion of outward conformity is indeterminate’ (1989, 153). Louden adds that maxims of virtue for Kant are the ‘human approximation of a good will’, specific to us given our contingent and morally limited human nature (1986, 478). It is noteworthy that O’Neill’s and Kant’s conception of a maxim of virtue closely matches some elements in my account of a virtue in Chapter 1. In that discussion, having earlier noted O’Neill’s last point about nonaction specificity with respect to the virtues, I differed from Zagzebski in defining virtues not only as deep-seated emotional responses but as moral motives in a motivational or dispositional sense. A moral motive, I argued, is formed out of, and is informed by – and is an expression of – features of agency such as a person’s directly or indirectly moral cares and concerns, his or her (reflective or unreflective, implicit or explicit) commitments, values, beliefs, desires and judgements. My own account accords well with O’Neill’s and Kant’s ‘underlying principles’ view of virtuous motivation and thus, in this respect at least, Kant’s idea of a maxim of virtue accords well with my own account of the virtues. Crucially for the position she takes on Kantian virtues, O’Neill argues that for Kant the categories of virtue are ‘more fundamental than the categories of right’, since the definition of right action for Kant is that it conforms outwardly ‘to action that is done out of a morally worthy maxim’ (1989, 153). Not only are morally worthy maxims sources of the moral worth of actions, they are also definitionally prior to right action. O’Neill contends that the traditional fixation of Kant commentators on the concept of duty and the categorical imperative has clouded this insight and has prevented the recognition of this central aspect of Kant’s ethics. The difference between Kant’s and most modern conceptions of duty, O’Neill argues, is that Kant ‘writes explicitly’, especially in the introductory section of the Groundwork, that he sees the duties we have ‘as in the first place duties

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to act out of certain maxims – that is to structure our moral lives along certain fundamental lines or to have certain virtues. Kantian moral duties cannot be exacted’ (1989, 153). The point about acting out of certain maxims seems clearly to be made when Kant states in the Groundwork that actions from duty derive their moral worth wholly from the maxim which motivates them: ‘an action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon’ (G 399). When combined with an argument that it may ultimately, despite Kant’s and others’ best efforts, be unfeasible to derive ‘any account of right and wrong action from an account of moral worth or virtue’ (1989, 153), the consequence of O’Neill’s argument about Kantian maxims ‘is that Kant offers primarily an ethic of virtue rather than an ethic of rules’ (1989, 154). This last argument is O’Neill’s response to those, like MacIntyre, who have concentrated on Kant’s illustrations and examples of dutiful action rather than the detail of his theory itself. It is also an argument with Kant himself at times: O’Neill contends that ‘one may well think that Kant was mistaken in holding that there were any rules of action required for the implementation of underlying moral maxims in all contexts’ (1989, 154), and thus that right action and rules in Kant’s theory reduce to virtue and good will, producing what is ultimately a virtue-primary (i.e. agent-based) moral theory. Another way of saying this is that, when we look closely, there are really no perfect moral duties. This point answers the force of MacIntyre’s criticism of Kantian rigorism and also offers a partial solution to his own theoretical difficulties, since in O’Neill’s reading, Kant’s theory of maxims turns out to be one specially tuned to ‘ethics for those living in defective communities, where there may be no standard ways to map inward virtue onto outward requirements’ (1989, 155). Louden concurs on this point, arguing that Kant ‘is aiming at a distinctively modern conception of virtue here, one which is a response to the fragmentation of modern life and the breakdown of communities and institutions’ (1986, 481). Taking moral virtue as the human approximation of a good will in a world of intrinsic moral uncertainty, Kant appears in O’Neill’s original argument to be taking virtue very seriously indeed. However, Louden also criticises O’Neill’s argument, and O’Neill’s later retraction appears to be an acknowledgment of this limitation: from the evidence of Kant’s own contrary examples – his four illustrations of duty in the Groundwork are exemplary of the point (G 421–3) – it emerges that moral maxims are not always ‘life plans or even underlying intentions’ at all (Louden 1986, 481). The argument that there are in

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fact no perfect duties would be an exceedingly difficult one to carry, especially when Kant’s own examples of maxims are so often ‘simply specific intentions for discrete acts’ (Louden 1986, 481). O’Neill may therefore be wrong if she intends to argue that all moral maxims are dispositional in the underlying sense, but for my purposes, Louden’s point here does not affect the force of O’Neill’s argument. I am not primarily interested in establishing whether Kant’s is an ethic of virtue, nor whether there are or are not any perfect moral duties; my interest is in the fact that, as Louden puts it, there is at least ‘one fundamental use of ‘maxims’ in Kant’s texts which unequivocally concerns underlying intentions and the sort of life one leads’ (1986, 482). This allows for intrinsic valuation in Kant of virtues. O’Neill’s article, in pursuing the line it does on Kantian maxims, provides grounds not only for a fruitful aretaic reading of Kant’s ethics, but, more specifically and modestly, grounds for holding that Kant takes virtues seriously, since for him they are intrinsically valuable. The 1989 version of O’Neill’s article is a reprint of the original, ‘Kant after Virtue’ (1984). O’Neill had in the interim rethought some of her arguments, hence her retraction in a postscript of some of the original conclusions, most notably of the conclusion that Kant offers primarily a virtue ethics. O’Neill’s postscript points the way to an important observation about Kant and considerations of virtue which should be made here. In retreating from her original claim, O’Neill observes that Kant ultimately offers ‘an ethic of principles’ rather than of virtues (1989, 162). This represents a subtle shift, but is an acknowledgement of the deeper structure of Kant’s overall moral theory. O’Neill’s retreat from the conclusion that Kant offers primarily an ethics of virtue is an important one for my central discussion in this chapter. The question whether and in what way Kant takes, or can take, virtues seriously needs to be answered. Firstly, virtues cannot be definitionally independent elements in Kant’s ethical system: there is simply no room in Kant’s theory for understanding virtues on their own account. The Kantian understanding of what a virtue is will always be bound up with and expressed through Kant’s overall system, with a good will, and moreover the categorical imperative, law and the concepts of duty and principle at its heart. A sign of this difference is that what Kant calls ‘virtues’ are themselves merely contingent outer expressions of more fundamental dispositional ‘duties of virtue’. However, this does not mean that Kant cannot or does not take virtues seriously in the sense which I outlined in Chapter 1, by according them intrinsic moral value. In Chapter 1,

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I said that a virtue has intrinsic moral worth if it is accorded moral value for its own sake. If Kant regards duties of virtue – as moral dispositions of people – as possessing moral worth regardless of what they support or tend to bring about, then he accords them intrinsic moral value. And if moral reflectiveness turns out to be one of these, then in my view Kant will have accorded it a serious place in his ethical system. The type of underlying, lifelong dispositional Kantian maxims O’Neill and Louden refer to is most clearly represented and detailed in the second part of Kant’s later work The Metaphysics of Morals: ‘Metaphysical first principles of the doctrine of virtue’ (the Doctrine of Virtue or Tugendlehre). There, Kant explains the role and import of ‘duties of virtue’ in his system of ethics, and it is there also that considerations of moral reflectiveness enter the Kantian moral picture. Since there is good evidence that genuine aretaic interest in Kant’s ethics will reward investigation, I will turn next to an inquiry into the nature of Kantian virtue as represented in the Doctrine of Virtue, with a view to uncovering what role Kant recognises for moral reflectiveness and what value he finds in it.

Kant’s concept of virtue: The Doctrine of Virtue In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant sets out his system of ethical duties. The obligatory ends of pure practical reason are for Kant ‘duties of virtue’, and, as Wood points out, ‘This should be enough to make us think twice before accepting the common allegation that Kant’s ethical theory is concerned only with willing and acting, with moral doing rather than ethical being, that it neglects the importance of virtue’ (1999, 329). The prejudice that Kant’s is an ethics of rules rather than of virtues, Wood argues, should be immediately thrown into doubt by ‘the very title’ of the Doctrine of Virtue (2002, 14). Virtues, for Kant, manifest themselves as moral fortitude against recalcitrant inclination, which he takes to be an inextirpable feature of any human moral life. Moral virtue is also the human approximation or expression of a good will, qualified by the pervasive and intractable competing impulses of human nature. As maxims, Kant’s virtues are expressive of deep and enduring commitment to either of the two ends which are also duties: one’s own perfection (natural and moral) and others’ happiness. Underpinning the end of self-perfection is what Kant calls the ‘First Command of All Duties to Oneself’, which is to know one’s own moral character. The specific moral motivation Kantian theory demands here is, I will argue later, his

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version of moral reflectiveness. In order to place moral reflectiveness in Kant’s moral schema, and to determine what value it might have, I will first outline Kant’s conception of virtue and its worth in the Doctrine of Virtue. Distinguishing virtue from right For Kant, the concept of virtue inhabits a significantly different role to the virtues in Aristotle’s theory, which I outlined in Chapter 4. According to Kant, contra Aristotle, a virtue is neither manifested in a mean relative to its possessor nor need be acquired by long habituation (MM 404–5). It is, rather, inner moral strength – ‘a moral strength of the will’ – which upholds the moral law against opposing natural inclinations (MM 405). This characterisation of virtue, more like Aristotle’s idea of continence or enkrateia than his idea of virtue proper, is derived from the structure of morality represented in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, where the ‘doctrine of virtue’ is distinguished from the ‘doctrine of right’ in ‘the system of the doctrine of duties in general’ through the distinction between those moral duties that can be given by external laws and those that cannot (MM 379). Morality and moral conduct is based on the concept of duty ‘derived from pure reason’ (MM 377), which causes the constraint of free choice ‘through the law’ (MM 379). According to Kant, ‘This constraint may be an external constraint or a self-constraint’ (MM 379). External constraint is in the purview of the doctrine of right, for it deals with moral actions which can be approved or disapproved by the application of the categorical imperative to the moral maxims of those actions. External laws can be formulated for actions in accordance with right, which can be applied without direct reference to, or knowledge of, the inner moral states of the agents who perform moral acts. Thus, in the doctrine of right, freedom is constrained by external moral laws, which apply to actions. On the other hand, the doctrine of virtue deals with inner states of moral agents, for which external constraint is impossible. Recently, Anne Margaret Baxley discusses whether Kantian virtue amounts to more than continence and argues that Kant ultimately ‘has a theory of virtue that is more appealing than commonly supposed and that bears favourable comparison with Aristotelian claims about virtue’ (2003, 584). I do not have room here to pursue the comparison between Aristotle’s and Kant’s notion of virtue, which has close links to much of the recent literature on Kant’s attitude to the emotional dimensions of moral agency and the place and value he accords emotions. Stephen Engstrom (2002, 290) briefly discusses continence in connection with

