Kierkegaard's "Mystery Of Unrighteousness" In The Information Age

Brian T. Prosser , Fordham University
Andrew Ward , The Georgia Institute of Technology

1

"The world's fundamental misfortune," the 19th century Søren Kierkegaard writes, "is ...the fact that with each great discovery ...the human race is enveloped ... in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody's, which belong to none and yet to all." [Kierkegaard (1967), #2650] The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having "destitute" relations to one another. As exemplified for Kierkegaard by the popular press, the uses of technologies not only transform face-to-face relationships, they create masks behind which people hide from one another. It is this latter point that is especially important. For Kierkegaard, what ultimately drives people toward certain technological practices is fear. "What rules the world," Kierkegaard writes, "is... the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another.... Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power... [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it." [Kierkegaard (1967), #2166] The use of technology to mediate communication, claims Kierkegaard, provides people with the means to escape, or at least hide from those aspects of interpersonal relationships they most fear.

This tendency to "hide" behind the impersonal masks provided by technologically mediated communication reflects, for Kierkegaard, a flawed attitude regarding what is most essential to veracious communication practices. The attitude is one that he claims characterizes an age "which reckons as wisdom that which is truly the mystery of unrighteousness, viz. that one need not inquire about the communicator, but only about the communication, the objective only". [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.44] Such an approach to the communication process, one that displaces the communicator from his or her place of centrality, undermines an appropriate sense of what it means to participate in such processes. Accordingly, an impersonal means of communication transforms the sense of ownership in the information being exchanged - that is, it transforms our sense of authorship. As Kierkegaard writes:

... in our age what is an author? An author is often only an x, even when his name is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual - perhaps also for fear of the control which in practical life must always be exercised over everyone who wishes to teach others, to see whether his personal existence comports with his communication.... [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.45]

Although the prose may be somewhat oblique, Kierkegaard is making two important, interrelated points. The first is that traditional face-to-face encounters between individuals structure the dynamics of communication in ways that permit the possibility of genuine human relationships. For instance, face-to-face communications often permit the immediate and dynamic clarification of the appropriateness of a particular piece of information. Moreover, the contexts of face-to-face communications generally impose a stronger concern for the veracity of information and instil in the participants a greater sense of responsibility both for what is communicated and how it is communicated. For Kierkegaard such elements are essential to our most "important" and characteristically human experiences. Kierkegaard's second point is that humans are often fearful of their own individuality as revealed in such exchanges. For this reason people seek to change the dynamics of such exchanges so as to hide that part of themselves they fear to reveal. Thus, a principal motivation for the development of technology is largely negative; the use of technology to mediate communication permits a kind of interaction in which the participants can hide or mask their individuality. It is in this respect that the use of technology to hide or mask individuality represents, for Kierkegaard, a fear of, and an attempt to flee from what it is that is most important and characteristic of our own humanity. As Kierkegaard writes:

The highest triumph of all errors is to acquire an impersonal means of communication and then anonymity.... [A]ll true communication is personal.... But error is always impersonal.... Without the daily press and without anonymity, there is still always consolation that there will be a definite, flesh-and-blood individual person who voices the error.... But it is frightful that someone who is no one (consequently has no responsibility) can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility and with the aid of this dreadful disproportional means of communication.... [Kierkegaard (1967), #2152]

Like other writers after him, Kierkegaard sees in technology an inherent tendency to transform human experience. This is an important observation about technology, but it is not one that, by itself, distinguishes Kierkegaard as a critic of technology. What Kierkegaard understands that most other writers do not, or do so only in an unfocused way, is that the impetus to use technology is driven by an ambivalence in human nature. On the one hand we are driven to interact with other people and to find a kind of identity and validation in our interactions with them. It is this aspect of human nature, and the ability of technology to satisfy this desire, that partly accounts for our willingness to embrace technologies such as the Internet. On the other hand, we are also driven to try to control and hide important aspects of ourselves that, in the act of communication, reveals us to others as the individuals we are. Thus, in the use of technology to mediate our communications with one another, what particularly concerns us is that the use of technology permits the reconstruction of human relationships devoid of the experiences most important to our humanity. In this respect, the use of technology is driven by a fear of, and an attempt to escape from the most important aspects of our own humanity as realised though our face-to-face interactions with others. For these reasons Kierkegaard writes that, "[F]rom fear of the others, one dares not to be an I and therefore strives to become an impersonal something.... This again has led to anonymity." [Kierkegaard (1967), #3219] The dynamic force behind contemporary technology is, for Kierkegaard, fear, which turns the impersonal, anonymity-enhancing powers of technology into an attraction.

