Two Cheers for Virtue

Peter RailtonThe University of Michigan

Draft of 15 May 2009

Introduction

The modern revival of virtue ethics took hold in part because it

promised a richer and more faithful account of actual moral life, and

especially, of the psychology of the moral agent. Yet recent years

have see increasing criticism of virtue ethics precisely on the ground

that it fails to fit the best evidence of contemporary empirical

psychology.1

What is the nature of this dispute? Traditional accounts of virtue

give a central role to the idea that the virtuous person will have

developed robust character traits – such as courage, generosity,

compassion, honesty, loyalty, etc. – that will enable her to act well

across a wide range of situations, responding spontaneously and

1 For positive theories, see Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Rachena Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character”, Ethics 114 (2004): 458-491. For criticisms, see Peter Railton, "Made in the Shade: Moral Compatiblism and the Aims of Moral Theory", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 21 (1995): 79-106; John Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics”, Noûs 32 (1998): 504-530; Gilbert Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the fundamental Attribution Error," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series Volume 109 (1999): 316-31; and Peter Vranas, The Indeterminacy Paradox: Character Evaluations and Human Psychology”, Noûs 39 (2005): 1-42.

appropriately even in the face of challenges that would daunt or

confuse weaker souls.

These accounts typically involve two elements, one perceptual,

the other motivational. In the case of the first element, it is held that

virtuous individual will “see what is required” in a given situation:

compassionate generosity in this case, or stern and dispassionate

honesty in that one; resolute courage in facing a mighty foe, or

prudent flexibility in withdrawing before an overwhelming foe in order

to fight another day. Thanks to her character, the virtuous person will

immediately grasp the essentials in a situation, sense the values at

stake, be sensitive to their weight, see the right response, and not be

distracted by temptations or moral irrelevancies. Let us call this a

capacity for reliable evaluative perception. And let us borrow a bit

from the classical model, and think of rationality in terms of ratio – i.e.,

proportion. We can then say that the virtuous person’s capacity for

evaluative perception, as a reliable ability to have a proportionate

response to the risks, values, and possibilities at stake, is part of her

practical rationality – not a deliberative part, but a crucial one. And

even when deliberation is called for, evaluative perception plays an

indispensable role. For it typically furnishes the primary information

that serves as basis for deliberation – if such perception is

disproportionate, then deliberation, too, is likely to go awry. Thus we

should picture the courageous person as neither irrationally cowed by

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danger (over-estimating it, like the coward), nor arationally oblivious to

it (under-estimating it, like the reckless individual). Rather, she

perceives the risks as they are, and likewise, appreciates the values at

stake as they are – thanks to this, her response to these features of the

situation, both non-deliberative and deliberative, is appropriately

focused, measured, urgent, etc., and is responsive the relevant

considerations. That is, it is proportionate and rational.

The second element of virtue is concerned with the translation of

perception into action. Thanks to her character, once the virtuous

person has seen what is called for, she will immediately be moved to

act accordingly. She will neither seek nor need any further motive or

incentive in order to perform the right action – her evaluative

perception will be sufficient. Nor will she need, like the merely

continent person, to fight off competing motives in order to win her

way toward doing the right thing. In this way, her action will be fully

attuned to what is called for in the situation – she will act in the right

way, at the right time, with the right feeling, and for the right end. Her

action will be a case of reason being in control, but not necessarily

owing to deliberation and a conscious act of will – for these would be

the signs of a character not already fully attuned to the situation. Let

us call this section feature of the robust character of the virtuous

practical attunement. Simplifying considerably, then, we will think of

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the virtuous person as someone robustly capable of reliable evaluative

perception and, on this basis, reliable practical attunement.

One chief strand of empirically-based criticism of this traditional

conception of virtue takes as its starting point the large body of

experimental work indicating that individual behavior in a given

situation – whether assistance is given to someone in need, or harm is

inflicted on someone vulnerable, or impulse wins out over reflection –

is heavily driven by situational features.2 This would be untroubling if

the features in question had moral relevance, so that sensitivity to

them would be part of a fine-grained skill in evaluative perception and

practical attunement. Unfortunately, however, the opposite seems to

be the case. Presented with morally similar situations differing only in

irrelevant details, individuals tend to react and act markedly

differently. In one notable recent example, whether an individual

responded generously or ungenerously to request for charity

significantly reflected whether she was holding a warm or cold

beverage in her hand at the time.3 Notably, this influence of morally

irrelevant variations in circumstance upon individual behavior was

unperceived by the agent herself. Asked why they responded

favorably or unfavorably to this particular charitable request,

participants in the experiment never cited holding the warm or cold 2Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).3 Reported by John Bargh. See the related experiments in L.E. Williams and J.A. Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth”, Science 322 (2008): 606-607.

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drink as a factor in their decision. Pressed for an explanation, they

instead would try to tell a meaningful narrative in the form of a

rationalizing explanation: “This just seemed like a really good cause”,

or, “The guy on the phone was obnoxious”, etc.4 This case might seem

too trivial to warrant any interesting conclusions about the role of traits

of character in determining action, were it not one of thousands of

experiments in which manipulating trivial situational features can

strongly affect behavior – even when it is a question of rendering help

in (what appears to be) a terrible accident, or inflicting (what appears

to be) severe pain upon a hapless victim.5

Of course, no psychological tests administered to random

samples drawn from the general population could disprove the

existence of exceptional individuals who possess robustly virtuous

traits of character in traditional sense. People of this kind might exist

in our midst, yet it seems clear that, if they exist, such individuals must

be quite rare. Most of us, it seems, are not much like this.6 Moreover,

the sad history of the past hundred years appears strongly to confirm 4 See the discussion of post facto rationalization in J.A. Bargh and T.L. Chartrand, “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being”, American Psychologist 54 (1999): 462-479. 5 Moreover, holding a hot vs. cold drink has been found to significantly influence evaluations of other individuals as themselves “warm” or “cold”, and relative warmth is considered to be, along with competence, one of the two primary dimensions of initial interpersonal evaluation, making a significant difference in willingness to trust another. See Williams and Bargh (2008).6 See for example Ross and Nisbett (1999). Some contemporary defenders of virtue theory dismiss this sort of evidence, arguing that we should not look for direct situation-behavior links in the virtuous agent, but for a whole pattern of thinking, perceiving, feeling etc. that is embodied in practical reason. See Kamtekar (2004). Unfortunately, however, it has been one of the lasting accomplishments of contemporary cognitive social psychology to demonstrate that what it occurs to individuals to think, perceive, or feel in a given situation is highly sensitive to subtle variations in the cues they are given. (See below.)

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the conclusion that perfectly ordinary, well-respected, and well-

behaved people can, under certain conditions, be brought to commit

horrible violence upon innocent individuals, or to tolerate it with

equanimity. When Stanley Milgram was about to begin his famous

experiments to test the willingness of individuals to comply with an

instruction to inflict serious harm on others (“I was just following

orders”), he approached forty experienced psychiatrists and posed to

them the question of what proportion of individuals to expect would be

willing to administer (what they took to be) an electric shock labeled

‘Severe Shock’ or ‘XXX’ upon a slow-learning adult “student” who

protested that he had a heart condition. The psychiatrists – aware of

the relative infrequency of acts involving such severe violence against

strangers in the general population – gave an average prediction of

only 1%.7 They took the infrequency of such severely harmful acts in

normal lives acts as a sign that people, sociopaths aside, had a robust

disposition against it – they would therefore be expected to refuse to

obey such instructions. But when Milgram actually ran the experiment,

nearly two-thirds of the participants complied with a series of firm

instructions to apply a complete sequence of voltages leading from the

weakest to the very top of the range – even to a subject who had been

calling out in pain, and then fallen silent.8

7 Reported in Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007).8 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

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Later variants of the experiment showed that, by manipulating

just one situational variable, such as how close the “teacher” was to

the “student” (apparently) receiving the shocks, or whether the

“teacher” had had physical contact with the “student” prior to the

experiment, the rate of compliance could be shifted up and down the

range from 10% to 90%. Milgram’s aim had been to study compliance

with authority, not virtue as such, but his experiments attest to the

power of slightly abnormal circumstances to produce very dramatic,

even lethal shifts in behavior. Something similar has been observed

repeated in incidents of genocidal violence and torture. Of course,

historically acts of genocidal violence and torture have also occurred

spontaneously, not at the direct behest of an authority, and in a

climate where a dehumanizing racial or ethnic ideology has taken hold.