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questions of ‘motivational harmony’ in Kant and directs us to the recent writings of Herman (1993), Baron (1995, 146–226) and Korsgaard (1996) among others. The recent renewal of aretaic interest in Kant, to which I referred at the beginning of this chapter, is in fact largely driven by such questions, and the recent literature is voluminous. My own analysis, being directed at a different consideration, moral reflectiveness, does not directly engage with these recently much-discussed questions. For a rich account of the connections between Aristotle and Kant on the subject of virtue see for example Sherman (1997), whose views on Kant’s treatment of self-deception I shall discuss below. The doctrine of virtue is concerned directly with the maxims and ends of an agent’s moral actions rather than the acts themselves, that is, with the inner moral motivations of the agent, rather than the conduct that issues from them. In the preface to the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant, in dismissing eudaimonistic accounts of the motivation to moral action, gives an indication of the kind of inner, self-constraint, that his doctrine of virtue is concerned with: Pleasure that must precede one’s observance of the law in order for one to act in conformity with the law is pathological and one’s conduct follows the order of nature; but pleasure that must be preceded by the law in order to be felt is in the moral order ... If this distinction is not observed, if eudaemonism (the principle of happiness) is set up as the basic principle instead of eleutheronomy (the principle of the freedom of internal lawgiving), the result is the euthanasia (easy death) of all morals. (MM 378) It seems clear that an observer cannot know what determines an agent to act in such-and-such a manner or perform certain actions – and indeed it is possible that an agent has been motivated by pleasure rather than directly by duty in moral conduct. However, Kant’s argument here is that if one accepts the contention that the pleasure which accompanies virtuous conduct is the motivation of that conduct, one’s conduct cannot be properly morally motivated: in that circumstance, I fulfil my moral duty because I anticipate pleasure from it and not because it observes the moral law. Obviously, moral conduct is on shaky ground in this case, for if I happen not to anticipate pleasure from the observance of duty at any given time, then I have no further motivation, moral or otherwise, to indulge in virtuous conduct. Alternatively, if I happen to take pleasure in conducting myself in accordance with duty, and this is my only reason for following the moral law, then there

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is an obvious sense in which I am not really being morally virtuous at all. That I recognise and respect that it is my moral duty to conduct myself in this way, Kant argues, is the only moral reason we can accept for acting well. This example illustrates why Kant believes a doctrine of virtue is essential to an overall doctrine of morality and also indicates the role of the concept of virtue: if there was only a doctrine of right, motivations to good actions which do not themselves count as morally good (at least as far as Kant conceives of morality), would not be subject to moral appraisal. The concept of virtue is thus essential to any thoroughgoing moral theory for Kant, although the realm of virtue is not subject to external constraint or scrutiny. According to Kant, it is because human beings are subject to natural inclinations against morally good conduct that virtue has its place in moral theory. The concept of constraint of free choice to duty applies not to purely rational beings, whom Kant conceives as ‘holy’, ... but rather to human beings, rational natural beings, who are unholy enough that pleasure can induce them to break the moral law, even though they recognize its authority; and even when they do obey the law, they do it reluctantly (in the face of opposition from their inclinations), and it is in this that such constraint properly consists. – But since the human being is still a free (moral) being, when the concept of duty concerns the internal determination of his will (the incentive) the constraint that the concept of duty contains can only be self-constraint (through the representation of the law alone); for only so can the necessitation (even if it is external) be united with the freedom of his choice. (MM 379–80) It is in defeating one’s natural reluctance to follow the moral law that virtue is found, and since one is free in the sense that one has freedom of choice in setting one’s own ends, the constraint of virtue, which is a moral constraint on one’s ends, can only be a self-constraint. Thus virtue is, in a sense, the weapon with which the moral agent fights urges against morality, which arise from human nature. This combative metaphor is how Kant characterises the internal struggle between virtue and inclination: Impulses of nature, accordingly, involve obstacles within man’s mind to his fulfilment of duty and (sometimes powerful) forces opposing it, which he must judge that he is capable of resisting and conquering ... Now the capacity and considered resolve to withstand

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a strong but unjust opponent is fortitude (fortitudo) and, with respect to what opposes the moral disposition within us, virtue (virtus, fortitudo moralis). So the part of the general doctrine of duties that brings inner, rather than outer, freedom under laws is a doctrine of virtue. (MM 380) Our outer freedom, the freedom of actions, can be constrained by others through coercion, but our inner freedom cannot be restricted by others (MM 381). Therefore, our choice to set the ends of morality as our own ends is, according to Kant, a free choice of self-constraint, and it is the function of our virtues to hold us to them. The realm of ends is the realm of ethics for Kant, and since virtue is identified with the inner strength to hold to one’s moral ends against inclinations to have other, natural ends, what is called ‘ethics’ is in fact a ‘doctrine of virtue’: That ethics is a doctrine of virtue (doctrina officiorum virtutis) follows ... from the above exposition of virtue when it is connected with the kind of obligation whose distinctive feature was just pointed out. – That is to say, determination to an end is the only determination of choice the very concept of which excludes the possibility of constraint through natural means by the choice of another. Another can indeed coerce me to do something that is not my end (but only a means to another’s end), but not to make this my end; and yet I can have no end without making it an end for myself. To have an end that I have not myself made an end is self-contradictory, an act of freedom which is not yet free. – But it is no contradiction to set an end for myself that is also a duty, since I constrain myself to it and this is altogether consistent with freedom. (MM 381–2) According to the doctrine of right, it is left to the agent to determine what end to set for a particular action: the doctrine of right deals only with an action’s conformity with the categorical imperative. Agents may set ends for themselves which are purely self-interested, yet this does not matter as long as their actions are right – that is, as long as their maxims conform to the moral law. Therefore, as far as the doctrine of right is concerned, ‘What end anyone wants to set for his action is left to his free choice. The maxim of his action, however, is determined a priori, namely, that the freedom of the agent could coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law’ (MM 382). The doctrine of virtue – ethics – ‘takes the opposite way’: the end of an agent’s actions having been set ‘in accordance with moral principles,’ maxims must be

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formulated for actions that will aim at that end (MM 382). Kant argues that agents cannot begin with the ends that they happen to have prudentially set for themselves, and then set maxims which generate moral duty, since ‘that would be to adopt maxims on empirical grounds, and such grounds yield no concept of duty ... Consequently, if maxims were to be adopted on the basis of those ends (all of which are self-seeking), one could not really speak of the concept of duty’ (MM 382). Therefore, one’s own ends cannot count as virtuous ends to have. Ends to which virtue applies as moral strength of the will must also be moral duties. And once again, it is the contrary force of natural inclinations – those feelings which incline one to break the moral law, or to act in conformity with it only when it suits us – which makes the concept of virtue an essential feature of our morality. A creature that had no natural inclinations working against its moral duty would require no doctrine of virtue, since it would have no recalcitrant inclinations to master. Virtue is for imperfect human beings and, thanks to our peculiar nature, is human morality’s ‘highest stage’: For finite holy beings (who could never be tempted to violate duty) there would be no doctrine of virtue but only a doctrine of morals, since the latter is autonomy of practical reason whereas the former is also autocracy of practical reason, that is, it involves consciousness of the capacity to master one’s inclinations when they rebel against the law ... Thus human morality in its highest stage can still be nothing more than virtue, even if it be entirely pure (quite free from the influence of any incentive other than that of duty). (MM 383) However, are there any ends of ours that are also duties to have, and if so, what are they? Kant identifies two ends of virtue and two duties of virtue that correspond to them. The two ends of virtue and moral worth Kant identifies two candidates for ends that are also duties to which the concept of virtue is applicable. The first is ‘one’s own perfection’, and the second is ‘the happiness of others’ (MM 385). Perfection and happiness, Kant points out, cannot be interchanged here to render ‘one’s own happiness’ and ‘the perfection of others’ as ends that are also duties – one naturally has one’s own happiness as an end, and it thus cannot be a duty one constrains oneself to, and another’s perfection is something only that person can achieve through setting his or her own ends in accordance with duty (MM 386).

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The first of the ends Kant identifies as ends that are also duties, and hence duties of virtue – ‘one’s own perfection’ – is meant in a specific way. Kant refers to perfection ‘as a concept belonging to teleology ... taken to mean the harmony of a thing’s properties with an end’ (MM 386). This he calls ‘qualitative perfection’, and with reference to a person’s moral duty, it means ‘the perfection belonging to a human being as such’ and consists in both ‘cultivating one’s faculties (or natural predispositions), the highest of which is understanding’, and ‘the cultivation of one’s will (moral cast of mind), so as to satisfy all the requirements of duty’ (MM 386–7). The first aspect of the duty of virtue to pursue one’s own perfection is a duty to develop and make the best of what one is given by nature. To be ‘worthy of the humanity that dwells within him’, and not merely because it is in his own interest, A human being has a duty to raise himself from the crude state of his nature, from his animality (quod actum), more and more toward humanity, by which he alone is capable of setting himself ends; he has a duty to diminish his ignorance by instruction and to correct his errors. (MM 387) Moreover, as far as an agent’s moral perfection is concerned, the end that is also a duty, and is hence a duty of virtue, is making the moral law not only the criterion for judgement of his actions but also the incentive to the actions he does in conformity with duty (MM 387). Thus, the end is to act from duty, not just in accordance with it – that is, to be motivated by morality in one’s agency: This disposition is inner morally practical perfection. Since it is a feeling of the effect that the lawgiving will within the human being exercises on his capacity to act in accordance with his will, it is called moral feeling, a special sense (sensus moralis), as it were ... it is a moral perfection, by which one makes one’s object every particular end that is also a duty. (MM 387) The second end Kant identifies as also a duty, the happiness of others, is set up against the consideration of one’s own happiness as an end that is also a duty. Kant dismisses the latter, since he believes ‘it is unavoidable for human nature to wish for and seek happiness, that is, satisfaction with one’s state,’ and one’s own happiness can only be said to be a kind of duty in the sense that it is partially derivable from the duty to one’s own perfection (that is, as far as one’s happiness helps

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in performing one’s moral duties, in which case the real end ‘is not the subject’s happiness but his morality’) (MM 387–8). In promoting the happiness of others, Kant adds two caveats: the other’s end is morally permissible, and one is allowed a certain latitude if one does not believe the other’s happiness will result. Thus, one is not duty-bound to seek one’s own happiness but is duty-bound to seek the happiness of others, ... whose (permitted) end I thus make my own end as well. It is for them to decide what they count as belonging to their happiness; but it is open to me to refuse them many things that they think will make them happy but that I do not, as long as they have no right to demand them from me as what is theirs. (MM 388) In setting both one’s own perfection and the happiness of others as ends, the doctrine of virtue lacks specificity with regard to moral action. Kant points out that the doctrine of virtue cannot give laws for actions, and so tell an agent what to do, but can only control (give laws for) the maxims of an agent’s actions (MM 389). This means that the two ends that are also duties are not duties to perform, or refrain from performing, specific actions: they do not tell an agent directly what to do or not do, as the doctrine of right does. Kant characterises this distinction as a distinction between duties of ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ obligation: ... for if the law can prescribe only the maxim of actions, not actions themselves, this is a sign that it leaves a playroom (latitudo) for free choice in following (complying with) the law, that is, that the law cannot specify precisely in what way one is to act and how much one is to do by the action for an end that is also a duty. (MM 390) A wide duty is a duty for which a specific action cannot be decisively commanded, and the two duties of virtue fall into this category (whereas a narrow duty is a duty for which a specific act or omission can be decisively commanded, e.g. perhaps the duty to be truthful, which for Kant seems to be constituted by the specific command never to tell a lie). This does not mean, Kant cautions, that they allow for ‘exceptions to the maxim of actions’ as one chooses, ‘but only as permission to limit one maxim of duty by another (e.g., love of one’s neighbour in general by love of one’s parents)’ (MM 390). The wider the duty is, the more ‘imperfect’ the obligation to specific actions and hence the wider the latitude for one’s choice in action.