It is the possibilities of anonymity permitted by the use of technology that, as Kierkegaard sees it, removes communication from what he refers to as "The Situation". As Kierkegaard writes, "[T]o a discourse, to a word, also belongs a situation during which it appears or is spoken. If the situation is different, one does not say the same thing but something else... even though the [discourse] is the same." [Kierkegaard (1967), #4058] The Situation represents for Kierkegaard that quality of individual existence that distinguishes individuality from the "crowd" or "the public". In "The Situation" you and I have the possibility of having an encounter not as anonymous agents, but as people with distinctive, accessible histories. Because of this, communication within "The Situation" can become individualised - my words can become words meant for you and words that you can recognise as being from me. When communication is removed from this context, the identity of those communicating becomes a mere abstraction, and words cease to belong to anyone in particular.

Accordingly, the appeal of "desituated" communications contexts correlate to a diminished context within which interpersonal relationships occur. Kierkegaard stresses this when he suggests that "Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction 'the public', consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organisation.... The real moment in time and the real situation being simultaneous with real people... that is what helps to sustain the individual. But the existence of a public produces neither a situation nor simultaneity." [Kierkegaard (1962b), pp.60-1] Hence, in an exchange lacking the content distinctive of face-to-face encounters, Kierkegaard goes on to say, "all personal communication and all individuality have disappeared; no one says I or speaks to a Thou.... It is the old sophistry of being able to talk - but not of holding a dialogue. For dialogue immediately posits: Thou and I, and such questions as require 'yes' and 'no'...." [Kierkegaard (1967), #673] For instance, the words of an e-mail message often arrive either without a context for authentic interpretation, or else within a fabricated context that distorts, masks, or otherwise hides the real identity of the other. In either case, impersonal, technologically-generated contexts become, for Kierkegaard, a "miasma" that offers a convenient escape for those who are unwilling to accept the often challenging, sometimes even distressing, contingencies and expectations that are unavoidable in face-to-face "dialogue" between individuals.

2

Where then does all this leave us? We suggest that Kierkegaard is honing in on an important sense in which technologically mediated communications serve up a measured reality - a reality that is significantly determined by one's imagination and personal desires. In this respect a Kierkegaardian analysis of technologically mediated communication offers an insightful explanation of why Maia Szalavitz writes in a recent Newsweek editorial that "I was immediately hooked by [the Internet...] a world where what you write - not how you look or sound - is who you are. It had definite appeal to someone who has always found socialising difficult." [Szalavitz, 1999] Use of Internet based communication exchanges, such as those offered by e-mail or "chat-rooms", permits the participants to simultaneously mask themselves and each other. In face-to-face encounters one is revealed because of the uncontrolled immediacy and dynamism of the situation. Moreover, the communicative cues provided by how one looks, how one sounds, one's body language and a variety of other embodied signals provides a context that is doubly revelatory. It presents one as an individual intentionally choosing to communicate a message, while at the same time presenting a message that is not wholly a self-conscious product of one's desires and wishes to be revealed in a particular way. It is just here that the true "communicative power" of the Internet and similar kinds of technologies reveals itself. The communicative mediation of the Internet permits the participants to reduce communication contexts to a restricted subset of the qualities that constitute traditional face-to-face encounters. In effect, use of technologies to mediate communication permits the creation of "measured" realities. Furthermore, this ability to withhold from others those parts of ourselves that we may, in some sense, be uncomfortable with while at the same time emphasising only those aspects that most appeal to our own self-perceptions, allows virtual communication to serve up a reality measured according to our imagination and desires. For example, the use of e-mail allows people the opportunity to realise the desire to make of themselves wholly what they want others to believe about them (as, for example, the commentator above wishes to make of herself what she writes "not how [she] looks or sounds"). These "measured realities" are constituent elements of the "miasma" that Kierkegaard describes as built upon "fantastic" abstraction.