So Milgram’s original experiments are not an all-purpose model. But

since Milgram, similar experiments have been done in a large number

of countries, sometimes removing the authority figure and allowing

individuals greater freedom to make choices. Even in these cases,

high rates of willingness to inflict severe harm have been observed,

and morally insignificant situational variables have been shown to

have strong effects.9

The good news from such studies is that virtually everyone,

sociopaths aside, seems to have core capacities for non-violent,

cooperative behavior in the broad normal range of circumstances. 9 For discussion of the Milgram experiments and their variants, see Zimbardo (2007).

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Moreover, in some circumstances, ordinary individuals will typically

show empathy and compassion, or a resentment of injustice, or a

willingness to resist arbitrary authority. Indeed, in examples of so-

called “altruistic punishment”, individuals show themselves willing to

pay money to see someone they believe to have behaved unjustly

denied a reward.10

The bad news is that virtually everyone, sociopaths included,

also has core capacities for cruelty, violence, opportunism, and

indifference to the abuse and suffering of others, which can equally

effectively be evoked in other situations.11

As Peter Vranas puts it, our psyches appear to be fragmented.12

If people do not possess overarching and highly general situation-

independent dispositions to act, neither are they a mere, suggestible,

infinitely malleable mass of dispositions. Instead they appear to

possess a behavioral repertoire of a large number of very different,

fragmented dispositions. Which fragment comes to the fore in thought

and action appears to have a great deal to do with social setting and

morally irrelevant situational cues, but we would not see such

predictable shifts in behavior with shifts in situation were there not

some clusters of underlying, fairly reliable dispositions. Some of these

10 See Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans”, Nature 415 (2002): 137-140.11 See Zimbardo (2007).12 Vranas (2005).

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might be found in nearly everyone, others might vary from person to

person.

At the same time, however, individuals do appear to possess

some quite general, stable “traits” that mark them as possessing

different “personalities”. These personality traits often first appear

early in life, and normally are relatively constant over a lifetime. They

lead to distinctive behavioral “styles” – not constancies in behavior

across all variations in circumstance, to be sure, but similarities in

behavior across a sufficiently wide range of normal circumstances to

result in genuine differences in average individual behavior,

differences with real predictive value. Evidence suggests that these

traits typically involve both genetic and environmental determinants,

and that the early childhood period is of special importance in their

emergence and development.13

Unfortunately, however, behavioral constancy of this kind does

little to help virtue theory, for the relevant personality traits do not

look much like the traditional virtues. Among the best-documented

personality traits are: extroversion (vs. introversion), openness to

novelty (vs. discomfort with change), aggressivity (vs. passivity), self-

control and “conscientiousness” (vs. impulsivity), sociability (vs. a

13 Certain developmental effects can have an important role in augmenting or reducing these traits later in life. For example, the traits of conscientiousness and self-control tend to grow in the period after adolescence, and while the trait of openness tends to decline with age. For discussion, see D.J. Ozer and V. Benet-Martinez, “Personality and the Prediction of Consequential Outcomes”, Annual Review of Psychology 57 (2006): 401-421.

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tendency toward social withdrawal), agreeableness (vs.

suspiciousness), and neuroticism (a tendency toward negative vs.

positive feeling and thought). While we might agree that possessing

some of these traits to a certain degree would be useful acting morally,

it would be very implausible to say that one or another of these

features is a moral virtue. They all can be exhibited, even prominently,

in bad as well as good behavior. And none of them, taken singly or

together, can be seen as a plausible basis for guiding one’s life, or as

providing a standard for right action.

Consider what might appear to be the strongest candidates, self-

control or conscientiousness. Individual differences in

conscientiousness, for example, are determined by strength of

agreement or disagreement with such statements as, “I follow a

schedule”, “I always do my duty”, “I get chores done right away”, and

“I often forget to put things back in their proper place”. We all know

such people, but do we look to them for moral models? What about

self-control? Here the case is more promising. A standard way of

assessing degrees of self-control is to test an individual’s ability to

defer gratification. This is an important capacity of practical reason –

certainly one that Aristotle would have recognized. When Walter

Mischel tested pre-school children to see how long they could refrain

from eating a marshmallow that has been set before them in an

otherwise empty room, if they have been told that, by abstaining until

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the experimenter returns to the room (an unspecified amount of time),

they will receive an extra marshmallow at the end. Following these

same children through their school years and beyond, Mischel found

that their ability to defer gratification at age 4 was a good predictor of

school grades, frequency of “behavior problems” in school and other

institutional settings, college-entrance examination scores, stable

relationships, and much more.14 This makes a capacity for self-control

look fairly virtuous, and it certainly is true that, in many circumstances,

self-control is essential if one is going to be successful, do the right

thing, or act well. But it simply isn’t true that we can look to self-

control to point us toward the right aims in life (consider the self-

disciplined SS officer), or to show us the best ways of living or relating

to others (consider the ascetic), or to alert us to moral problems in

what we set our minds upon doing (consider the torturer, rigorously

following orders). Interviewing 19 violent murderers in prison, selected

at random, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo found that 10 were

impulsive, extroverted, and aggressive. But the other 9 had strong

self-control, were introverted, and passive.15 Sometimes, to put things

in Aristotelian terms, acting at the right time, in the right way, with the

right feeling, and toward the right end will call for spur-of-the-moment

14 As Aristotle would have noted, there can also be excess in deferral of gratification. Those preschoolers who waited the full fifteen minutes, but then continued to defer eating the marshmallows were found to have a higher rate of psychological difficulties than those who allowed themselves to enjoy the treat they had earned by their patience. 15 Zimbardo (2007).

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generosity (a “failure to defer gratification”), or impulsive defiance of

an authority (a “behavior problem”), or unreflective loyalty to a

threatened friend (a “failure to be considerate of others”). Individuals

rated as very high in self-control and conscientiousness are also prone

to perfectionism, personal rigidity, compulsiveness, social distancing,

and manipulation by authorities. We should not confuse Aristotle’s

great-souled man, or courageous warrior, or true friend, with Goody

Two-Shoes.

* * *

Suppose, then, that we move away from the idea of hoping that

we could expect people to develop stable character traits like courage,

compassion, temperance, justice, etc., to regulate their behavior

appropriately across a wide range of normal and abnormal

circumstances. What then remains of virtue theory?

A great deal, I believe. Enough to warrant at least two cheers for

virtue. First, virtue theory emphasizes the importance of thinking in

terms of the whole agent – not only what we do, but what we are.

Second, virtue theory draws our attention to the eudaimonist project –

the idea that what makes for a morally good life, and what makes a life

worth living or intrinsically rewarding, are allied in some fundamental

way. The first cheer salutes virtue theory for helping to move

contemporary moral philosophy away from a fixation on judgment,

cognition, command, will, and principle to a more encompassing

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understanding of the moral self, including social environment, affect,

emotion, and motivation. The second salutes virtue theory for

reminding us that morality will not take strong root in our lives, or

sustain itself as a living force in the world, unless it can be connected

with actions and lives we find meaningful and in some measure

rewarding. These two salutary features of virtue theory are not, I

would claim, at odds with contemporary empirical psychology. On the

contrary, a large and growing body of psychological research gives

them very substantial support.

First cheer: the perspective of the whole agent

In the first half of the twentieth-century, moral philosophers tended to

take the question, “What ought I to do?” to be the moral question. So

strong was this preoccupation, that moral philosophers often wrote as

if normative ethics just was a answer to the question, “What ought I to

do?”16 Curiously, this was true of teleological and deontological

theories alike. For example, it often was assumed by utilitarians as

much as their critics they were offering a distinctive sort of theory of

right action. Thus understood, utilitarianism was typically seen as

coming in two basic forms: act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism.

For example:

16 P.H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (London: Penguin, 1954).

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(AU) Act A at time t is right iff Of all the alternative acts accessible to

the agent at t,

A has the highest expected value, taking all potentially affected

equally into account.

(RU) Act A at time t is right iff Act A is required by the set of rules of

conduct, the

general adoption and enforcement of which would, of all the

possible systems of adoptable and enforceable rules, have the

highest expected value, taking all potentially affected equally

into account.

But why should a utilitarian – whose ultimate concern after all was with

human weal and woe – restrict her attention to the well-being

produced by acts, rather than by feelings, motives, or relationships?

Put another way, why focus on the rightness rather than the goodness

of ways of acting? These questions might seem especially pressing for

rule-utilitarians, who seek to be sensitive to the importance of rules in

moral life. Formal and informal rules can contribute to overall utility in

many ways beyond providing a criterion of right action. For example,

one advantage of a system of formal and informal rules is that such

background norms can promote the coordination of behavior in ways

purely individualistic theories cannot. But does (RU), a theory of right

action founded upon optimal rules, do this?