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Since the duties of virtue are just such ‘imperfect duties’ of ‘wide obligation’, certain conditions attach to their fulfilment. Firstly, according to Kant, fulfilment of the duties of virtue is counted as ‘merit (meritum) 5 1a’. Secondly, ‘failure to fulfil them is not in itself culpability (demeritum) 5 2a, but rather mere deficiency in moral worth 5 0, unless the subject should make it his principle not to comply with such duties’ (MM 390). Thus, the duties of virtue – one’s own perfection and the happiness of others – are meritorious but the failure to comply with them is not necessarily vicious. One possesses virtue and deserves merit, owing to ‘the strength of resolution’ that accompanies the fulfilment of the duties of virtue. The second case, of moral worthlessness, is not counted as vice but ‘as rather mere want of virtue, lack of moral strength (defectus moralis)’ (MM 390). It is a transgression of moral duty, but since there is only an ‘imperfect’ or ‘wide’ duty, it is not a vicious one. It is only when ‘an intentional transgression has become a principle that it is properly called a vice (vitium)’ (MM 390). Kant also emphasises that virtue is to be valued by its possessor for itself, manifested through pleasurable selfawareness: ‘through consciousness of this pleasure, virtue is its own reward’ (MM 391). Moreover, human virtue, the approximation of a good will in practice, appears to have intrinsic moral worth for Kant in the practical moral sphere: The highest, unconditional end of pure practical reason (which is still a duty) consists in this: that virtue be its own end and, despite the benefits it confers on human beings, also its own reward. Virtue so shines as an ideal that it seems, by human standards, to eclipse holiness itself ... in comparison with human ends, all of which have their obstacles to be contended with, it is true that the worth of virtue itself, as its own end, far exceeds the worth of any usefulness and any empirical ends and advantages that virtue may still bring in its wake. (MM 396–7) This claim is reiterated later (MM 406): ‘And while virtue ... can be said here and there to be meritorious and to deserve to be rewarded, yet in itself, since it is its own end it must also be regarded as its own reward.’

The ‘First Command of All Duties to Oneself’ We have seen the nature and place of the two ends or duties of virtue – one’s own perfection and the happiness of others – in Kant’s ethics. The most important element of the Doctrine of Virtue for my purposes

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(it is also such for Kant) is the duty of moral self-perfection: ‘A human being has a duty to carry the cultivation of his will up to the purest virtuous disposition ... This disposition is inner morally practical perfection ... it is a moral perfection, by which one makes one’s object every particular end that is also a duty’ (MM 387). Without this motivational core, the other elements of Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue would fall. Underpinning this duty of virtue, however, is something Kant calls the ‘First Command of All Duties to Oneself’. I will argue in this section that what Kant refers to, when understood clearly and when his own confusion about the matter is resolved, constitutes a Kantian version of moral reflectiveness. The command to know thyself and self-deception As Louden points out, because ‘what is basic to all duties – legal, moral or otherwise – is the concept of binding oneself,’ this element, of binding oneself in the fundamental commitment to ‘inner morally practical perfection’, being a condition of genuinely binding oneself to any other moral duties, ‘is the linchpin of Kant’s entire system’ (Louden 1986, 483). If we do not choose to bind ourselves to morality by making the commitment to our own moral virtue in the first place, then other moral duties cannot get a practical foothold; as Kant puts it: ‘For suppose there were no such duties: then there would be no duties whatsoever, and so no external duties either. – For I can recognize that I am under obligation to others only insofar as I at the same time put myself under obligation’ (MM 417). Thus, as Louden argues, the duty to have as one’s end one’s own moral virtue is practically primary: Once Kant’s argument concerning morally necessary ends is considered, it becomes strikingly evident that virtue does indeed have a pre-eminent position in his ethics. Our overriding practical vocation is to realize a state of virtue in our own character as the basis of all action. Without fulfilling such a duty to ourselves, other duties are not possible. Virtue is not only the heart of the ethical for Kant; it also has priority in morals considered as a whole (that is, in Recht [the Doctrine of Right] and Tugend taken together). For if there were no ethical duties to oneself, there would be no duties whatsoever. (1986, 484) However, the duty to oneself of moral self-perfection for Kant is not only impossible to fully achieve in a human life – due to recalcitrant inclinations it is ‘always in progress and yet always starts from

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the beginning’ (MM 409) – but also itself rests upon one fundamental moral demand. There is, according to Kant in the Doctrine of Virtue, such a thing as the ‘First Command of All Duties to Oneself’. And what it commands is moral self-cognisance: This command is ‘know (scrutinize, fathom) yourself,’ not in terms of your natural perfection (your fitness or unfitness for all sorts of discretionary or even commanded ends) but rather in terms of your moral perfection in relation to your duty. That is, know your heart – whether it is good or evil, whether the source of your actions is pure or impure, and what can be imputed to you as belonging originally to the substance of a human being or as derived acquired or developed and belonging to your moral condition. (MM 441) According to Nancy Sherman, the state to which Kant refers here is ‘something of a ‘meta-virtue’ underlying all virtues’ (1997, 46). Sherman’s description is apt. Although Sherman does not dwell on what a meta-virtue is, it seems clearly to be the kind of state which plays a role in other virtues but does not achieve the status of full virtue itself. A meta-virtue may be defined – consistently with Sherman on Kant – as a supporting moral state, whose role is to facilitate or assist in the acquisition and expression of virtues proper. As such, it would be difficult to argue that a meta-virtue could be the kind of state that Kant takes seriously, even in the attenuated sense. Its value is not intrinsic. A meta-virtue is only morally worthwhile insofar as it is useful in facilitating other moral states: it is not valued for its own sake. However, referring to the same ‘meta-virtuous’ command, Sherman calls Kant’s command a ‘duty’ and argues that ‘the duty is a ubiquitous one’ (1997, 232). If Kant does deem it a duty of virtue, then it may well be that it has intrinsic worth; I will take up this point below. The First Command, be it meta-virtue or duty of virtue proper, requires for Kant ‘an ongoing reflective attitude about one’s moral habits. This will involve an assessment of one’s habits of moral perception and capacities for recognising what is morally relevant’ (Sherman 1997, 232). In other words, it seems that we may have here, in Kant’s command to know oneself morally, the two things we are looking for: the command to be genuinely committed to moral lucidity is a Kantian command to be morally reflective, and it may be intrinsically valuable. Both of these conclusions, however, remain to be argued for and established. The former I argue in this section; the latter I consider in the next.

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Before we see why Kant ought to be referring to moral reflectiveness, we need to find out why the command to scrutinise oneself morally is so fundamental for Kant. This reason is furnished by human nature. Human life, as we have already noted, is pervaded for Kant by recalcitrant natural inclinations, which often set themselves against one’s moral duties. Virtue is characterised as moral strength of the will due to the potency of such all-too-human counter-motives. However, there is another, more insidious feature of human nature and practical conduct which Kant fears is apt to tear down virtue in a moral life. The command to scrutinise and fathom one’s own moral character is fundamental for Kant, because of the ever-present danger not just of opposing natural inclination but of bad-willed self-deception. We get an intimation of this danger in Kant’s account, in the Doctrine of Virtue, of the duty of virtue which opposes lying to others: he conceives of it, as Nelson Potter points out, as a duty ‘in the first instance’ to oneself rather than directly to others (2002, 376; MM 429–31). This is because Kant sees as the greater danger in lying to others, ‘the deeper and more serious action of self-deception’ (Potter 2002, 376). This is understandable in a system of practical ethics such as Kant’s in which the motivation to perfect oneself morally is the fundamental element. As Potter observes, ‘self-deception poisons the well of inner awareness (for example, awareness of our own motives of action) and thus undermines in a fundamental way our ability to be accurately aware of our inner self, its motives, and actions’ (2002, 376). Sherman also emphasises the danger Kant perceives in self-deception and makes the same connection between it and the requirement for such a meta-virtue. In the self-reflective gaze, Sherman argues, ‘bias and prejudice, as well as tendencies toward rationalization and self-deception, need to be routed out’ (1997, 232), if the Kantian moral agent is to see her own moral character accurately: ‘Principal here will be keeping vigil over one’s own attempts at self-deception. Significantly, Kant takes radical evil to be not so much a matter of following the temptations of contrary inclination, but of veiling such inclination in rationalizations that escape reason’s own survey’ (1997, 46). Sherman argues that for Kant there is no larger moral danger in human agency, or more important element, than self-deception and its removal: ‘Indeed morality, on the Kantian view, is largely a ferreting-out of one’s attempts at self-deception. The true enemy of morality is not inclination that runs contrary to duty, but reason’s attempt to veil such desires from its own view’ (1997, 232). It is arguable whether the attempt to self-deceive is actually reason’s own here, as Sherman has it, or either inclination or

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the will working through reason at a yet deeper level of agency. In fact, it seems incoherent to argue that reason itself could be the ultimate source of self-deception for Kant, given his broader views on its nature and basic structuring role for morality. Sherman should perhaps have said that, for Kant, the true enemy of morality is ultimately an unacknowledged bad or evil will running contrary to duty, using reason – self-deceptively – as its baffle. Sherman (1997, 46) directs our attention to the discussion in which Kant makes this last point, not in the Doctrine of Virtue itself, but in the argument of Book Two, ‘Concerning the Conflict of the Good with the Evil Principle for Sovereignty over Man,’ of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. There, Kant discusses briefly the Stoic position that virtue is to be understood as courage or valour in a never-ending battle against ‘undisciplined natural inclinations’ (R 57/50). Kant only partially agrees with the Stoic position; he contends against the Stoics that the enemy is much more devious and dangerous than an obvious, conscious inclination against morality: Yet those valiant men [the Stoics] mistook their enemy: for he is not to be sought in the merely undisciplined natural inclinations which present themselves so openly to everyone’s consciousness; rather is he, as it were, an invisible foe who screens himself behind reason and is therefore all the more dangerous. They called out wisdom against folly, which allows itself to be deceived by the inclinations through mere carelessness, instead of summoning her against wickedness (the wickedness of the human heart), which secretly undermines the disposition with soul-destroying principles. (R 57/50) The ‘wickedness of the human heart,’ wreathed in self-deception, is the foe that Kantian virtue principally sets itself against. One can see straight away how, if Kant’s fears are justified, the pervasive possibility of a self-deceiving bad will threatens to destabilise the whole Kantian ethical apparatus. We cannot blithely try to perfect our moral characters if we are likely to be self-deceptively concealing from ourselves our true, morally bad, motivations every step of the way. In the light of morally bad self-deceptive motivation, the duty to perfect one’s moral character suddenly becomes difficult and daunting. Kant is all too keenly aware of the morally self-undermining psychological capacities of human beings, and his response to the problem is the ‘First Command of All Duties to Oneself’.