It is important to note here that the appeal of technology's measuring effect is not limited to self-perception. There are examples that indicate a tendency to want to reduce others to a mere subset of the qualities that constitute our face-to-face experience of them. Sherry Turkle offers a dramatic example in her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Turkle writes:

Peter, a twenty-eight-year-old lecturer in comparative literature, thought he was in love with a MUDding partner who played Beatrice to his Dante (their characters' names). Their relationship was intellectual, emotionally supportive, and erotic. Their virtual sex life was rich and fulfilling ... Peter flew from North Carolina to Oregon to meet the woman behind Beatrice and returned home crushed. "[On the MUD] [said Peter] I saw in her what I wanted to see. Real life gave me too much information." [Turkle (1995), p. 207]

In this anecdote we once again see a measuring and reconfiguration of reality through technological mediation. Computer-mediated communication restricted the nature of this situation to an extent where the protagonist was led to say that "real life" somehow gives "too much information"! In this case, it is significant that real life gives too much information about the other person with whom the protagonist communicates. The idea of an aversion to the "full reality" of other persons is an important aspect of Kierkegaard's concern over our tendency to indulge a potential for measuring reality. It is "[F]rom fear of the others," he tells us, that "one dares not to be an I and therefore strives to become an impersonal something...." [Kierkegaard (1967), #3219] But, as this statement suggests, both potential effects of technological mediation - the restriction of one's own self-presentation and the restriction one's perception of another - are connected in important ways.

By the fact that technologically-mediated communication so affects what may be both given and received of the persons participating in the communication, the communication situation becomes quite malleable. Of course, perhaps there are communication situations where the kind of malleability described is not problematic. Kierkegaard has expressed his concern in terms of the disappearance of "personal communication" and "individuality". But, not all communications are of a "personal" nature. For example, suppose that all I am interested in is a statement of the facts. I go to the Internet, pick up a phone, or otherwise access an information source about something that may affect me personally - such as the weather or sports scores - but about which it is neither necessary nor important that I have a personal relationship with the source of information. What this points out is that there are limitations on the kinds of communicative exchanges for which the Kierkegaardian critique is relevant. The Kierkegaardian critique ought not lead us to reject all technologically mediated communications, though it certainly should lead us to question the purpose of all such communications and what it is that we expect to realise by their use. What is more, it is conceivable that there are situations where a distorted sociality is the only option and is, consequently, better than no sociality at all. For example, maybe a person with an extreme social-anxiety disorder finds the mediated communication context to be a viable form of social interaction whereas, by contrast, face-to-face encounters are so distressing that the person would tend to avoid social interaction altogether. Such possibilities encourage ambivalence regarding the extent to which information technologies may serve as a social prosthesis, on the one hand, or serve to enable anti-sociality - or at least a distorted sociality - on the other. Kierkegaard's speculations about "the inventions which really please mankind" [see Kierkegaard (1967), #3224] seek to emphasise an all-too-present danger in the latter possibility. It is the tendency toward such distorted sociality, whether by use of technology or by other means, which Kierkegaard has in mind when he talks about a "fear of humanity" that "rules the world." [Kierkegaard (1967), #2166]

3

As the variety of information technologies continue to multiply and public access becomes more widespread, the social landscape also changes. Perhaps the greatest changes have been affected by the prevalence of increasingly easy and inexpensive public access to the Internet and its information resources. More and more activities that traditionally relied on face-to-face encounters are being replaced by "virtual" encounters that take place within a computer generated "world". No longer is the personal computer merely a glorified typewriter or adding machine, it is increasingly becoming a "virtual bank", a "virtual shopping centre", a "virtual café", a "virtual auction house" and a "virtual classroom".