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Suppose that our town is threatened by a flood. If a nearly all

the townsfolk go to the levee and stack sand bags, the floodwater can

be stanched and the town saved. If only most, or fewer, go to the

levee, however, the person-power will be insufficient to keep up with

the rising water and the levee will collapse. In this circumstance, the

town will be flooded and some of those on the levee might drown,

adding human tragedy to the massive loss of property – it would have

been much better if no one had gone to the levee and all instead had

headed for the safety of higher ground. Let us further suppose that

the current low-level flooding has already destroyed communications.

So there I stand, asking, Should I go to the levee, or head for higher

ground? That now depends, according to (RU), upon what rule for such

a circumstance belongs to the set of rules with optimal acceptance

utility. From the description thus far, it seems likely that this rule

would say that one ought to go to the levee to fill and stack sandbags.

If nearly everyone follows this rule, the best result will obtain. But

what if this optimal rule is not, in the actual circumstance, widely

accepted? Then, by following this rule and going to the levee, I would

do no good, or perhaps even perish, when too few show up.

Surprisingly, it is no part of (RU) as a criterion of right action to take

the actual climate of rule acceptance and compliance into account.17 17As an alternative, suppose instead that the optimal rule is thought to be “playing it safe” – i.e., one should head for higher ground. But if I follow this rule, and if almost everyone else decides to go to the levee, then not only will I fail to play my part in saving the town, but I might even contribute to the terrible disaster of having a large but not quite adequate number of people sand-bagging the levee – resulting in the

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Surprisingly, too, an act-utilitarian fares better in this regard. For in

deciding which act is right by criterion (AU), I must wonder about how

others are likely to behave, and what marginal difference my acts

might make. (RU)’s criterion, by contrast, does not pay attention to

questions about what (usually imperfect) rules or norms or habits are

actually present in the population, shaping their behavior and

providing possible points of coordination for them. If we wish to give a

teleological foundation for coordination in moral life, (RU) appears to

be a step in the wrong direction.

The first clear exceptions to the 20th-century pattern of reducing

utilitarian theories to theories of right action were Donald Regan’s

Utilitarianism and Cooperation and Robert Adams’ “Motive

Utilitarianism”.18 Let’s look at Adams’ proposal:

(MU) A human individual I is morally best iff I has those patterns of

motivation,

among the patterns of motivation psychologically possible for

human beings, that have the highest expected value, taking all

affected equally into account.

Notice that (MU) is a theory about the morally best way to be

motivated, and says nothing directly about how it is right to act. In

particular, it does not say that the right act is the one that would

loss of many lives as well as the town. Once again, (RU) pulls me away from cooperating. 18 Donald Regan, Utilitarianism and Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Robert M. Adams, “Motive Utilitarianism”, Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 467-481.

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proceed from the morally best way of being. That would, as Adams

notes, be an implausible claim.

We can see this as follows. An old friend is passing through

town, and he and I have gotten together for the evening. We have had

plenty to talk about, but now are in the wee hours, and I still have a

lecture to prepare for an early-morning class. For me to interrupt the

flow of the conversation at this point would be a bit jarring, and might

seem inhospitable in a way that would somewhat dim the pleasure of

the evening. But by this point my friend and I mildly aware that we are

mostly talking for the sake of talking, and the diminished pleasure we

would experience would affect only two individuals. By contrast, if I

give a poorly-prepared lecture tomorrow, I will cause 150 students to

experience a mix of confusion, frustration, and boredom, and leave

them with an inadequate understanding of the slated topic, “the

problem of coordination in moral theory”. It seems, then, all things

considered, as if I ought to find an opportune moment to suggest that

we break off the conversation, so that he can go to bed and I can go to

prepare. That is, let us say, the right act to perform. But perhaps the

best set of motives to have would include so strong a desire to keep

connected with an old friend that one would in such circumstances not

be motivated to break off the conversation, and instead would want to

keep talking despite the call of pedagogical duty. Thus the action that

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would stem from the best motives to have would not be the right thing

to do.

The action consistent with the best motives might, however, be

part of the morally best way to be, or the morally best sort of life to

live. These “non-acts” are as central to life as acts themselves, and to

whether our lives go well or ill, or are a blessing or a curse to others, or

make the world a better place, will have a great deal to do with them.

Always doing the right action, by contrast, might not be psychologically

compatible with the way of life that most contributes to value in the

world. As the example suggests, always acting rightly might not be

conducive to the most affectionate or meaningful relationships, or to

the deepest loyalties and commitments.

Now consider a somewhat different example. It might be high

time for Smith to offer his spouse, Jones, an apology. After all, it was

his sharp remark that started this quarrel, and his continuing failure to

apologize is leading to nothing more at this point than an escalating

and more argument. To be sure, his sharp tone was somewhat

provoked, but that really is no longer the issue. Apologizing, let us say,

is the right thing to do. But how well Smith has acted, even in

apologizing, will also be a function of the motive or feeling behind his

apology – something he has long since ceased to be able to deceive

Jones about. And how well Jones and Smith have acted as a couple will

additionally depend upon the spirit in which Jones receives Smith’s

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apology. Experts on marriage emphasize that it is not whether couples

fight, but how they fight – including what they feel as they fight, how

they manage to stop fighting, and what unresolved emotion remains in

the aftermath of fighting – that matters for the long-term health of the

relationship. Getting a child to see and understand this crucial fact

about giving and accepting apologies is as much a part of his moral

education as getting him to say “I’m sorry” or “I accept your apology”

in the right circumstances.

Suppose that a child, subjected to just such a talking-to after

making a patently sarcastic and therefore ineffectual apology to her

brother, complains, “But what can I to do about it? I can’t make myself

feel sorry when I’m still so mad at him.” She has a point. The feeling

behind an apology or its acceptance is critical, but how can one learn

to feel? Or how could committing oneself to follow a principle about

how to apologize or accept an apology be efficacious? Still worse, if we

know from psychology that situational variables tend to exert a

preponderant influence on how individuals will think, feel, and act in a

given setting, then it seems overwhelmingly likely that, in the heat of a

conflict, with harsh words on both sides, one would not be cued to

consider or follow such a principle at the appropriate time. Rather, the

literature on psychological “dissonance” suggests that situations of

conflict of this kind tend to result in emotional escalation. Each side

experiences the claims of the other as threats to their own sense of

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themselves as decent, caring, and capable. As a result, each side is

cued to frame the situation in defensive, self-justifying terms. Thus a

quarrel over something minor escalates into a heated, morally-charged

conflict. Each side concentrates on proving the reasonableness and

non-culpability of their own behavior, and this is exactly what stokes

the anger of the other side.

Knowing all this, one could easily despair of finding any way of

improving things. Especially, because the problem in cases like this is

not brought on by the individuals’ lack of a strong concern with the

justness and fairness of her actions. Indeed, this strong concern

appears to be part of the problem. Neither is the problem brought on

by the individuals’ failure to endorse reasonable principles of conduct.

They certainly do endorse such principles. And were Smith and Jones

instead to be dispassionately observing a nearly identical fight among

acquaintances, they would readily identify which moral principles

apply, and understand how and when to apply them to improve the

situation. But in an actual quarrel, moral principles tend to make their

appearance primarily as weapons or shields, not as solutions. So: If

we cannot appeal to durable moral character to supply the needed

“evaluative perception” of what needs doing, and practical attunement

to do it in cases like this; and neither can we expect endorsement of

correct principles to enable people to avoid, or avoid prolonging, such

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self-defeating situations; then, where then can we turn? And has

virtue theory anything to offer us?

Affect and evaluation

Virtue theory, I have claimed, has the virtue of asking us to look to the

whole agent. It therefore has historically been very much concerned

with questions like: How can one learn to feel? And especially, how

can one learn to feel the right way at the right time with the right

object? For Aristotle (and, one might add, Hume), the core of the

answer lies with the regulation of affect through habit and habituation.

Nietzsche appears to have shared this perspective:

One will rarely err if extreme actions are ascribed to vanity,

ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.19

In the case of Smith and Jones, emotion certainly seems to grease the

skids down which the quarrel slides, gaining speed and force. And

ingrained habits of thought and feeling, habitual ways of arguing and

counter-arguing, becoming defensive, upping the ante by turning

criticisms back upon the other, etc., make this predictably self-

defeating slide seem almost inevitable. Well, if they are so central to

the problem, might not affect and habit also be central to the solution?