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Moral reflectiveness Kant’s response to the pervasive danger of moral self-deception is the ‘First Command of All Duties to Oneself, the command to ‘‘know (scrutinize, fathom) yourself’’... in terms of your moral perfection in relation to your duty’ (MM 441). Although the matter is not entirely clear, Kant appears at first to think that one fathoms oneself morally through a form of direct moral introspection, a ‘descent into the hell of self-cognition’: ‘Moral cognition of oneself, which seeks to penetrate into the depths (the abyss) of one’s heart which are quite difficult to fathom, is the beginning of all human wisdom’ (MM 441). Kant believes two subsequent duties to oneself follow this command of self-scrutiny, the duty to be impartial in moral self-appraisal and ‘sincerity in acknowledging to oneself one’s inner moral worth or lack of worth’ (MM 441–2). However, Kant, if he is taken to be advising moral self-knowledge through direct introspection, appears to be confused about how one can come to know one’s moral character beneath the shadow of moral self-deception. The two duties Kant claims follow from the ‘First Command’ seem rather to be candidates or elements of the practical embodiment of the command, whereas direct moral introspection has little or no legitimate role. To see this, consider briefly Kant’s view of conscience. It might be argued that what Kant means to recommend is heeding or paying close attention to the directions of one’s own conscience. Conscience, for Kant, is one of the presuppositions of moral agency (MM 400–1), and he characterises it as ‘consciousness of an internal court in the human being (‘before which his thoughts accuse or excuse one another’)’ (MM 438). Conscience, Hill argues, is not a mere instinctive reaction for Kant but depends in its judgements on our ‘capacity for reasoned moral judgment’ (2002, 302). Conscience is, for Kant, ‘an involuntary response to the recognition that what we have done, are doing, or are about to do is contrary to the moral judgments that we have made’ (Hill 2002, 303). Furthermore, Kant holds that ‘an erring conscience is an absurdity’ (MM 401), and there is a wide duty ‘to cultivate one’s conscience, to sharpen one’s attentiveness to the voice of the inner judge and to use every means to obtain a hearing for it (hence the duty is only indirect)’ (MM 401). Thus, we can expect that the kind of self-scrutiny Kant commands at MM 441 is more or less a demand to be attentive to the judgements of one’s conscience, while seeking to ‘penetrate into the depths (the abyss) of one’s heart’ (MM 441). Since according to Kant it is absurd to think one’s conscience can be mistaken, it seems impossible that a person who is attentive

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to it – conscientious – while morally introspecting could go wrong. According to this view of Kant’s theory, conscientiousness - listening attentively to one’s conscience – is the true path to fathoming one’s own moral character. Indeed, Rudolf A. Makkreel (2002) argues that conscience is the key to assessing one’s own virtue or moral worth for Kant, and Hill believes that to be conscientious is more or less precisely the content of the ‘First Command’ at MM 441 (2002, 303). Yet it is difficult to see how Kant could coherently hold to this conclusion. Kant repeatedly insists that we cannot know either the moral depths of our own hearts or, as Makkreel reminds us (and which ultimately comes to the same thing), the true moral worth of our actions (2002, 205). On this point, O’Neill argues that ‘Kant insists that we do not know clearly what our maxims are on a given occasion,’ and furthermore that ‘Kant’s insistence on the opacity of the human mind and the limits of self-knowledge are extraordinarily strong,’ especially in his later works (1996, 89). O’Neill (1996, 90–1) argues that our own deepest dispositional maxims are ‘systematically elusive’ to introspection for Kant, and this seems clearly to be the case in a way that argues directly against conscientiousness as the sole criterion of fulfilling Kant’s ‘First Command’ at MM 441. Discussing again the duty of virtue to moral selfperfection in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant goes further than his original comment at MM 441 that the human heart is ‘quite difficult to fathom,’ this time asserting: The depths of the human heart are unfathomable. Who knows himself well enough to say, when he feels the incentive to fulfil his duty, whether it proceeds entirely from the representation of the law or whether there are not many other sensible impulses contributing to it that look to one’s advantage (or to avoiding what is detrimental) and that, in other circumstances, could just as well serve vice? (MM 447) Makkreel concedes that Kant’s position throughout his works on practical philosophy is unmistakably that ‘objective determinate knowledge of our inner disposition is not possible for us’ (2002, 215) and that ‘it seems that conscience only provides a felt truthfulness’ (2002, 218). Moreover, the infallibility of conscience (in its own right a questionable doctrine) does not entail accuracy in conscientious moral judgements about ourselves and our own conduct. Even if we grant Kant’s view that a person’s conscience itself is unerring, self-deception under the influence of what Kant calls ‘the evil principle in a human being’ (MM 440) is capable of pervasively skewing subjective responses

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to conscientious judgement. One would expect this propensity to be especially acute in the attempt to use conscience in broad and indirect contexts (i.e. not directed at specific immediate or very recent actions) such as the evaluation of one’s overall moral character and history of one’s moral experiences. Conscience is a ‘felt truthfulness’ perhaps, but what one takes it to be felt or truthful about is quite another matter. A clear-eyed Kantian view would endorse this qualification. Indeed, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, as O’Neill (1996, 92) points out, it is the very kind of underlying maxim such as maxims of virtue to which Kant is least optimistic about our access. According to Kant, a human agent, who is morally fallible and must keep recalcitrant inclinations in abeyance, is beholden to try to improve morally throughout life and moreover is expected to ‘know his own character, at least to a certain extent’: Thus he will have to examine his disposition throughout his whole life. Now he can form no certain and definite concept of his real disposition through an immediate consciousness thereof and can only abstract it from the way of life he has actually followed. (R 71) A Kantian conscience certainly has a role to play in fathoming the depths of one’s moral heart or ‘real disposition’, as a kind of moral signpost or trigger for investigation – and, sometimes, its judgements will make it through self-deception unscathed. However, moral selfknowledge, especially if it is to be knowledge of the goodness of one’s deep and long-term dispositional maxims or ends, requires a disposition more wide-ranging – and moreover past-directed – than mere conscientiousness. Conscientiousness implies a limited range, and, much like Aristotle’s phronesis, seems to be primarily forward-looking – or concerned with the very recent past – and is closely linked with deliberation about possible future actions. It seems to me that moral reflectiveness, as I described it in Chapter 2, is the disposition Kant requires here. Scrutinising or fathoming oneself morally to find ‘your moral perfection in relation to your duty’ (MM 441) is a matter of trying to determine the extent to which one’s moral conduct has expressed and expresses maxims of virtue. Discussing moral reflection in Chapter 2, I emphasised that it is primarily agency rather than status directed: moral reflection primarily concerns itself with experience and moral response, and not moral status. Here too, Kant privileges moral agency over status: although the command is to know oneself morally, that knowledge is to be found in one’s agency in relation to moral duty. It is

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not moral self-image that explicitly concerns Kant, but moral duty. In fact, an overriding concern with one’s moral status would be disastrous in the attempt to determine one’s true moral status for Kant, given his repeated warnings about the untrustworthiness of our heart. There is no more fertile ground for self-deception. Although the moral truth for which we are commanded to search is not directly manifested in outer, observable action – the same action can usually manifest various standards of moral maxim – the best clues are to be found in the history of one’s agency rather than in the depth or immediacy of one’s introspected moral feelings. Over a lifetime, patterns of moral motivation tend to express themselves pervasively but subtly in many areas of our conduct and, under a genuinely sceptical reflective gaze, tend to emerge more readily than they would under direct introspection. Catching oneself out in an underlying moral sense is a matter of laying bare one’s moral experiences and not just one’s heart. Critical examination of our moral experiences is crucial, and the disposition to scrutinise them persistently is indispensable. Also, as far as self-deception is concerned, the points of view and experiences of others are crucial resources in catching oneself out. Moral reflection, I pointed out in Chapter 2, is social both in the sense that other people and their own experiences are often crucial resources for our own critical inquiry and in the sense that the moral experiences and responses of a group are often shared. These are both examples of the kinds of broad critical view moral reflectiveness brings to moral agency. In Chapter 2, I emphasised both the agency (as opposed to status) directedness and the broader social dimensions of moral reflection. Kant does not appear to recognise these possibilities at MM 441, and hence the received version of his command to moral self-scrutiny appears somewhat morally autistic or solipsistic and is likely to lead to failure through ‘the wickedness of the human heart’. Moral reflectiveness, though not a guarantee of success, provides reliable resources to short circuit the self-deceptive tendencies of direct moral introspection. As a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, moral reflectiveness sets itself squarely against self-deception. Moral reflectiveness is what Kant does not quite recognise as the answer to the command to ‘ “know (scrutinize, fathom) yourself”... in terms of your moral perfection in relation to your duty’ (MM 441). Instead, he sees elements of moral reflectiveness as duties which flow from the command (MM 441–2). Kant is led astray by a preoccupation with the wrong kind of ethical inwardness: direct introspective reflection rather than morally reflective examination.

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Kant requires a bulwark against the self-deception that works to undermine the duty of virtue to self-perfection in our practical human agency. Although the command might appear to refer to direct introspection or careful listening to one’s conscience (conscientiousness) – and although Kant himself is unclear – what he refers to is moral reflectiveness. Kant makes room for moral reflectiveness in a certain sort of way and obliquely recognises its practical significance. However, I have not established whether Kant takes moral reflectiveness seriously by according it intrinsic moral value. To this central question I now turn.