Moreover, the use of e-mail and other Internet based communication modalities has continued the process begun with the telegraph and telephone; the movement away from time-intensive travel so as to communicate face-to-face in favour of the immediacy of technologically mediated communication amongst geographically distributed participants. As we have seen, Kierkegaard's concern is that we often allow such technological replacement of standard face-to-face activities not because we fail to realise that the number of immediate face-to-face interactions is diminishing, but because the reduction is taking place. Recall in this context the case from Szalavitz where the commentator located the appeal of her Internet experience in an ability to escape the embodiment that made her "socialising difficult". We recognise that people often appreciate not having to deal with the "difficulties" that traditional relational contexts require. The cyber-personae we are free to create in the "virtual world" may sometimes seem to "fit" the ideals of our imagination more comfortably than the bodies we are born into. This raises an important question: Isn't there something "healthy" about learning to deal with the difficulties of face-to-face communication? Questions such as this encourage us to reconsider Kierkegaard's fundamental assumption that there are some experiences - perhaps constituted by, or inherent in traditional face-to-face activities - which simply cannot be captured in and conveyed by technologically mediated communications. As Kierkegaard's "fear of humanity" thesis suggests, perhaps some of our attempts to reach beyond the legitimate framework of such relationships arise not because we are trying to preserve the relationships, but because we are trying to subvert them and escape them. Consequently, Kierkegaard challenges us to question our motives for wanting to displace such activities.

In Kierkegaard there is a definite assumption that such transformations of social activity are often motivated by a desire to subordinate individual persons to public opinion - "the crowd". In this regard it is helpful to compare Kierkegaard's concerns with those of Marcuse. For example, consider Marcuse's assessment of "technologized" society as described in passages like the following:

...[T]he existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to external exigencies - an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behaviour... designates the private space in which man may become and remain "himself". Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality... The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with society as a whole.... [Marcuse (1964), p.10]

This sounds very much like a description of the faceless public personae, devoid of the particularity of responsible individuals, that Kierkegaard sees increasingly serving as proxy for personal commitment. [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.113] Nonetheless, even though this Marcusian account squares nicely with the superficial contours of a Kierkegaardian analysis, Kierkegaard's suggestion that there is a secret attraction toward this condition that comes from within the individual (i.e., the "fear" suggested above) is a significant departure from the Marcusian picture. If Kierkegaard is correct, there is a psychological drive that emanates from within the individual that draws him or her toward the measured realities allowed for by technological mediation. Thus, from the Kierkegaardian point of view, it is insufficient to describe "technological reality" as "invading" the private space that is the individual. Instead, we should see such technological reality encroaching on and changing the individual's interactions with other people more by invitation than by invasion. As such, a Kierkegaardian perspective would also be suspicious of the claim that technologization occurs through the manipulation and indoctrination of the individual by some outside vested interest. The technological society does play an enabling role for the "fearful" individual who chooses to hide behind the fantastic abstractions provided by technology; but from the Kierkegaardian perspective technology per se is less deterministic than it seems to be for others who offer similar pictures of "technological reality".

Furthermore, though Marcusian-like concerns over the "whittling down of private space by technological reality" is one aspect of Kierkegaard's consideration, a Kierkegaardian analysis is not limited to this concern. Kierkegaard writes that:

As a matter of fact, the inventions which really please mankind are either tinged with the rebellion of the race against God (the tower of Babel, railroads, mass-mindedness) or, if they are related to the individual, they are inventions which satisfy his boyishness. Yes, school boys find great sport in being able to say something without the teacher's being able to discover who said it. Boyishness is related to the impersonal, and it is impersonality which pleases man - that is, personally being impersonal, being a person but without any danger or responsibility, being an ill-tempered, malicious person perhaps, venting all one's spite - but anonymously or by ventriloquism. [Kierkegaard (1967), #3224]

Though the technologically mediated contexts we use to revise and restrict our social interactions often serve to subordinate individuality to "mass-mindedness", Kierkegaard also suggests that the same practices often serve to indulge a kind of irresponsible childishness. Such childishness fosters a flippant, sometimes harmful attitude toward the information shared within a particular communication. Hubert Dreyfus has referred to this aspect of Kierkegaard's analysis as a concern over the "cultivation of curiosity" which manifests itself in a "failure to distinguish the important from the trivial...." Dreyfus goes on to warn that "[W]hat Kierkegaard envisaged... is now being realised on the World Wide Web." [Dreyfus (1999)]

Within this context, we want to stress that Kierkegaard describes the same "fear" as underlying both motives - i.e., the tendency toward "mass-mindedness" on the one hand, and "boyishness" on the other. In either case the appeal of technological mediation lies in the ability to extract oneself from the "difficulties" and discomforts that sometimes arise within the open-ended character of face-to-face interaction. One way to relieve oneself of this open-endedness is to replace the face-to-face context with the "measured realities" made possible by "virtual communications". However, at the heart of Kierkegaard's critique of technologically mediated communication is the recognition that "difficulties and discomforts" of face-to-face contexts often constitute the sense of mutual responsibility that are crucial to many social activities.