Virtue theory proposes just this, I claim. So, in spelling out my first

19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Alexander Harvey (Chicago: Kerr, 1908), p. 74.

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cheer for virtue theory, we will be taking up questions of affect and its

role in our psychology, and questions about the nature and cultivation

of habits of feeling and acting.

I have suggested that contemporary social psychology will prove

helpful in this task. To begin to see why, let us ask how a psychologist

might explain the effectiveness of seemingly unimportant situational

features – features we would dismiss on a moment’s reflection as

irrelevant – in shaping the behavior of otherwise sensible individuals.

It appears that certain salient features of a situation are able to “get to

us” affectively well before self-conscious thought and judgment can

enter the scene. Perception of a salient situational “cue” tends to

produce, within the first hundreds of milliseconds, and well before any

self-conscious process of judgment can act, an immediate, affective

response in us. This response is typically below the level of awareness,

yet it strongly influences how the mind will go on to think and act. The

immediate affective response “tags” or “codes” the incoming

information as positive (“approach”) or negative (“avoid”), and as

important (“attention and arousal”) or unimportant (“ignore”). This

affective coding then “potentiates” (makes more accessible and thus

more likely) certain thoughts, conscious feelings, memories,

associations, and inferences. Encountering a friend in evident distress,

for example, might immediately be encoded as “approach” and

“important”, triggering intense focus upon him (ignoring the

22

surroundings), and priming an empathetic simulation of his feelings,

which arouses sympathy for him and “motivated cognition”, as we take

in the situation and hunt through our minds ways in which we might

understand it or help out. By contrast, our perception of an

unpleasant-looking, ill-dressed stranger in an agitated state of evident

distress whom we encounter in a narrow alleyway might immediately

be encoded as “avoid” and “important”, focusing attention on possible

risk or threat from this person, exciting fear that blocks empathy with

this person, so that no sympathy is aroused and our attention is

instead directed away from him as a person (as opposed to an

“obstacle”), and turned to the surroundings and ways of escaping the

situation as cleanly as possible. All of this occurs within seconds, yet

once it has happened, the entire frame within which we will see the

situation and act has been fixed. Affect, then, occupies a pivotal place

in perception, “triaging” stimuli and priming a train of direct and

indirect psychic effects and influences – on attention, arousal,

evaluation, memory, association, judgment, and motivation, on what

an individual sees, feels, thinks, and seeks. All before we have had a

chance to reflect consciously upon the situation.

Affect by its nature thus involves a suite of responses straddling

feeling, cognition, and motivation. When the unattractive, distressed

stranger encountered in an alleyway triggers fear, we will promptly

undergo physiological arousal, heightened attention, a reshaping of

23

focus, a readiness for action, and a motivational impetus to protect

oneself and evade engagement (“flight”, in this case, rather than

“fight”). In evolutionary terms, it seems clear why it would be an

advantage to be capable of feeling an emotion immediately in

response to risks and threats in one’s environment, if this emotion

could produce an almost instantaneous, co-ordinated mobilization of

the organism’s capacities to cope. And that is the role of fear, in

humans and animals alike.

Our rapid, non-voluntary affective responses are not, however,

mere “innate reflexes”. They are not simple “reflex arcs”, involving

only distal elements of the nervous system, and never passing higher

than the motor neurons in the spinal cord. Instead, they involve

numerous, coordinated mental processes – perception, cognition,

memory, conation, etc. Nor are they all “hard-wired instincts”, capable

only of responding in a fixed way to a sharply delimited set of stimuli –

like the human aversion to spiders and snakes, or attraction to smiling

faces and babies. Our affective repertoire importantly includes such

basic responses, but it also can be enlarged and refined almost

indefinitely through experience, learning, and cognitive development.

We can come to dread or welcome all manner of things, natural or

human: people, places, rituals, examinations, peer review, and

business opportunities. And although our affective responses are often

lightning fast, and involve activation of so-called “action programs” –

24

such as “fight or flight” in the case of fear, or “engage or withdraw” in

the case of a novel social situation – the bulk of these responses and

action programs have been shaped and reshaped through a long

history of personal experience, and thus vary from one individual to

another, becoming more discriminating and elaborate over the course

of a single individual’s life.

Because these rapid affective processes tend to operate

“spontaneously”, i.e., without intervention of explicit judgment or will,

they are often called ‘automatic’ or ‘autonomic’. And because they are

often not directly accessible to consciousness, they are often called

‘subpersonal’. These rather ominous-sounding terms suggest

something robotic, uncontrollable, and unintelligible to the agent – a

loss of agency comparable to the so-called “automatic writing” of

spiritualist séances or post-hypnotic suggestion. And, of course, in

some cases one is affected by a situation, and finds oneself responding

to it – with anger, say, or uneasiness, or pleasure, or dread – in a way

one simply cannot understand. But more typically our affective

reactions figure in quite intelligible everyday exercises of agency, even

in its most sophisticated forms – as when a skilled athlete, politician,

teacher, or chess player is engaged in situations with continuously

changing demands, “picking up on” certain things as encouraging or

worrying, “sensing” that things are going well enough or not as

expected, “feeling” that a certain action is needed. We speak of such

25

complex behavior as “intuitive”, since it typically proceeds with very

little self-conscious deliberation. The “cognitive-affective system” at

work in these behaviors enables individuals to take in, process, and

respond aptly to a much greater wealth and complexity of information

than self-conscious deliberation alone could manage. At the same

time, this system can also function to alert, encourage, inform, and

“advise” higher-order thought, including self-conscious deliberation.

Humans are thus seen as possessing a “dual process” mind, in

which affect plays an important information-gathering and -evaluating

role, and functions jointly with cognition in enabling us to understand

and navigate the world. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt

describes the “new synthesis” in thinking about moral psychology:

… the key factor that catalyzed the new synthesis was the

“affective revolution” of the 1980’s… . [S]ocial psychologists

have increasing embraced a version of the “affective primacy”

principle … [in light of] evidence that the human mind is

composed of an ancient, automatic, and very fast affective

system and a phylogenetically newer, slower, and motivationally

weaker cognitive system. … [The] basic point was that brains

are always and automatically evaluating everything they

perceive, and that higher-level thinking is preceded, permeated,

and influenced by affective reactions (simple feelings of like and

26

dislike) which push us gently (or not so gently) toward approach

or avoidance … .20

If a simple environmental cue like a feeling of warmth can trigger

an immediate positive affective response (“approach”), which then in

turn primes a more open and empathetic response to those around us,

then a simple psychological “manipulation” like giving someone a cup

of warm coffee to hold can alter his response to a charitable appeal.

Thus, we can alter individual moral behavior rather dramatically but

unknowingly once we have identified specific situational cues that play

effectively upon the affective system, even if they are morally

irrelevant. In this way, we can understand the mechanism behind

many of the studies “situationalists” have used to criticize traditional

“trait” psychology, and philosophers have cited in the critique of virtue

ethics.

However, this is not the end of the story. The same “dual-

process” theory can also be put to good use helping an Aristotle-

inspired account. In the first instance, it affords a psychologically

credible way of explaining the otherwise rather mysterious idea that a

person can “simply see” certain situations as involving certain values

and calling for a particular response (what we have called “evaluative

perception”) – and in virtue of seeing it this way be immediately 20 Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology”, Science 316 (2007): 996-1002, also “The Emotional Tail and the Rational Dog”, Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814-834. For some systematic presentations of recent work on the role of affect in the regulation of cognition and behavior, see Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs (eds.), Handbook of Self-Regulation (New York: Guilford Press, 2004).

27

moved to make this response without other incentive (“practical

attunement”). As long as we conceive of perception as wholly

cognitive, encoding only sensory information, it is quite unclear how

perception could incorporate evaluation or be motivating. What would

value look, sound or taste like? How can a percept call for a response?

But the Aristotelian picture of evaluative perception makes better

sense in the setting of dual process psychology, in which new

perceptual information is immediately coded affectively – as “pro” or

“con”, “important” or not. This coding then primes certain tendencies

to act and react – “approach”, “avoid”, “notice”, “ignore” – when

directly induce motivated cognition and action-readiness. Affect, for

the psychologist, is the most basic evaluative currency of the brain –

small wonder that a brain that is built to respond to the values and

disvalues in its environment, and produce behavior properly attuned to

them, is also built to encode perception affectively. After all, this brain

grew and took shape in an evolutionary past when animals lacked the

luxury of self-conscious judgment. And as Aristotle and Hume would

be quick to point, we, no less than they, need much more by way of

practical attunement than self-conscious judgment could ever provide.