The worth of moral reflectiveness for Kant At the foundation of Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue lies the command to scrutinise one’s own moral character. In my understanding, this ‘First Command’ – if rendered coherently and fully articulated – is a Kantian command to be morally reflective. It would seem, therefore, that moral reflectiveness has a place at the foundation – indeed at the very heart – of Kantian ethics. Moral reflectiveness underpins the effort to fulfil the duty of moral self-perfection, our most fundamental duty of virtue. It seems to be a highly prized and morally worthy Kantian motivation. In this section, I will try to discover what its moral worth might plausibly be for Kant. Even if moral reflectiveness plays the crucial role in Kantian moral agency I have argued it does, this point does not establish that Kant takes it seriously by according it intrinsic value. Fundamental practical value need not entail intrinsic moral value in an ethical theory. This point is borne out quite clearly in Kant’s own theory. Moral reflectiveness is centrally important for Kant, as I have indicated, because of the difficulty moral agents have in accessing their own moral motivations and overall character. For Kant, our deepest moral motivations are overwhelmingly self-referentially opaque. Self-deception is an ever-present and insidious threat to virtuous moral motivation. These features of human agency threaten to undermine and even destroy moral practice at its foundation, in the moral motivations of agents. However, these are also mere empirical matters for Kant: practical facts about our ‘impure’ human nature, which by themselves have no bearing on Kantian attributions of moral worth. As Louden points out, ‘In Kant’s ethics ... a pure (that is, non-empirical) motive must be the determining ground of the will for an action to have moral worth’ (2000, 10). This distinction applies not just to actions but also to moral motivations themselves. As

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far as moral reflectiveness is concerned, it cannot have moral value for its own sake, just because it is an admirable moral motivation, but only derives moral worth from its practical usefulness in the service of what does: the expression of a good will. If the determining ground of the will is, for example, purely a genuine commitment to moral lucidity, then the motivation by itself cannot be other than worthless, morally speaking, for Kant. This is because by itself a commitment to moral lucidity, no matter how genuinely it is held, does not qualify for Kant as a practical expression of a good will. Moral reflectiveness can only have moral worth instrumentally – never intrinsically – for Kant. To explain this bleak Kantian conclusion, it is useful to reiterate the nature of the relationship between human moral virtue and a good will in Kant’s theory. A good will is the only thing that possesses unlimited or unconditional value in the Kantian moral universe. On the other hand, the moral virtues are for Kant the human approximation of a good will, shaped by the peculiarities of our human nature and circumstances. Human moral virtues acquire their moral value from their having this very particular relationship to a good will. If human nature or circumstances were different in relation to the contingent, empirical expression of a good will, then Kantian moral virtues would manifest themselves differently. Our practical or empirical moral psychology – the human background of contrary inclinations, potential bad will and selfdeception against which the ‘moral strength’ of virtue is set – is for Kant in principle at least variable. Our human predispositions and flaws are empirical, ‘impure’ facts without true – non-empirical or ‘pure’ – moral significance. We are not, empirically speaking, the only way rational beings could have turned out. However, the fixed reference point and source of moral worth for all rational beings – however we or they have or might have turned out – is a good will. What hinders the expression or manifestation of a good will in human experience is contingent on the empirical details of human nature, and so the practical shape moral virtue takes – what actually counts as moral strength or fortitude against these hindrances – is also contingent on human nature, although the source of the moral worth virtue contains remains constant: the human approximation of a good will. The other side of human nature – that which supports a good will but is not of it – is also empirical. What is important to note here is that the empirical features of human nature which support a good will – and the exercise of our two duties of virtue – do so only contingently for Kant. They are ‘impure’ and cannot have any moral worth in and of themselves: it is only in their absence that we can be sure of the moral worth of an

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action or person. This point is repeated many times by Kant, perhaps most notoriously in his examples from the Groundwork (G 398), of the sympathetic versus the desolate philanthropist. There, Kant contrasts the ‘pure’ morally worthy motive of duty, which ‘contains that of a good will though under certain subjective limitations and hindrances’ (G 397), with ‘impure’ morally worthless mere inclination. Kant accords a sympathetic philanthropist, who gives out of ‘inner satisfaction in spreading joy’ ‘no true moral worth’ but accords an inconsolable man who is ‘no longer incited to it by any inclination’, but who nevertheless gives ‘simply from duty’ ‘genuine moral worth’ (G 398). Motivation due to a good will – ‘simply from duty’ – is the exclusive source of any moral worth in an action. Since Kant sees moral reflectiveness as a ‘command’ rather than a duty proper, it is and can only be – as Sherman has already noted – a meta-virtue for Kant. What this all means for the status of moral reflectiveness as the ‘First Command of All Duties to Oneself’ is well described by the Kantian attitude to moral lucidity. A genuine commitment to moral lucidity is how I originally characterised moral reflectiveness in Chapter 2. The end or goal of the morally reflective commitment is moral lucidity: lucidity about one’s past moral experience. Now, according to Kant’s theory, lucidity about one’s past moral experience has no intrinsic moral value. Its only moral worth is derived from its role as an instrument in doing our duty as such. Roughly, for Kant the only moral worth that there is in achieving lucidity about one’s past moral experience is that one will do one’s duty better now and in the future. Having clarity about and coming to grips with one’s past moral experiences and agency has no intrinsic merit for Kant, although it could plausibly have other kinds of (morally overridable) value for us. But there is no real point in the achievement of moral lucidity just by itself, according to Kant’s theory. In fact, if its achievement were to lead somehow to a reduction in one’s good will, the overriding commitment to doing one’s duty, or to interfere with fulfilling future moral duties, then moral lucidity could well be morally bad. Similarly, a genuine commitment to moral lucidity can be morally valuable for Kant, but only if it supports doing one’s moral duty now and in the future. In either case, it is only valuable because of its relation to something else of moral value and then only within the restrictive terms of Kant’s overall theory. And like its end, if a genuine commitment to moral lucidity interferes with or is opposed to a good will or right action, it is morally bad. Any moral worth a genuine commitment to moral lucidity has is ultimately entirely derived from the prior moral value of something manifestly quite different for

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Kant: one’s present and future good will. It is clear, therefore, that Kant does not – Kant’s theory cannot – take moral reflectiveness seriously as a virtue. Why does not Kant see moral reflectiveness as a duty rather than a command? What would follow if he did see it as a duty? Although Kant recognises in the Doctrine of Virtue the central importance of such a retrospective moral state as lucidity about our past moral experience, there is no conceptual room in his model of rational agency in which to neatly fit a distinctive commitment to pursue it. One way of explaining this supposition is to point out that Kant can – or at least assumes he can – derive the two duties of virtue, one’s own perfection and the happiness of others, directly from his model of rational agency, the categorical imperative. Being directly derivable from the categorical imperative, respect for these duties as moral motivation is by definition expressive of a good will. Actions taken out of respect for these duties are morally valuable for their own sake as expressions of a good will, regardless of what they bring about. On the other hand, Kant pointedly does not call the command to know oneself morally a duty of virtue. He cannot, it seems, derive the motivation to critically examine past moral experience directly from the categorical imperative. Therefore, since it is not derivable directly from the categorical imperative, moral reflectiveness is not morally valuable for its own sake as the expression of a good will. The moral value available to it in Kant’s theory is the value derived from what it instrumentally supports and brings about. And no matter how central and important moral reflectiveness is for human moral agency, Kant cannot find for it in his system an intrinsically valuable moral status apart from this. However, there is a deeper problem still. Even if it were the case that moral reflectiveness was granted a place in Kant’s theory as a duty of virtue, the restrictive structure of Kant’s theory itself would distort it out of recognition. Tight Kantian doctrinal limitations on the terms in which the commitment to moral lucidity could legitimately be expressed would mean, for example, that genuine openness to critical doubt – especially doubts about ex hypothesi correct Kantian judgements – too often expresses a bad will and therefore could not be conceived as a sign of excellence in moral reflection. The same kind of distortion applies to any of the full range of moral concepts under which moral reflection typically takes place, just when they happen not to fit the correct terms for Kantian moral scrutiny. Indeed, much of what I conceived in Chapter 2 to be conduct typically expressive of a genuine commitment to moral lucidity would

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be forced by doctrinal commitments already made elsewhere in the Kantian system to be ruled blameworthy instances of moral failure. Lucidity about one’s own moral history may only be Kantian lucidity, and any attempt at moral reflection in terms that are not re-expressible in Kant’s own terms is therefore at best worthless and otherwise morally wrong. Kantian theory thus sponsors a theoretically narrowed version of moral reflectiveness, regardless of the particular conditions under which it emerges and is expressed by pre-emptively fracturing the basic disposition and channelling its legitimate expression along Kantian doctrinal lines. Ultimately, Kant’s theory cannot support features of moral agency that bring into critical doubt or otherwise conflict with background assumptions of his own theory. Although Kantian virtuous agency is morally reflective in a restricted sense, it is not open to expressing the openness to critical doubt that is central to the virtue of moral reflectiveness.

6 Moral Reflectiveness and Moral Philosophy

In the preceding three chapters, I have explored specific points in the history of moral theory where Socrates (Plato), Aristotle and Immanuel Kant might have been expected to consider moral reflectiveness as a virtue. Despite its near-emergence, especially in Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue – and despite all three taking virtues seriously, each in his own distinctive way – moral reflectiveness has persistently resisted explicit unearthing in each case. Insofar as the three prominent moral theories I have examined are concerned, it would seem that the virtue of moral reflectiveness is not – or at least has not been – readily accommodated in moral theory. There are several reasons why moral reflectiveness does not fully or easily emerge in these accounts, some of which I have already canvassed. I think that moral reflectiveness is also unlikely to emerge in moral philosophy as it has traditionally been practised – indeed, as it is still paradigmatically practised. In this brief final chapter, I shall attempt to draw out some of the reasons why moral reflectiveness has escaped, and continues to escape, explicit recognition in even those moral theories that take virtues seriously.

Particularity, retrospectivity and critical doubt There are certain features of moral reflectiveness that make its recognition, and a satisfactory account of its nature and value, particularly difficult for moral theories to nail down. One of these features is that it is typically a virtue deeply submersed within the privacy of particular moral experience. Moral reflectiveness is in every case interested in, and anchored and framed by that person’s own lived moral history. Personal moral history is in every case encountered and interpreted – or fails to be encountered, 174

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is ignored, suppressed, avoided, distorted – through (to use Philip Larkin’s phrase) the ‘unique random blend’ of qualities that makes each of us who we are, and it is shaped and reshaped through the specific events of our lives and by the conditions in which we have lived (moral, social, cultural, historical and personal). This first-person particularity is both ubiquitous in human moral agency and exceedingly difficult to capture – moreover, to respect appropriately – in moral theories that paradigmatically seek to launch their accounts of moral agency not directly in light of the actual pattern human experience takes, but from an already moral– theoretically loaded point of view. This is not to say that moral theories fail to capture and make sense of significant features of moral experience or to deny that they are capable of offering excellent practical moral resources in many circumstances. Yet theoretical conceptions of moral agency tend for various reasons to be theory-saturated all the way down, and it is difficult to track back towards concrete particularity in moral agency with the kind of unvarnished attention to people’s actual lives that is likely to light upon moral reflectiveness. Although Aristotle, for example, incorporates particularistic moral sensitivity into his account of both phronesis (EN Book VI) and equity (epieikeia) (EN 1137a–1138a), this is not a path that traditionally constituted moral theories have trod with much accomplishment. A second feature of moral reflectiveness that makes it awkward for moral theories is its retrospectivity. Of course, there are many retrospective states that moral theories readily incorporate: justice requires retrospectivity, as do honesty and many other traditionally recognised virtues, and deontic conceptions of (for instance) responsible, dutiful, conscientious and obligatory agency often rely on paying close moral attention to the past, sometimes in critically reflective and self-reflective ways. Yet none of these seem to be ways in which moral theory accords a separate, standalone significance to people’s own particular moral histories. Overwhelmingly, the examination of the moral past gains significance in relation to moral qualities of the present and near future – it is significant only when it has meaning or use for some further moral value. And this is not just to say that the particular past of moral agents is not valuable or significant, or that critical examination of it is not considered important other than instrumentally – although often they are not – but that in moral theory, examining one’s own moral history in the morally reflective sense is usually considered irrelevant to the proper concerns of moral agency. For human beings as moral agents, our own particular past has moral significance in its own right, reflected in the value accorded to reaching