Without the face-to-face confrontation, self-expression that would otherwise be presumed to reflect one's true personality becomes obscured by the possibilities of "impersonal" media and childish "ventriloquism". As Kierkegaard states the problem, "to discern 'a witness for the truth' his personal mode of existence must be ethically examined in relation to what he says, to see if the personal existence is an expression of what he says - though this is a consideration which the systematising and lecturing tendency and the general want of character in our generation has set aside." [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.130] That is, without the shared context of "The Situation", there is the increased risk of mistaking trivial self-expression for sincere commitment, and mistaking a "merely" manufactured image of oneself or another for the "real" persons that would ground a face-to-face encounter.

If, as people other than Kierkegaard have agreed, technologically-mediated contexts really do foster a more impersonal atmosphere of communication, and if Kierkegaard is right that such impersonality and anonymity diminish important aspects of interpersonal relationships, then we should ask why we increasingly allow technology to transform our world in such ways. Kierkegaard's claim of a psychological attraction toward anonymity and interpersonal isolation - an attraction that comes from within the individual - suggests that it is insufficient to describe "technological reality" as "invading" the private space that is the individual. Anonymity is not something forced upon people by a society's adoption of a particular technology. It is not something forced upon people by the changing economics of information exchange. For Kierkegaard there is always complicity involved in the way we allow ourselves to be transformed by technological society. Technology, even in its negative forms, enters our lives as much by invitation as by invasion and imposition. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Often claims are made that communication technologies such as those provided by use of the Internet will "draw people out of their shells" and will create communities of vibrant, socially enabled citizens. Following Kierkegaard, what we are suggesting is that such claims rest on an unexamined acceptance of the motivations that lead people to participate in these technologically mediated exchanges. From a Kierkegaardian perspective, the use of technology to facilitate and mediate our interactions with other people plays an enabling role for the "fearful" individual in each of us who chooses to hide behind the facades we created through the use of that technology.

4

In conclusion, in our Kierkegaardian analysis of technologically mediated communications we have drawn on examples where there is an obvious disjunction between the attitudes toward and expectations for social interaction that persons had for their online personae versus their real-world exchanges. But, to go along with examples like Turkle's, where "real life" disappoints relative to images developed online, there are ample instances where online encounters have opened the way for fulfilling face-to-face relationships. [see Baker, A. (1998)] It is important, however, to note that the ultimate criteria for social success or failure is the opportunity to measure the online encounter against the face-to-face encounter. That is, the standard for failure or success was whether life online appropriately corresponds to "real life".

The analysis we offer here does not intend to suggest that we should always expect face-to-face interaction to disappoint the efforts of online social practice. What it does intend to emphasise is the importance of face-to-face encounter for determining the validity of the online interaction. This makes the Kierkegaardian challenge to our technological motives striking. Kierkegaard insists on an essential caveat to society's often unbridled enthusiasm for transferring traditional social contexts into a technologically mediated state. This transference often occurs not as preparation for eventual face-to-face interaction, but rather as a surrogate for it. Thus, the key measure for the social legitimacy (i.e., the face-to-face comparison) is removed from consideration. Take, for example, the recent proliferation of "distance learning" opportunities through which the traditional classroom may be replaced by a "virtual classroom". [Prosser and Ward, 2000] It is often unclear to what extent these "virtual" learning facilities are intended to supplement traditional learning contexts or, by contrast, to supplant them. Whereas computer-mediated-communications may serve as a helpful supplementary pedagogical tool, it seems likely to be inferior as a replacement for the face-to-face interactions of traditional learning contexts.