As Hume pointed out in the Treatise, nature was more thoughtful than

to trust our fates to the uncertain workings of reason.

The “new” personality theory

28

Let us return to those “character traits” that, according to a large

consensus in contemporary personality psychology, do play an

important role in the explanation of behavior. In particular, consider

the so-called “Big Five”: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion,

agreeableness, and neuroticism. Recall that these traits often emerge

relatively early in life, and remain fairly stable over substantial periods

of time. Whether an individual is attributed the traits, and to what

degree, is typically determined by specialized “personality

assessment” scales, in which individuals are presented with a large

number of statements, to which they are asked how strongly they

agree or disagree. Such assessment techniques plainly suffer from the

well-known biases of self-reporting, yet the scores individuals receive

on these scales do appear to be picking up on important dimensions of

individual difference. For example, even though it generally is not

possible on the basis of these broad “traits” to predict with precision

how individuals will behave in particular contexts – here the

“situationists” are clearly right that situation-specific cues often play a

dominant role, swamping other factors and masking differences in

individual temperament – , still, knowing that someone scores highly

on, say, neuroticism or extraversion, has significant predictive value

when that individual’s behavior is taken in the aggregate, summing

together many acts and many circumstances and looking for broad

29

patterns.21 This, in effect, was the lesson of Mischel’s early

experiments with deferred gratification.

More recently, Mischel, one of the architects of the critique of

traditional trait psychology, has joined with others to develop a “new

personality theory” to help us integrate the lessons of situationalism

with those of contemporary trait psychology.22 Despite the

demonstrable power of situations to affect behavior, it remains the

case that everyday individual behavior remains highly predictable.

This is something we all know from experience, and something we all

count on in our daily interactions. What could account for this sort of

constancy in behavior? A key to the explanation is that, for most

individuals most of the time, their environment is also highly

predictable – we tend to face the same sorts of situations day-in and

day-out. This means that if we possess stable dispositions to respond

in distinctive ways to rather specific kinds of situations, the regular

recurrence of such situations will ensure that our behavior itself is

largely regular.

Indeed, although how people will react to extraordinary

situations is often less predictable, even highly stressful situations tend

to fall into identifiable kinds that will, for different individuals, trigger a

distinctive array of stress responses – depending, for example, on the

21 See Ozer and Benet-Martinez (2006).22 See, W. Mischel and Y. Shoda, “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure”, Psychological Review 102 (1995): 246-268.

30

particular sources of stress, the public vs. private character of the

situation, which emotions are involved, what degree of personal

control is possible, or what personal relations or relations with

authorities are involved. Individuals vary in their dispositions to be

sensitive to these factors, and to respond in particular ways – e.g., to

respond to public failure with self-directed vs. other-directed anger, to

be made fearful or excited by novel social situations, etc. – and

therefore, even when “under pressure”, people’s behavior will show

some degree of constancy or predictability. All of this contributes to

our everyday sense that people do have something like “personal

character”.

“New personality theory” explains these phenomena by positing

that individuals possess distinctive arrays of “if ... then ...” dispositions

or “behavioral contingencies”, which constitute a kind of “personal

profile” or “signature”. Rather than speak in terms of overall

character traits like courage, honesty, friendliness, etc., the emphasis

is upon how individuals differ in these “if ... then ...” dispositions, which

link certain situational features with a “cognitive-affective” response –

a way of seeing things, feeling, thinking, and acting. Consider again

Smith, who we will suppose had a middling score on “agreeableness”

measures, and whose behavior, looked at in aggregate, doesn’t show a

pronounced tendency toward agreeableness or disagreeableness.

Nonetheless, Smith’s behavior might be far from random: there might

31

be a distinctive, situation-relative pattern to its variability, since he

responds to certain recurring situational cues in a reliable way. When

the person with whom he is interacting is perceived as possessing high

status, Smith is open, agreeable, and accommodating. When the

person is perceived to be of low status, Smith is closed, lacks interest,

and is reluctant to accommodate his own behavior to the others’. His

spouse Jones, on the other hand might have a very different sort of

"behavioral signature” – she is fearful and withdrawn in the face of

those she perceives as possessing higher status, relaxed and engaging

with those she perceives to be of lower status. These “if ... then ...”

dispositions might not be anything of which either Smith or Jones is

aware. Those close to them might never notice these patterns

explicitly, and yet, for those who deal with them regularly, the

manifestation of these dispositions will generate expectations (perhaps

unacknowledged) of how Smith and Jones will behave, and this creates

the impression that each has a “character”. Those of higher status

who deal regularly with Smith will see him as “a really nice, a good

guy, very helpful”, those of lower status will see him as “stand-offish,

cold, and self-centered”. Their perceptions of Jones, of course, will be

quite otherwise. Yet these very different patterns of behavior and

conflicting perceptions by others will be the result of each individual’s

unique “cognitive-affective personality system”.

32

Where might these complex and differing arrays of “if ... then ...”

dispositions in individuals come from? Genetic differences make some

contribution, as any parent with more than one child knows, but they

only do so via development and environment. There is very good

evidence that individuals tend to imitate those around them, often

picking up their distinctive styles of interaction: children look to their

parents; adolescents to their peers, or the “cool” kids; adults look to

those who seem successful, and to their own institutional context.

Patterns of behavior acquired in these ways also tend to be

contextually rewarded or punished by the behavior of others. In these

ways, we come to acquire a large number of ingrained, habitual ways

of acting. But these are not only ways of acting. With them come

ways of feeling and being motivated as well, as we adapt to our world

at many levels. Knowledge of such “if ... then ...” contingencies in the

case of a given individual will give substantial insight into how he or

she behaves, but many of these contingencies are fairly narrow in

scope, and, taken together, they might not support any global

evaluation of “character”.23

Smith, for example, might be a lawyer and a committed activist

in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who devotes an

exceptional amount of time and effort to fighting various forms of

social injustice. In this respect, he far exceeds most of us. He would

presumably be deeply embarrassed and disturbed to realize the role of 23 See Vranas (2005).

33

status in shaping his ways of interacting with the individuals he meets.

Partly this is because in some contexts, he is in fact very helpful and

accommodating toward those of low status. For instance, when he is

dealing with someone in a professional legal setting, he may see them

in the first instance as “underdogs” who are “innocent victims”. If that

is his cue, then his immediate affective reaction will be positive rather

than negative, and he will be primed to empathize with the individual

and take her side. Here we see a different “if ... then ...” contingency

at work. Yet in his behavior toward strangers in an airport waiting

room, or even toward his own office staff, the stable “if someone is of

low status, then keep a distance” contingency will be cued by the

salience of their low status, and a different side of Smith will be in

view. 24 Insofar as propensities to treat people respectfully are

concerned, Smith is fragmented – like all of us.

24 Strictly speaking, of course, one’s “if ... then ...” contingencies will operate with one’s apparent perception in context (perhaps unconscious) of the relevant “if ...” cue.

34

Habits and habitudes

Where, psychologically, can we locate these relatively stable “if ... then

...” contingencies? From the standpoint of classical virtue theory, they

are not themselves virtues, for they are typically too narrow. But they

are something the importance of which Aristotle emphasized above all

else: habits, i.e., habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting –

acquired by example and through repetition. Of course, not everything

contemporary speakers of English would normally call a habit is like

this. We sometimes speak of an addiction, such as smoking, as a

habit. Certain drugs, we say, are “habit-forming”. And we sometimes

speak of stereotypic, mindless behavior, such as repetitively and

unreflectively twirling a strand of hair in one’s finger as one struggles

through a timed exam, as a habit. Perhaps these are even

paradigmatic habits, as we now use the word. But there are good

reasons to try to reclaim the word for what Aristotle seems to have had

in mind by ethos, which led him to say that the formation of proper

habits is the chief task of moral education (see NE 1104a25; hence, the

Nicomachean Ethics), and to claim that virtuous behavior, such as

acting courageously in battle or generously toward friends, is “as it

should be” when it is done from habit (NE 1105a38). To spare readers

of unwelcome suggestions, however, I propose that, for now, we not

35

struggle with the English word habit and instead import and anglicize

the French term habitude as our equivalent of ethos.25 (Later, we’ll

return to simple notion of habit.)