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a lucid understanding of this moral history and these experiences, quite apart from the assistance such understanding may afford us now or in the future. The significance of our particular moral past can be minimised and ignored in moral theory, I think, partly because it is too readily overshadowed by practical reason and deliberation – a perpetually live matter of choice for particular moral agents, demanding immediate, concentrated moral attention. Practical reason seems to be what moral agency is primarily about. As Aristotle has observed, past events cannot be deliberated about, and from this observation, we are tempted to conclude that they are not morally interesting or important either. Whether or not the overwhelming claims on moral attention of deliberation are deleterious, moral theory does have a tendency to overlook the moral past and retrospective states as bearers of moral value beyond their usefulness for other moral purposes. As a retrospective state that is interested in what has already happened, moral reflectiveness slips easily between moral theory’s temporal cracks. Thirdly, moral reflectiveness expresses a critical openness to doubt about one’s own moral history in a way that encourages genuine engagement with a broad range of moral concepts that are capable of making sense of that experience. This means that its scope is not automatically narrowed by a range of accompanying theoretical assumptions – often implicit and already heavily doctrinally loaded – about the veracity of a single, exclusive theoretical approach to understanding moral agency and experience. The tendency in moral theory towards reductionism about value is often accompanied by conceptions of moral agency and experience that pre-emptively curtail or even rule out consideration of moral reflection and reflectiveness as important or valuable. Yet their value for and usefulness to us seems so obviously clear when theoretical commitments are suspended and attention is paid to the experience of our moral lives. Outside fully articulated moral theory, openness and critical doubt about morality in our own lives is commonly considered admirable and a sign of moral maturity. Yet from inside moral theory, these features are much more often greeted with deep suspicion and are seen to be corrosive of various key elements of a well-lived moral life. This is not to deny that committed Kantians or utilitarians, for example, can come to recognise that their settled moral views are indeed flawed or that their preferred theory is not applicable in every case. Rather, it is to say that fully articulated moral theories have difficulty in allowing for or positively valuing scepticism directed at the theories themselves. Much of what I have envisaged as morally reflective agency would no doubt be considered wrong-headed, futile, a waste of time, and

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for various reasons morally bad from the point of view of most moral theories, especially (but not exclusively) moral theories that assume moral lives are explicitly to be lived in their own terms. Traditional moral theories (quite understandably) tend to have built into them strong assumptions running against the thought that self-consciously ‘correct’ moral reflection could be radically mistaken. Indeed, doubt about and openness to reappraisal of one’s settled moral assumptions are more naturally conceived in traditional moral theory to represent a significant barrier to the lucid understanding of one’s past moral experience. Thus, where a morally reflective stance holds centrally that we can be and often are wrong – even dramatically wrong – about our own moral history, moral theories seek to eliminate self-critical doubtfulness, or else seek to restrain and redirect it along familiar doctrinal lines.

Moral philosophy and human psychology The overall shape moral theories take and the concepts and features of moral agency they reify and privilege rest on background assumptions about the psychological facts of human experience quite as much as they do upon views about the nature and ultimate source (or sources) of moral value. Moreover, moral theories tend – sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly – to ignore, simplify, suppress and distort important, even ubiquitous, features of human psychology. Misplaced assumptions can mar normative theories when it comes to their accounts of moral agency, threatening to divorce actual moral experience from the normative foundations that are supposed to make sense of it. In Chapter 1, the contemporary renewal of interest in the virtues was traced back to Anscombe, whose original critique of deontic ethics culminated in a call for the revivification of the virtue concepts of the ancient Greeks and especially those of Aristotle (Anscombe 1958). Yet Anscombe herself was pessimistic about the chances of such a revival being successfully carried off, given a putatively unbridgeable discontinuity between ancient Greek conceptions of human nature and agency and our own: ‘it can be seen philosophically there is a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human “flourishing” ’ (1958, 18). Indeed, Anscombe’s bleak recommendation was ‘that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’ (1958, 1). This and similar species of pessimism about moral philosophy are

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found in the writings of various moral philosophers since, perhaps most prominently in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1985). However, this pessimism can too easily be overblown. There is no compelling reason why moral philosophy cannot fruitfully seek to account for moral agency in terms already inhering in our thick virtue concepts (among others), especially when such concepts are made answerable to and enriched by contemporary moral psychology. This does not require the dramatic cessation of moral philosophy until a conclusive philosophy of psychology becomes available. Indeed, given the remarkable closeness between ancient Greek and modern accounts of the central psychological features of moral agency, the gap between the ancient Greeks and ourselves concerning virtue seems remarkably narrow – certainly, it is not nearly wide enough to justify abandoning the attempt to fill it. What is wide, and would be unbridgeable (if we were somehow minded to make the attempt) is the social, political and cultural chasm between ancient Greek societies and our own. Yet we do not need to live like the Greeks in order to experience our lives in broadly similar human terms. Contemporary accounts of the psychological nature of the virtues and moral agency have shifted little enough to retain strong roots in ancient Greek moral thought, and yet still easily accommodate contemporary views concerning human psychological complexity and sophistication. Part III of R. M. Adams’s recent work A Theory of Virtue exemplifies this point (2006). Another reason not to wait for the last word on human psychology is that virtue ethics would thus be indefinitely postponed. A far better idea would be to continue inquiring into virtue concepts with an eye to our current understanding of the relevant features of human psychology and be prepared to respond to novel developments should they arise. Anscombe’s key suggestion – that moral philosophy should answer to ethically thick aretaic concepts of human moral agency – remains compelling. What may have distorted ancient Greek accounts of virtue when viewed from a modern perspective is that they tend to simplify, deny, ignore or attempt to explain away human psychological oddities and complexities that are now commonly accepted. The problem of selfdeception has constituted a central example in this book. As we saw in Chapter 5, by Kant’s time, sophisticated acknowledgement was possible of a common psychological feature that Socrates had repudiated and that Aristotle had struggled coherently to explain. This contrast shows (among other things) that, while Greek views on the nature of human desire, emotion and reason are not so conceptually remote that we cannot now understand them – or indeed marvel at their familiarity – their

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psychological rigidities ramify through the normative theories of which they are component parts. Indeed, Socrates and Aristotle both overlooked moral reflectiveness largely thanks to the distorting effects of their background psychological assumptions. The question of whether my search for moral reflectiveness in Socratic and Aristotelian accounts involves some kind of inappropriate modern moral–psychological palimpsest is, I think, partly answered by their familiarity with the problems of akrasia and self-deception. A more sophisticated psychological account was not out of the question for Socrates (Plato) or Aristotle.

Moral philosophy and theory-building Of course, moral philosophy in the form of virtue ethics has been pursued vigorously since Anscombe’s article first appeared, and virtue theorists have accounted for the virtues anew in many different ways. The dominant urge has been to sketch or construct normative theories – usually conceived as direct competitors with traditional deontic perspectives – in which to house the virtues. The clarion call has been to establish virtue ethics as a genuine third alternative in normative ethics, able to hold its own against rival deontological and utilitarian theories. Michael Slote’s agent-based theory, canvassed in Chapter 1, furnishes a paradigm example of the direction this branch of moral philosophy has taken. The groundbreaking discussion between Marcia W. Baron, Philip Pettit and Michael Slote in Three Methods of Ethics (Baron et al. 1997) exemplifies its remarkable success with regard to it proponents’ ‘third force’ ambition. Philosophers from these other traditions have also responded to the burgeoning interest in the virtues by revisiting their theories, as we have seen is the case for Kantian scholars in Chapter 5. Deontic and aretaic theories in some senses have converged towards each other, exemplified by the increasing philosophical interest in comparative studies of Aristotle and Kant, as lines of theoretical demarcation are retraced in response to the rise of virtue ethics. Yet I think there is a danger in virtue ethics continuing in a theory-building vein and in its practitioners believing that establishing or defending its status as an alternative overall theoretical perspective in moral philosophy remains paramount. There is a sense in which theory-building seems almost to force moral philosophy that concerns itself with the virtues to re-engage with deontic moral theories on traditionally deontic moral ground, rather than on its own terms, and this can direct philosophical attention away from more interesting terrain. I have already mentioned some of the reasons I think that moral theories

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are apt to overlook moral reflectiveness, and I think that the theorybuilding impulse especially disposes moral philosophers interested in the virtues to this kind of oversight. It does so at least partly because theory-building forces us to concentrate on traditionally deontic theoretical matters (for example, whether or not virtue ethics can come up with a defensible account of right action) to the detriment of a distinctive aretaic approach (or set of approaches) to doing moral philosophy. The alternative aretaic approach, presaged by Anscombe and others, eschews ‘thin’ abstract theory-building in favour of moral inquiry into the thick moral concepts belonging to human moral experience. The philosophical literature that has arisen with the resurgence of interest in the virtues – inquiring into our concepts of honesty, loyalty, modesty, justice, sincerity (for example, in Trilling’s seminal Sincerity and Authenticity (1972)) and many others – has, I think, best answered the original call for moral philosophy to re-engage with concepts that reflect the depth and detail of moral life as it is lived. New philosophical work that engages aretaic ethics with questions surrounding human psychology, and our human capacities and limitations with regard to the cultivation of virtuous character (for example, such as Adams pursues in A Theory of Virtue (2006)), offers an empirically well informed corollary. Virtue concepts receive their ethical thickness not via the status of virtue ethics as a defensible stand-alone theoretical stance in normative ethics but from the rich variety, complexity and depth of what they describe: the realm of human moral experience. Virtue ethics should continue in this direction in order to build upon the original promise of presenting a distinctive alternative approach. This also means directing philosophical attention towards, for example, the immensely deep and diverse store of reflection on human life and moral experience to be found already in the humanities (perhaps especially in literature), in our public culture and in our own reservoirs of personal experience. Here, what moral philosophy seeks is to put aside its theory-building concerns and pursue something Christopher Hamilton has described (adapting Wittgenstein’s original idea) as ‘an übersichtliche Darstellung – a perspicuous representation’ (Hamilton 2001, 14) of our moral concepts. Rather than moving from the recognition of virtues as importantly different moral concepts straight to their placement in abiding philosophical debates, moral philosophy ought to be exploring the meanings and interrelationships between these thick moral concepts, in light of our best understanding of human psychology and ‘life as it is actually lived’ (Hamilton 2001, 13). This is morally reflective philosophy.