In this regard, the Kierkegaardian analysis clears space for certain positive suggestions about how best to approach technology as a social medium. Specifically, as technological capacity makes it easier to supplant (rather than merely supplement) traditional social contexts, it becomes increasingly important that considerations for how to preserve a real face-to-face element in social interaction enter into our strategies of technological use and design. To this end, we suggest that the following considerations be taken into account when evaluating the use or potential use of technologically mediated communications such as the Internet:

1. Information Overload - Like newspapers in the 19th century, more modern forms of technologically mediated communications such as the Internet permit and encourage the dissemination of increasing amounts of information. This has two results: (a) The distinction between what is important and trivial, what is private and public, breaks down; (b) The ability of people to discern accurate from inaccurate, veridical accounts from opinions or propaganda breaks down. Both (a) and (b) lead people to take a detached and superficial interest in everything and anything. People take a vicarious interest in the trivial and are willing to pass judgement without any first-hand knowledge. Thus, we need to be mindful of being able to distinguish what is important and what is not, what is truthful and what is not.

2. Anonymity - As we have already noted, the use of technologies such as the Internet greatly enhances the opportunities for anonymity. In the case of the Internet, people can often go "on-line" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and find other on-line personae with whom to exchange information. More importantly, these exchanges can be anonymous with the participants choosing to reveal as much or as little as they want. In this virtual interactive world - what Kierkegaard would call "the Public" [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.54] - anonymity has the tendency of encouraging a lack of seriousness and an erosion of the reasons and desires for responsibility. Thus, we need to carefully reflect on our reasons for engaging in such communications, and not use them as a way of escaping from those qualities that are important to being human beings.

3. The Personal Element in the Formation of Self-Image - In connection with (2), Kierkegaard's principal concern is that genuine/authentic communication involves a personal commitment. In such communication a person both reveals and finds his or her own identity. This last is especially important. If the interactions we have with people via technologically mediated communications are "artificial", arbitrary, and unbounded, then the identity one creates in such dialogues is itself artificial, arbitrary and unbounded - in effect, inauthentic. In part, identities and a sense of self are formed by our relations with one another, and to the extent that such relations are shallow and fractured, so too is our emergent sense of self. Thus, as in (2), we need to carefully reflect on our reasons for engaging in such communications, and not use them as a way of escaping from those qualities that are important to being human beings.

References

Baker, A. (1998), "Cyberspace Couples Finding Romance Online Then Meeting for the First Time in Real Life", CMC Magazine online at http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1998/jul/baker.html accessed 03.22.2001

Dreyfus, H. (1999) "Anonymity Versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet", Ethics and Information Technology, v.1, no.1, 15-21.

Kierkegaard, S. (1962a) The Point of View for My Work as an Author, tr. W. Lowrie, Harper&Row Publishers.

Kierkegaard, S. (1962b) The Present Age, tr. A.Dru, Harper&Row Publishers.

Kierkegaard, S. (1967) Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 7 vols., tr. & ed. Hong & Hong, Indiana University Press. [Note: references are to journal entry numbers, not page numbers.]

Marcuse, H. (1964), One-Dimensional Man, Beacon Press.

Prosser, B.T. and Ward, A. (2000), "Kierkegaard and the Internet: Existential Reflections on Education and Community", Ethics and Information Technology, v.2, no.3, 167-180.

Szalavitz, M. (1999), "Can We Become Caught in the Web?" in Newsweek, December 6.

Turkle, S. (1995), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon and Schuster.

Virtue Ethics (Not Too) Simplified

By: Philip Cafaro, Southwest State University

ABSTRACT: There are two basic types of ethical judgments: deontological judgements that focus on duty and obligation and eudaimonist judgements that focus on human excellence and the nature of the good life. I contend that we must carefully distinguish these two types of judgements and not try to understand one as a special case of the other. Ethical theories may be usefully divided into two main kinds, deontological or eudaimonist, on the basis of whether they take one of the other of these types of judgements as primary. A second important contention, which this paper supports but does not attempt to justify fully, is that neither type of theory trumps the other, nor should we subsume them under some more encompassing ethical synthesis.

Introduction: Virtue Ethics

There are two basic kinds of ethical judgments. The first have to do with duty and obligation. For example: "Thou shalt not kill, lie, or steal." "You just keep your promises." These judgments often uphold minimal standards of conduct and (partly for that reason) assert or imply a moral ‘ought.’ The second kind of judgment focuses on human excellence and the nature of the good life. These judgments employ as their most general terms "happiness," "excellence," and perhaps "flourishing" (in addition to "the good life"). For example: "Happiness requires activity and not mere passive consumption." "The good life includes pleasure, friendship, intellectual development and physical health." I take these to be the two general types of ethical judgment, and all particular ethical judgments to be examples of these. The main contention of this paper is that we must carefully distinguish these two types of judgments, and not try to understand the one as a special case of the other.