As Aristotle emphasized, acquiring a skill or mastery requires

development of a habitude that involves a large number trained

responses to a wide range of circumstances. Each of these trained

responses integrates a way of noticing certain features of situations,

seeing what’s at stake, reacting in thought and feeling, and ultimately

acting in consequence, without need (in this respect at least) for much

if anything by way of conscious reflection or additional motivation. Put

in terms we introduced earlier, such habitudes thus involve both

evaluative perception and practical attunement. As a result of a

fortunate nature, exposure to good examples and good training in

youth, and from her own growing experience, the virtuous person

acquires such habitudes, enabling to her to in the right way, at the

right time, with the right feeling, and toward the right end.

It is important, Aristotle believed, to distinguish such habitudes

from norms or principles. Surely they often involve internalization and

acceptance of relevant norms, e.g., those of proper speech,

comportment, law, customary distribution, etc. But these norms alone

will not determine proper action, nor will they equip an individual with

25 We speak of the habit of smoking, but for a French speaker, il n’a pas l’habitude de fumer does not mean, “he doesn’t have the smoking habit”, but rather, “he isn’t used to smoking” or “he isn’t an experienced smoker”, in the sense that he’s a novice, awkward at it, coughs when inhaling, can’t take strong tobacco, etc.

36

evaluative perception and practical attunement. Two of us might

accept the same norms, yet, if you are well-trained and experienced

and I am not, then in many cases you will notice what is important in a

situation, and what specific response is called for, while I will not.

Without training and experience, I will often need to deliberate heavily

and clumsily, fail to respond fluently to a changing situation, and be

beset by conflicting thoughts and irrelevant considerations. Think of

two individuals, one of whom grew up in a bilingual Polish-English

environment, and while the other was raised in English and learned

Polish much later, in college. Each will in some sense have learned the

same grammatical rules, yet they will differ markedly in their ability to

bring these different rules to bear in spontaneous Polish conversation,

or to notice what is well-formed or ill-formed, felicitous or infelicitous,

or in the right or wrong register. They will also differ markedly in the

complexity of thoughts and feelings they can readily understand or

effectively express and communicate. One will require a great effort of

concentration and will – a great deal of “linguistic deliberation” and

high motivation – to keep up her end of a conversation. For the other,

conversing is like swimming for a fish – unselfconscious, fluid, precise,

and calling for no special thought or effort. In short, other things

equal, one will be much more capable than the other of saying the

right thing at the right time in the right way with the right feeling.

What accounts for this difference? Not a difference in principle,

37

rationality, or conscientiousness. In English we might say that one, but

not the other, has the habit of speaking Polish, but that understates

the case. Someone fluent in Polish can lose the habit of speaking it,

simply by failing to use the language for a year or so. Yet her

fundamental competency in the language could remain largely intact.

This competency is better termed a habitude than a habit. And it is

this sort of habitude, I believe, that Aristotle had in mind in speaking of

the centrality of ethos.

Return to Smith for a moment. His behavior is not

incomprehensible or arbitrary – on the contrary, we can see it as a

manifestation of a stable, but somewhat narrow disposition. A

champion of the underdog, does not accept a principle to the effect

that lower status individuals are to be received with less warmth and

accommodation – I suspect Smith does not even hold such a principle

unconsciously. Certainly, he never represents his behavior to himself

in this way. It seems more accurate to say that he has a habitude,

perhaps acquired by modeling on the behavior of his status-anxious

parents. As a result, he has learned an entire suite of status-oriented

ways of sizing up a situation and responding to it in feeling and action.

Thanks to this “cognitive-affective” disposition, he will see certain

social situations or relationships as attractive, and find them rewarding

to pursue, even as other kinds of situations and relationships will seem

to him unattractive and unrewarding.

38

Aristotle is very explicit about the importance to habituation of

acquiring certain ways of feeling as well as certain cognitive

orientations. By deeply emulating admired models – identifying with

them, as we might now say – we will tend to come to feel as well as act

as they do. Such positively affectively charged emulation will, after,

give rise in us to empathetic simulation of the model’s thoughts and

feelings, as well as her actions. Aristotle is particularly concerned that

we come in this way to find pleasure and pain in the right things.

Indeed, we know someone’s motives – what really moves her, not

simply what she takes to move her – by knowing what gives her

pleasure or pain (NE 1104b3). Witness the case of Smith vs. Jones. In

Aristotelian psychology, anticipated pleasure and pain play a

fundamental role in guiding behavior, so that if we seek reliably good

behavior, we must cultivate within ourselves and others “habits of

feeling” that align pleasure with what is good, and pain with what is

bad. Smith, despite his high principles and wonderful dedication, will

persist in showing a regrettable indifference to those who are saliently

below him in status until he begins to find some pleasure in connecting

with them. Aristotle writes:

There are three objects of choice – fine, expedient, and pleasant

– and three objects of avoidance – their contraries, shameful,

harmful, and painful. About these, then, the good person is

correct and the bad person is in error, and especially about

39

pleasure. For pleasure is shared with animals, and implied by

every object of choice ... . Further, since pleasure grows up in all

of us from infancy on, it is hard to rub out this feeling that is

dyed into our lives; and we estimate actions as well, some of us

more, some less, by pleasure and pain. Hence our whole inquiry

must be about these, since good or bad enjoyment is very

important for our actions. … [F]or if we use these well, we shall

be good, and if badly, bad. [NE 1104b31-1105a13]

Psychologists speak of situations as having “affordances”, roughly, as

seeming to hold out certain prospects. If Smith’s immediate,

unconscious affective reaction to people of conspicuously low status is

habitually negative, then social situations involving such persons will,

for Smith, have negative affordances as well. Whatever principles this

individual might subscribe to, however strong his “moral identity” as

just and fair might be, we know quite well how he will actually behave.

Thus we come to the problem of how to learn how to feel, and

how to regulate one’s feelings. How might Smith’s behavior come

more closely into line with his principles? Aristotelian virtue theory

speaks directly to this problem, by arguing that we must fight affect

with affect, and habitude with habitude. Smith might discover

someone in the ACLU he deeply admires, and register (perhaps

unconsciously) how this individual conducts herself around others. He

might hear from those who work below her of how warmly they regard

40

her, and notice how much pleasure she gets from engaging in a give-

and-take with people she encounters, high and low. Like all of us, he

will begin to pattern himself, consciously or unconsciously, upon

someone he admires. Like all of us, he will in so doing simulate her

thoughts and feelings as well – and the experience of this simulation

will itself be positive, or rewarding. (Contrast simulating the thoughts

and feelings of someone who treats you, and others, with anger or

disdain.) Moreover, as he unknowingly models her actual conduct in

his own dealings with others, he will find that this, too, is gratifying. To

be welcomed by people, and engage them on terms of mutual respect

and interest, is a rewarding experience in itself. Smith will begin to

find pleasures in activities and relationships he would previously have

found emotionally empty. Like someone learning a second language,

Smith will pick up new habits of interaction and new ways of thinking –

eventually, they will become a habitude, with momentum of its own.

He will have changed how he feels, changing his pleasures and pains

as well as his conduct, so that the changes in behavior will become

self-reinforcing, not self-denying. And, of course, once they have

become an ingrained, habitual way of being, a true habitude, there will

be little need to supply any further motivation in order for them to

operate reliably and effectively in his life.

I have been writing as if all this were unconscious on Smith’s

part, and so it might be. But someone who has learned that he is

41

viewed as cold and uninterested by his fellow workers – perhaps

through an anonymous annual evaluation – can also embark upon such

a campaign of emulation. Given his values, Smith would admire

someone who could former warmer and more respectful relations with

subordinates, and this admiration can affectively empower even

deliberate emulation.

The notion of perceptual affordance helps us understand why

habits of feeling and acting – habitudes, as I have called them – are

critical in moral psychology. We see this most readily in the case of

the simplest habits. Unlike principles and pronouncement, habits tend

to be “self-applying”. That is, their very nature is to be cued to

particular, often recurring, features of one’s situation, and to yield by

default a reliable response to it. If I have the habit of brushing my

teeth at bedtime, I don’t need remember to do this, or to feel any

special motivation, or to engage in an act of will, in order to get me to

carry out this small but worthy task. The habit itself will remind me,

cued by the characteristic activities of preparing to go to bed, and will

carry me forward through the task. I need not adhere conscientiously

to a principle of oral hygiene in order to be slightly discomfited

(“pained”, so to speak) if, when bedtime comes, I cannot find my

toothbrush. Nor do I need such adherence to a principle to give me a

certain satisfaction (“pleasure”), if I do find it, and manage to brush my

teeth after all. Individuals who exercise regularly will also be

42

stimulated by the normal sequence of the day’s events to take

exercise at the usual times, and will feel “out of sorts” when they

cannot. Through these good habits, we rely less upon the

uncertainties of will and motive, and more upon expectations gradually

“dyed into” into the organism. This is no less true of various worthy

habits of social comportment. As George Eliot wrote, habit is, “That

beneficent harness of routine, which enables silly men to live

respectably”.