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Moral philosophy and moral reflectiveness It is through philosophical reflection on the moral dimensions of life as it is actually lived that moral reflectiveness emerges most clearly as a virtue. Theory-building takes moral philosophy in the opposite direction. The search for a ‘perspicuous representation’ of virtue concepts also returns moral philosophy in a certain sense to its Socratic origins and turns it towards a distinctive contemporary rapprochement with practical moral agency and applied ethics. Although Socrates’ conviction (that the knowledge such perspicuity aims at guarantees virtue) no longer motivates its pursuit, the search for philosophical lucidity about virtue concepts still represents a powerful way in which moral philosophy might help make comprehensible the moral experience of our own lives. Towards the end of Chapter 2, I claimed that moral reflection is more fruitfully pursued from the point of view of aretaic rather than deontic concepts ones and that morally reflective agents are likely to gravitate strongly towards them. We have specific and complex personal moral histories that are best captured in aretaic terms, and it seems reasonable to suppose that morally reflective people will consider aretaic concepts especially germane to the pursuit of moral lucidity. Moral philosophy that seeks to clarify and knit together virtue concepts that best fit actual moral experience promises to interlock with and reveal morally reflective character in a way that traditionally constructed normative theories cannot. Pursued in this spirit, moral philosophy presents to morally reflective agents perspicuous accounts of aretaic concepts as a set of reflective resources, in a form tailored to suit critical moral reflection on the textured complexity of life as it is actually lived. Philosophical reflection of this kind offers deeply relevant resources for morally reflective people on what it means, for example, to be sincere, merciful, modest, loyal, honest or trustworthy; on whether and to what extent justice is reconcilable with mercy, or loyalty with cosmopolitan values, or modesty with self-knowledge; on why, how and to what extent various states of character are admirable or worthwhile and on how they might fit (or not) into both exemplary and ordinary moral characters and lives, and within the curious complexities of our human psychology. Contrastingly, the virtue ethics tradition that emerges from the idealised account of virtuous agency presented by Aristotle is apt, especially through its theory-building and reliance on the concepts of phronesis and eudaimonia, to skip lightly over precisely these connections between aretaic ideals and people’s moral experience. One aspect of this problem arises, for example, in the

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complaint that virtue ethics fails to be sufficiently action-guiding – it is the junction at which we look most hopefully to our virtue concepts for enlightenment and guidance. In applied ethics, too – still overwhelmingly mired in traditional deontic concepts and characterisations – the struggle to integrate virtue concepts is made more difficult by the pervasive threat, when pressed, that applied accounts of virtue will retreat into unedifying explanatory ellipses surrounding the interrelation between moral virtue, practical wisdom and human flourishing. If we look instead to ‘trace the grammar’ (Hamilton 2001, 14) of aretaic concepts as it runs (and they run) through our best current understandings of human psychology and moral experience – in the process mapping their interrelationships with each other and our other moral concepts – deeper, more textured and better fitting practical accounts of the virtues can emerge. From this approach it might also be possible to paint a deeper, richer and more complete picture of the ways the virtue of moral reflectiveness emerges, and is cultivated and integrated, within actual human lives. This approach also potentially links moral philosophy directly to moral practice through the virtue of moral reflectiveness. In Chapter 2, I said that moral reflectiveness constitutes a retrospective element in other virtues, assisting in various ways their acquisition, cultivation, improvement, correction and retention. There, I said that it is difficult to see how a person comes to live a life, characterised by a significant degree of, say, fairness, honesty or trustworthiness without having as part of those states a deep-running disposition to critically reflect on their own experience in terms that seek a lucid grasp of what – in terms of these states – has happened in that life, and especially of how their own conduct has measured up. In this way, I claimed that moral reflectiveness is embedded in other virtues from the ground up, constituting one of the central enabling and supporting dispositions through and with which virtue is habituated and entrenched, and a source of the reflective resources feeding continued efforts at maintenance, improvement and adaptation of virtuous motivation through the changing circumstances of a whole life.

Moral philosophy, moral reflectiveness and human well-being Morally reflective philosophy thus has the potential to operate as a corollary or accompaniment to morally reflective character and, in so doing, to shift moral philosophy much closer than has traditionally been the case to life as it is actually lived, and also closer to a robust and

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relevant applied virtue ethics. Moral philosophy pursued in this morally reflective style is also capable, I think, of generating a distinctively morally reflective account of the good life or human well-being – that component of Greek ethics whose modern lack Anscombe most strongly accentuated (1958, 18). The ideal of well-being has gained increasing currency beyond moral philosophy in recent years, especially in social scientific and public policy research, and is rapidly being adopted as an applied ethics catch-all by governments and other institutions worldwide. The standard distinction between theories of well-being divides approaches into hedonistic, desire and objective list theories, and all three are traditionally set out and defended in terms that relate them closely to deontic (consequentialist and deontological) moral theories. Objective list theories catalogue what they consider to be objective components of well-being, and what goes on each list depends on its underlying theory of value. Michael Slote briefly discusses the theoretical possibility of an aretaic objective list theory of well-being he calls ‘hyper-agent-basing’ at the conclusion of Morals from Motives (2001, 197–211) in which ‘all human good (or welfare or well-being)’ is understood in agent-based terms (2001, 197). Slote’s objective list includes the seven virtues – three moral and four rational – that also constitute the aretaic foundations of his agent-based moral theory. The position I have taken in this book already appears to rule out such hyper-agent-based conceptions of overall human well-being, since it already rejects the (exclusive) agentbasing of moral value. Yet I do not think that my view rules out the possibility that human well-being is at least partly constituted by living virtuously, in a similar sense to which Aristotle considers the virtues to be centrally constitutive elements of eudaimonia. One way this new aretaic conception of well-being might be framed – returning again to the discussion of moral reflectiveness in Chapter 2 – is in terms of the overarching virtue of integrity. On this conception (part of) what it is to achieve overall well-being – to live a good life – will be a matter of living a life characterised by its integrity, including its moral integrity. I indicated in Chapter 2 how moral reflectiveness plays a partly constitutive role in the virtue of integrity, especially in confronting some of the pervasive integrity-defeating features of human agency, such as dogmatism, rigidity, self-deception and hypocrisy. The appeal to integrity is also a central element in professional and applied ethics, and moral reflectiveness may also have a central role to play in developing accounts of professional, social and institutional well-being that coalesce with integrity-based accounts of personal well-being.

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In an integrity-based approach towards an objective list theory, what counts as well-being will not be settled in advance of close philosophical attention being paid to the particular moral conditions and spheres of human life under examination, and to the lives so lived. It may turn out to be an objective list theory that is flexible about – does not seek to resolve in advance – which moral features belong on its list or it may eschew list-making altogether. Within such an approach to wellbeing, moral reflectiveness seems to fit as a central virtue of character to be cultivated along with and in response to morally reflective philosophy – both pursued in light of our best understandings of moral experience in human lives as they are actually lived. Such an approach to the question of well-being may be able to avoid some of the pitfalls of theory-building approaches, and in so doing help to unearth in finer philosophical and practical detail the aretaic meanings, variety and depth of moral experience in human life as it is actually lived. And such an approach may also be capable of capturing and articulating the value of moral reflectiveness with a clarity and comprehensiveness that it has previously escaped.

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Index Ackrill, John L., 114–16 Adams, Robert Merrihew, 178, 180 admirableness, see under virtue akrasia, see under Aristotle Anscombe, G. E. M., 4, 5–7, 11, 75, 177–9, 180, 183 Apology of Socrates, 79–100, 102–3 applied ethics, 182, 183–4, see also moral theory; virtue; virtue ethics aretaic ethics, see virtue ethics Aristophanes, 82 Aristotle, 2–4, 5, 6, 11–16, 18, 23–4, 29, 106–42, 153–4, 167, 181–2, 183 and akrasia, 117–31, 179 and appetite, 125, 132 and character, 108–9, 137–9 and deliberation, 111–17, 130, 135 and emotions, 11–12, 109, 113–14, 119 and enkrateia, 3, 13, 117–21, 128–36, 153 and eudaimonia, 12, 29, 107, 110–11, 112, 113–14, 116, 129–30, 133–6, 139, 181, 183 and friendship, 136–41 and knowledge, 111–12, 113, 115, 118–28, 135 and the mean, 108–9, 111, 113 and perception, 115, 118, 124–5, 130–1, 134–5 and phronesis, 3, 13, 106–19, 167, 175, 181 and practical syllogism, 121, 124–8, 135 and saliency, 124–8, 130 and virtue, 107–11 Audi, Robert, 146

Baron, Marcia, 144, 154, 179 Baxley, Anne M., 153 benevolence, 21, see also Slote, Michael; virtue; virtue ethics Broadie, Sarah, 16, 122, 131, 133 Burnet, John, 79 categorical imperative, see under Kant, Immanuel character, see under moral reflectiveness; virtue Church, F. J., 87–8, 90 cleverness, 113–14, see also Aristotle commitment, see under moral reflectiveness; virtue compassion, 17, 24–6, see also virtue Conrad, Joseph, 1 conscience, 143, 165–9, see also introspection; Kant, Immanuel; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; retrospectivity consciousness, 44–6, see also moral consciousness; Searle, John consequentialism, see utilitarianism continence, 153–4, see also Aristotle; Kant, Immanuel; virtue contributory value, 12, 74, see also instrumental value; intrinsic value; irreducible value; moral value; moral worth; primary value Cooper, John M., 136–41 courage, 17, 71–2, 104, see also virtue Cox, Damian (et al.), 58–9, 75 Dahl, Norman, 122, 133 Dalton, Peter, 91–2, 93 deliberation, 167, 176, see also Aristotle; practical reason deontic ethics, 5–11, 28–30, 179, see also deontology; moral philosophy; moral theory; moral

bad will, see under Kant, Immanuel Ballard, Edward G., 92 Barnes, Annette, 59 189

190

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deontic ethics – continued value; moral worth; primary value; virtue ethics deontology, 8, see also deontic ethics derivative value, see moral value; moral worth; primary value; virtue; virtue ethics de Strycker, Emile, 87–9, 90–1, 96–7 dispositions, see Aristotle; moral reflectiveness; virtue; Zagzebski, Linda doctrine of right, see under Kant, Immanuel Doctrine of Virtue, 4, 152–73 duty, see under Kant, Immanuel Elliott, David, 7, 9, 28–30, 42 emotions, 153, see also Aristotle; Kant, Immanuel; virtue Engstrom, Stephen, 153–4 enkrateia, see under Aristotle equity, 26, 29 ethics, see moral philosophy; moral theory ethics of duty, see deontic ethics ethics of virtue, see virtue ethics eudaimonia, see under Aristotle Fingarette, Herbert, 59, 128–9 Foot, Philippa, 15 freedom, see under Kant, Immanuel friendship, see under Aristotle generosity, 17, see also virtue Gorgias, 101 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4, 144–6, 171 Gulley, Norman, 99–100 Guthrie, W. K. C., 94–5 habituation, see under moral reflectiveness; virtue Haight, M. R., 59 Hamilton, Christopher, 180 Hampshire, Stuart, 59 Hartley, L. P., 1 Herman, Barbara, 144, 154 Hill, Thomas E., Jr., 146, 165 honesty, 26, 30