But what if we are not lucky enough to have been well trained in

youth, or to find worthy models to emulate? What if we are faced with

a difficult challenge, equipped with manifestly bad habits, and trying to

improve? Experts on nutrition find that a better predictor of good

dietary practices in adulthood than possessing an active concern with

diet is whether one has grown up in a household where meals are

regular and social, and food is diverse and largely home-cooked. Such

individuals tend to expect diversity and freshness in eating, and to

prefer social eating, and to be discomfited when these are missing –

they have “good eating habits” – even if they pay relatively little

attention to food in their lives. But suppose one is not so lucky, and

faces the very great difficulty of controlling one’s weight, a vital

problem in a world beset with the diseases of obesity and affluence. It

would seem in this circumstance, one has no choice but to rely upon

principle or resolution and will power. Recall those who children who in

43

pre-school refrained from eating one marshmallow in order to have

two. And recall their successes later in life. Among these are better

success at weight control. So it would appear that the secret to good

conduct in this case does lie in character – in will power – for isn’t that

precisely the trait they manifested so early on, and that served them

so well throughout life?

That is not at all how Mischel and others have analyzed his

results. Children who were successful in delaying gratification did not

rely upon steely well, but upon cognitive and affective strategies to

redirect their attention from the tempting marshmallow, or to re-

interpret the marshmallow in a way that reduced its salience as a

tempting food. Successful children turned around in their chairs, sang

songs, closed their eyes, told themselves stories, imagined the

marshmallow a cloud, and so on. This is not “will power” as we

ordinarily understand it, but something quite different – a form of

flexible cognitive-affective adaptation to a situation in which a

tempting stimulus is “too hot”, so that one must change its valence or

reduce its power. Since his original experiments, Mischel has tried

teaching such simple strategies, even to children who initially showed

almost no ability to resist the marshmallow. For example, the simple

suggestion that a child to draw a frame around the marshmallow and

think of it as a picture enabled some children to increase their delay of

gratification from 15 seconds to 15 minutes. What is being controlled

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here is not the will, but one’s attention and ideation, with effects upon

one’s feeling and motivation. One is engaging in the regulation of

affect by using one’s mind’s broader resources. All of us understand

this at some level – for example, when we take care not to fill the

house with attractive goodies that would elicit immediate interest and

test our resolve. By structuring our environment, we thereby also

shape how we will feel.

How is all this relevant to the new personality theory? A

monumental number of studies of dieting have led in the main to the

disappointing conclusion that dieting is not an effective strategy for

long-term weight loss. At best, it tends to result in temporary

reduction in weight, which is typically regained within a year or two.

There are a great many factors at work against the dieter, not least

that his metabolism may shift to higher efficiency mode when he

manages to restrict his intake, thus tending to cancel any positive

effect. But one researcher has found that a very simple shift in

technique can enable people to control their food intake more

effectively.

Peter Gollwitzer and colleagues have been interested in the

effectiveness of rules in controlling behavior. They have found that

general rules and imperatives are not especially helpful. A dieter who

gives herself the imperative, “No snacking between meals!”, is found

to have less success than a dieter who says to herself, “If it’s before

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12:00 noon, [or before 7:00 pm], don’t go into the kitchen”. Similarly,

students score better on timed tests if they are encouraged to give

themselves the action-plan, “If I can’t answer a question in two tries, I

will leave it for later, and refocus on to the next question”, rather than

the general rules, “Stay focused!” or “Don’t waste time on questions

you can’t answer”.26 Gollwitzer has found, in effect, that situation-

specific and situation-cued “if ... then ...” plans can be much mroe

effective in self-regulation than general rules. Moreover, these “if ...

then ...” plans tend to be retained, so that individuals continue to show

beneficial effects a number of months later. Neurological evidence

suggests that “if ... then ...” plans can become “automatized” within

the brain, and therefore operate more reliably – that is, they become

habit-like. By contrast, open-ended imperatives tend to lead to

conflicts within the control system and less reliable behavior – like the

test-taker who is torn between “Stay focused!” and “Don’t waste time

on questions you cannot answer!”27 Research in artificial intelligence

has also shown the effectiveness of programming that uses a

multiplicity of situationally-specific, default “if ... then ...” subroutines,

rather than a master decision-theoretic program that inventories

alternative acts and attempts to calculate the expected value of each

before executing. The latter sort of program quickly overwhelms

26 Peter Gollwitzer, “Self-Control by If-Then Planning”, presentation to the Research Seminar in Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 16 March 2009.27 Gollwitzer (2009).

46

computational capacity of any system, whereas the former allows the

artificial device or system to take an action promptly upon a receiving

an input, compare the outcome with some target value, and then

either continue or switch to a different contingency, accordingly.

Return to the earlier challenge of apologizing well. How might

habit help here? In the wake of such arguments, one often thinks, “I

should really be more gracious and forgiving”. Perhaps one will even

express this as a resolve or resolution, to “Be more gracious!” or “Be

more forgiving!”, or “Treat others as you would have yourself be

treated!” Unfortunately, general resolutions of this kind are unlikely to

have much traction in the heat of an argument. Nothing will

automatically call them to mind, or give them a concrete implication

for action if it were to come to mind. General principles do not cue us

as to when to apply them, and typically they require a good deal of

interpretation to see how to they are to be applied. But suppose a

wise uncle has told you, “Whenever I’m about to apologize, before I let

the words leave my mouth, I stop and listen to what I’m about to say.

And I think, is that a real apology?” This action-plan is cued to a

specific circumstance, and it redirects your attention away from your

own anger and toward your partner’s point of view. In effect, it

triggers empathetic simulation of your partner’s situation and feelings,

and this momentarily checks the natural rush of self-righteous thought

and anger that fuels an escalating argument. By redirecting attention

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to the goal of apologizing, rather than trying to score points or avoid

making concessions, it engages different feelings, reframing the

situation at the non-conscious, affective level that will actually shape

the spirit as well as the word of your apology. As a result, you will be

more likely to apologize well, in a way that conduces toward de-

escalation and resolution, and invites acceptance. If such an action-

plan becomes a habit, then one can acquire the habit of making

apologies that work28. And the habit of making apologies that work can

be part of an array of habits that constitute the habitude of fighting

well.

The insight of virtue theory is that, ultimately, one cannot

counter bad ways of being – mauvaises habitudes – with will power and

principle. The rapid, self-applying, and self-gratifying character of bad

habitudes will tend to win the overwhelming number of such contests

in the long run. One must instead find ways – such as empathetic

modeling, mastering techniques, and modifying one’s environment – to

call upon the resources of affect and habit constructively, lest they be

your undoing.

28 This isn’t purely speculative. Ethan Kross and colleagues have found that recasting the viewpoint with which one represents a situation can be very effective in changing its emotional valence and helping one to cope adaptively. For example, someone who is having trouble with obsessive recollections of a humiliating incident can much reduce this tendency, and help regulate negative affect, by imaginatively picturing the original humiliating episode from a spectator’s point of view. See E. Kross and O. Ayduk, “Facilitating Adaptive Emotional Analysis: Distinguishing Distanced-Analysis of Depressive Experiences from Immersed-Analysis and Distraction”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 924-938.

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Those drawn to a picture of sovereign reason guiding our lives on

the basis of principle will likely find this notion of habitude, of acquiring

and acting from complex arrays of habit, distasteful. It seems like a

way of transferring authority from the self to a set of automatized sub-

routines, a loss of autonomy. I have argued elsewhere why I think this

is not so.29 And I am also struck with how false it would be to say that,

because fluent speech is the exercise of a habitude acquired by

modeling, training, and practice, rather than by a self-conscious and

deliberate application of principle, it is somehow “robotic”, mechanical,

or fails to express one’s individuality or “real self”. The Ancients

found it natural to compare virtue with excellence in a technical area

(techné), such as a skilled trade or a sport. In my experience, people

who exhibit impressive skills – craftsmen, athletes, musicians,

mariners, teachers, researchers, managers – have developed

habitudes, in fact, an enormous number of “good habits” of the sort I

have described. They do not rely heavily on abstract principles, or

continual exercise of reflection and will power, to do the daily work of

exercising or elaborating their skills. This is unremarkable, since, for

most of us, the bulk of what we do in any given day will be a matter of

habit rather than active reflection, choice, and willfulness. Why should

it be otherwise with the most skilled, who know how to do what they do

so much better and more intuitively than the rest of us? To achieve a

29 “Practical Competence and Fluent Agency”, in D. Sobel and S. Wall (eds.), Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

49

very high level of accomplishment typically means having better

habits, not greater freedom from the habitual.