Hughes, Gerard J., 123, 126–7, 129 human nature, see under Kant, Immanuel; see also self-deception humility, 17, see also virtue Hursthouse, Rosalind, 11, 12, 78 ignorance, 83–4, 98–105, 120, 127, 131, see also introspection; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; self-deception; Socrates impiety, see under Socrates inclinations, see under Kant, Immanuel instrumental value, 9–11, 27, 136, 171–3, see also contributory value; intrinsic value; irreducible value; moral value; moral worth; primary value integrity, 75–6, 183–4, see also moral reflectiveness; virtue; well-being intellectual virtue, 106–8, see also Aristotle; practical reason; Socrates; virtue intrinsic value, 2, 9–11, 12, 26–7, 42, 64, 74, 146, 151, 160, 162, 169, 171–3, see also contributory value; instrumental value; irreducible value; moral value; moral worth; primary value introspection, 165–6, 168, see also conscience; Kant, Immanuel; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; retrospectivity irreducible value, 9–11, 27–30, 41–2, 74, 143, 146, see also contributory value; instrumental value; intrinsic value; moral value; moral worth; primary value Irwin, Terence, 97, 99–101, 103 Kant, Immanuel, 3–4, 5, 143–73 and bad will, 163–4, 166–7 and categorical imperative, 143, 149, 151, 153, 156, 172 and doctrine of right, 153, 155, 156, 161 and duties of virtue, 4, 152–60, 162, 167, 171, 172

Index Kant, Immanuel – continued and duty, 149, 151, 153, 154, 167–8 and ‘First Command of All Duties to oneself’, 152, 160–9 and freedom, 155–7 and good will, 144–6, 151, 152, 170–1 and human nature, 152, 163–4, 170–1 and inclinations, 152, 155–7, 161–2, 163, 170 and maxims, 143, 147–9, 150–1, 152, 153, 156–7, 159, 167–8 and virtue ethics, 144–52 Kato, Shinro, 79, 80–1 kindness, 26, see also virtue Kittay, Eva Feder, 59 knowledge, see Aristotle; Kant, Immanuel; Socrates; virtue Korsgaard, Christine, 145, 154 Laches, 99, 104, 119 Louden, Robert, 144, 145, 149, 150–1, 161, 169 lucidity, see moral reflectiveness MacIntyre, Alasdair, 147, 150, 178 McLaughlin, Brian, 59 Magna Moralia, 4, 107, 136–42 Makkreel, Rudolf, 166 Martin, Mike W., 59, 128–9 maxims, see under Kant, Immanuel the mean, see under Aristotle Meilaender, Gilbert, 15 Mele, Alfred, 59, 122, 129–30 Meno, 100–1 The Metaphysics of Morals, 144, 153–60 meta-virtue, 162–3, 171 Milo, Ronald, 122 Miri, Mrinal, 59 Monk, Ray, 57 moral consciousness, 2, 43, 46–9, 167, see also consciousness; moral reflection; self-deception moral lucidity, see under moral reflectiveness moral perception, see Aristotle; introspection; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; practical reason; self-deception

191

moral philosophy, 3–4, 5–7, 174–84 and psychology, 5–7, 170, 177–9 and theory-building, 179–80 moral psychology, see Aristotle; Kant, Immanuel; moral philosophy; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; self-deception; Socrates; virtue moral reflection, 1–2, 43, 49–57, 65–6, 68, 70, 75–6, 94–5, 103–5, 115–16, 134, 138–9, 172–3, 177 and critical nature, 51–2 and openness, 54–6 and self-understanding, 56–7 and social aspects, 53–4, 104 moral reflectiveness, 2–4, 5, 42, 43, 57–77, 78–9, 95–6, 103–5, 106–7, 111, 114–18, 121, 122, 128–43, 147, 153, 154, 167–73 and acquisition, 66–7 and character, 67, 76 as a commitment, 57–63, 64–71, 76 and habituation, 66–7 and integrity, 75–6 and moral lucidity, 1–2, 57–8, 64, 69–71, 104–5, 106, 114, 115–16, 128, 131–2, 171–3 and moral value, 64, 73–4 and motivation, 57–8, 67–8, 72 and natural capacities, 64–6 and self-deception, 59–63, 65–6, 75 and skills, 64–6, 68–71 and success, 65–6, 69–71 and vice, 71–3 and virtue, 63–77 moral theory, 3–4, 5, 27–42, 74, see also Aristotle; deontic ethics; Kant, Immanuel; moral philosophy; Socrates; virtue ethics moral value, 2–4, 136–41, 145, 172, see also contributory value; instrumental value; intrinsic value; irreducible value; moral worth; primary value; virtue; virtue ethics moral worth, 3, 8–11, 27–42, 146, 149–50, 157–60, 169–73, see also contributory value; instrumental

192

Index

moral worth – continued value; intrinsic value; irreducible value; moral value; primary value; virtue; virtue ethics motivation, see under moral reflectiveness; virtue natural capacities, see under moral reflectiveness; virtue Nicomachean Ethics, 3, 11–16, 18, 23–4, 29, 106–35 normative ethics, see moral theory Nozick, Robert, 18–19 Olson, Robert, 59 O’Neill, Onora, 144, 147–52, 166, 167 openness, critical, 172, 176–7, see also moral reflection Pasternak, Lawrence, 146 perception, see under Aristotle Pettit, Philip, 179 phronesis, see under Aristotle Plato, 3, 78–9, 89, 101, 119 pleasure, 132–3, 154–5 plural value, 2, 13, 41–2, see also intrinsic value; irreducible vale; moral value; moral worth; Swanton, Christine; virtue ethics Potter, Nelson, 163 practical reason, 109, 111–12, 121, 124–8, 131, 147, 176, see also Aristotle practical syllogism, see under Aristotle practical wisdom, see Aristotle primary value, 9–11, 27–30, 36–42, 145, 146, 149–50 Protagoras, 119–20, 127 psychology, moral, see moral philosophy reductionism, 176–7, see also deontic ethics; moral philosophy; moral theory; Slote, Michael; virtue ethics Reeve, C. D. C., 89, 91 reflection, moral, see moral reflection reflectiveness, moral, see moral reflectiveness

Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 164, 167 Republic, 101 retrospectivity, 1–2, 49–58, 63–4, 74–6, 116–17, 135–6, 140–1, 172, 175–6, see also moral reflection; moral reflectiveness right action, see under virtue; see also deontic ethics; moral value; moral worth; virtue ethics Roberts, Robert C., 16 Rorty, Amelie, 59, 133 Santas, Gerasimos, 98, 133 Saunders, John T., 59 Searle, John, 44–5 self-control, see Aristotle and enkrateia; Kant, Immanuel self-deception, 59–63, 65–6, 75, 128–36, 139–41, 154, 163–4, 165, 166–9, 179, 183, see also Aristotle; Kant, Immanuel; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; sincerity; virtue self-examination, see under Socrates; see also introspection; Kant, Immanuel; moral reflection self-knowledge, 136–41, see also Aristotle; Kant, Immanuel; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; self-deception; sincerity; Socrates; virtue self-reliance, see under virtue ethics Sherman, Nancy, 139, 144, 154, 162–4 sincerity, 17, 59–63, 128, 165, see also moral reflectiveness; selfdeception; virtue Slings, Simon, 89–90 Slote, Michael, 2, 7–8, 10, 23, 30–42, 78, 179, 183, see also moral value; moral worth; primary value; virtue ethics Socrates, 78–105, 118–23, 127 and characteristic activity, 79–87 and corrupter of youth, 84–5 and elenchus, 96–8, 102–5 and ignorance, 83–4, 98–105 and impiety, 84–6

Index Socrates – continued and knowledge, 96–105 life of examination, 87–105 and moral reflection, 94–5 and moral reflectiveness, 103–5 and philosophical examination, 96–105 and self-examination, 91–6 translation from Greek, 96–7 trial of, 79–87 and virtue, 93–5, 96–105 and wisdom, 82–4, 93–5, 96–105 Sorabji, Richard, 114–16 status, moral, 167–8, 172, see also introspection; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; selfdeception; sincerity; virtue Stoics, 164, see also Kant, Immanuel Stokes, M. C., 88, 90, 97 success, see under moral reflectiveness; virtue; see also Zagzebski, Linda Swanton, Christine, 9, 13, 41, 78 syllogism, practical, see Aristotle Szabados, Bela, 59 Tredennick, Hugh, 88 Trianosky, Gregory, 8–9, 10 Trilling, Lionel, 59, 180 Urmson, James Opie, 121–2 utilitarianism, 8, 31, see also deontic ethics; Slote, Michael; virtue ethics value, see contributory value; instrumental value; intrinsic value; irreducible value; moral value; moral worth; plural value; primary value virtue, 3–4, 5–42, 178–80 accounts of, 12–27 and acquisition, 13–20, 66–7 and admirableness, 13, 26–7, 32, 36, 38, 43 and agency, 13–15, 19

193

and character, 2, 6, 11–16, 19, 26, 67 and commitment, 57–63, 64–71, 76 and emotions, 11, 12–13, 20–3, 67–8 and habituation, 18–20, 66–7 and moral worth, 7–11, 27–42 and motivation, 17–23, 24–6, 41–2, 67–8, 72, 74 and natural capacities, 13–17, 19–20, 64–6 and psychological nature, 7–27 and reasons, 21–2 and right action, 10–11 and skills, 15–17, 24–6, 64–6, 68–71, 112, 135 and success, 23–6, 65–6, 69–71 and vice, 16–17, 71–3 virtue ethics, 5–42, 179–80 agent-based, 8, 30–42 agent-focused, 8 and benevolence, 31–42 hyper-agent-based, 8, 183 and self-reliance, 31–2, 35–7 self-undermining, 35–42 Vlastos, Gregory, 79, 101–2 von Wright, Georg Henrik, 11, 12–13 Walker, A. D. M., 59 Wallace, James, 15–16 Walsh, James, 122, 131 well-being, 39, 183–4, see also integrity; Slote, Michael; virtue; virtue ethics West, Thomas, 92–3 Williams, Bernard, 13, 19, 22 wisdom, 112–13, see also Aristotle; moral reflection; moral reflectiveness; Socrates; virtue Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 57, 180 Wood, Allen W., 144, 145–6 Zagzebski, Linda, 2, 8, 10, 12–27, 29, 34, 64–70, 110, 149, see also Aristotle; moral reflectiveness; virtue; virtue ethics