Talk of the habitual often excites the notion of mindlessness –

“unthinking routine”. And it is true that a major function of habit is to

relieve the mind of certain burdens so that it can focus on other things.

But recall that we have been discussing habits that are situationally

cued rather than simply routine. This makes them sensitive to the

environment and capable of refinement – like fluent speech. Thus, an

expert athlete or craftsperson does not respond in the same way,

regardless of circumstance. On the contrary, part of expertise is

acquiring “facility” with a very great range of circumstances – so that

one has appropriately different ways of responding intuitively in all

manner of relevant situations. This requires an increasingly fine

discrimination of situations, a practiced eye and trained responses.

That is, an increasingly elaborate and well-adjusted set of “if ... then

...” dispositions.

The root of the English word ability is the same as the root of

habit, and the two are in psychological fact closely related. Still, a

skilled person must not be a prisoner of habit – if a genuinely

anomalous or novel situation presents itself, she must be able to break

from ordinary responses. But this, too, can be done well or badly.

Doing it well is likely to call for good habits for dealing with the stress

and demands of anomalous or novel situations. All of us have to hope

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we will have such abilities when faced with a difficult situation. If we

are among the very skilled who have come to have them as second

nature, so much the better. This does not look like mindlessness to

me.

A second cheer: Eudaimonism

About my second cheer for virtue theory I can be – happily! – brief.

Classical virtue theory embodied an idea sometimes called

‘eudaimonism’, according to which living well and doing well are not at

odds, but rather come together in the life of an excellent or virtuous

individual. The aim of ethical theory was to give an account of the

best way to live, and to show how leading this sort of life was best not

only for the individual, but for his family, friends, and the polis. The life

of a bad person was not to be envied, and a good person was not only

someone you’d want to know, but someone you’d want to be.

Today’s ethical theorists are less sanguine about this sort of

uniting of all of the goods. Too often, it seems, virtuous action is its

own punishment: standing up for what’s right or doing what’s best

regularly collides with powerful interests bent on other purposes, and

is personally and socially “inconvenient”, to put it mildly. English-

language moral and political thought from Hobbes on has tended to

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take it for granted that the natural condition of most of us, even if we

are fortunate enough to live together peaceably, is fundamentally

competitive. And getting ahead – amassing wealth, power,

recognition, or status – seems to have no intrinsic connection with

moral worth.

Part of what is misleading about this way of looking at things,

however, is that the relationship between, for example, wealth and

income, on the one hand, and life satisfaction, on the other, is hardly

linear. Indeed, an increasing body of evidence indicates that, at least

in terms of so-called “subjective well-being” (how happy people report

themselves as being, or how satisfied they claim to be with their lives

as a whole), once people have reached a fairly modest level of material

affluence, the contribution of more wealth or income to the perceived

quality of life makes falls off dramatically. On average, law school

professors report greater subjective well-being than clerks in cubicles,

but foregoing a career as a corporate lawyer with a salary in seven

figures in order to hold a law school position at one quarter of this

salary, is not sacrificing one’s life happiness. And despite a near-

tripling of the material standard of living in the United States since

1946, the average level of reported well-being has not increased.30

So we have reason to be suspicious of the idea that the road to

happiness is paved with material wealth. Indeed, there is an 30 For much relevant data, see D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz (eds.), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).

52

interesting body of literature suggesting that the experiences

individuals enjoy most intensely are not leisured, luxurious

consumption of the sort featured in advertising, but focused activity or

social interaction that engages us mentally and physically, and enables

us to exercise a range of our abilities in a way that involves mastering

challenges. Performing in a local theater, orchestra, or choir, for

example, or successfully repairing your motorcycle, or dancing, or

engaging in a lively conversation at a dinner party with friends.31

Aristotle appears to have been vindicated: we seem to find our

greatest happiness engaging in activity in accord with our full nature

as rational, social animals. This suggests that we might revisit the

doctrine of eudaimonism in a modern setting.

The field of “positive psychology” was founded in recent decades

with the aim of creating a body of knowledge about the various ways in

which, and means by which, lives can go well – from subjective

measures of the felt quality of experience to objective indicators of

success in health, school, work, sports, and relationships. Although it

is early to draw broad conclusions, a number of large-scale studies of

have given evidence for the conclusion that, in the workplace,

individuals experience the greatest value in their work when

professional requirements and incentives are aligned with doing work

that they can see as of high quality and integrity, and useful to the

31 Mihalyi Csikznetmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

53

wider society.32 More generally, it appears that people gain a greater

sense of meaning from what they do, perform it better, and find it

more rewarding, when they see it as coherent with their underlying

values and contributory in some way to the world.33

Of particular importance in all this positivity is our social nature.

Few if any of us have aims, ambitions, values, or aspirations that can

be understood without seeing us as operating in a world of other

beings to whom what we does matters. The situationalist literature in

cognitive social science makes it clear how much we take our cue from

those around us, even when we are being oppositional or competitive.

After all, what would be the meaning of being a revolutionary or a

champion, or an avant gardiste overthrowing all convention in a

solitary world? As far as I can see, there is no magical world-telos or

World Spirit that guarantees virtuous action will be rewarded. But the

idea that doing well and doing good might find some common ground

in the conditions for a human life full of purpose and reward – that is

something for which we having an increasing weight of evidence.

Most of us find ourselves with a strong desire to see ourselves as

good. This can be the source of a great deal of mischief and self-

deception, since it leads us into all manner of rationalizations. But

rationalization is only necessary if we perceive, perhaps unconsciously,

32 See the publications of the “Good Work Project”, especially Howard Gardner, Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (New York: Basic Books, 2001).33 Gardner, et al (2001).

54

an incoherence between what is good and what we do. Moreover, few

of us would attest that the process of rationalization is one of life’s

greatest satisfactions. Compare this with a situation that needs no

rationalization – devoting a weekend day to helping build housing for

the homeless, helping a student finally understand the difference

between a derivative and an integral, fixing the jammed door that has

been annoying the whole family, holding a successful party, or

returning a lost wallet. Martin Seligman, a prominent researcher in

positive psychology, reports that the most reliable way to improve

someone’s mood – even when that person is chronically depressed – is

for her to do an unanticipated bit of good for someone else.34

Notice that we are speaking here entirely of actions done in a

certain spirit, not of any underlying moral personality or global

character. All of us, again, excepting a very few, have the capacity for

such actions well within our reach. And, depending upon the

environment, we will find such actions come more or less easily and

naturally. A marriage, office, sports club, community, or army platoon

can meet incredible challenges with resilience – or collapse in the face

of a minor crisis. Very good predictors of success are whether the

members of the group have mutual respect, a willingness to sacrifice,

a strong sense of shared purpose, and a sense of being able to make

34 Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness (New York: Free Press, 2002). For recent experimental work, see E.W. Dunn, L.B. Aknin, and M.I. Norton, “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness”, Science 319 (2008): 1687-1688.

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best use of their talents.35 Unsurprisingly, these very same factors

correlate well with the level of subjective well-being experienced within

the group, as well as objective measures of health or group

accomplishment. Unsurprisingly, too, these are sorts of groups and

relationships we find it attractive to be in. At least at this level, doing

well and living well can cohere with some regularity – for people of

perfectly ordinary character, not moral titans. Solitary, self-sacrificing

virtuous action in the face of a hostile or uncomprehending society

may afford one of the most remarkable testimonies to the human

spirit, but the eudaimonist will quickly point out that this is not a

sustainable picture of morality.

If we could set our sights not on Virtue, but on the many

unextraordinary forms of virtuous action that are within our reach, and

that would add a bit of purpose and pleasure to our lives, we might

even begin to make something of a habit of it. And as Aristotle

reminds us, once something has become a habit, it can generate

reward and motivation of its own, increasing its ease and fluency, and

lessening the demand upon will. In this way, too, understanding the

nature and operation of affect and habit is essential to understanding

how such beings as ourselves – faults, weaknesses, and all – might

manage to live well, and do good.

35 See Gardner, et al. (2001).

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