Ethical theories may be usefully divided into two main types, deontological or eudaimonist, on the basis of whether they take one or the other of these kinds of judgments as primary. (1) In the main, ancient ethical theories were eudaimonist in both form and content (in the kinds of judgments and terms they took as primary, and in the questions they spent the most time investigating). Most modern ethical theories have been deontological, again in both form and content. (2) Aristotle’s central question is: What is the good life for a human being? Kant and Mill’s central question is: What are our duties to our fellow human beings? My second main contention, which I cannot fully argue for here, is that neither type of theory trumps the other, nor should we attempt to subsume both types under some higher ethical synthesis.

The resurgence of "virtue ethics" in the past fifteen years has been tied in to a number of disparate projects and positions. (3) These have included rejecting the primacy of meta-ethics and the possibility of a moral calculus, and returning to the careful description of concrete moral experience (as in the work of Martha Nussbaum); developing a communitarian ethics, which limits individual rights where these conflict with the common good (Charles Taylor); questioning the scope and importance of deontological moral claims (Bernard Williams); and turning to an historicist, as opposed to an universalist, moral theorizing (Alasdair MacIntyre). (4) Regardless of their ultimate success, these efforts have reinvigorated debate within ethical philosophy and will ultimately strengthen it. Yet important as this has been, the most important consequence of the turn towards virtue ethics has been to reopen Aristotle’s question — What is the good life, and how can I go about living it? — as a major question in philosophical ethics. In reasserting the importance of the realm of judgments concerning our flourishing, excellence and happiness, virtue ethics reclaims for us this neglected half of our ethical lives for intelligent, philosophical consideration.

If we keep this in mind, it will help us avoid some mistakes. For example, for many writers, the most important difference between a virtue ethics and its Kantian and utilitarian counterparts is that virtue ethics is "agent-centered" rather than "act-centered"; (5) this emphasis has led some to develop virtue ethics primarily as a "character ethics." (6) However, a true eudaimonist ethics does not focus narrowly on character, particularly on character understood as something mental or internal, and separable from its various external manifestations. An eudaimonist ethics judges the people we are and the lives we lead. It critically evaluates lifestyles, careers, roles and achievements (as well as individual actions and character). In the end, a comprehensive account of the good life must consider both character and personal achievement, our selves and our creations. (7)

Again, the term "virtue ethics" can mislead if it is taken to mean an exclusive focus on "the virtues": those enduring character traits such as courage and moderation which foster successful achievement and help make a person a good person. Eudaimonist ethics is concerned with such character traits, and also with their opposing vices or deficiencies. But the virtues are properly defined by reference to a conception of the good, successful, or happy life. This is the more basic consideration (and thus this general approach to ethics is aptly labeled "eudaimonist"). (8) Eudaimonist judgments often refer to other aspects of our lives besides virtues and vices.

Again, many contemporary ethicists specify "the virtues" as stable dispositions to act according to duty. (9) This is in line with modern English usage, as the term ‘virtue’ has taken on a moralistic and internal sense. (10) It is helpful here to remember that the Greek term arete, usually translated by our ‘virtue’ is also often aptly translated by ‘excellence.’ In Greek ethical theory, arete embraced both intellectual and moral excellence; in common Greek usage, it embraced intellectual, moral and physical excellence, the excellence of human beings and their creations and achievements, human and non-human excellence. We may use the word ‘virtue’ as we wish, of course. The important point to remember is that a "virtue ethics" which defines virtues as stable dispositions to act according to duty is essentially deontological in content, if not in form. Such theories are not primarily concerned with human excellence, but with human dutifulness. A true eudaimonist ethical theory, contrarily, is concerned with human excellence and the good life. It does not define the good life as the dutiful life, even if it (falsely) equates the two, or (more plausibly) sees dutifulness as a necessary component of the good life. (11)

The phrase "enlightened self-interest" best defines the scope of a properly conceived eudaimonist ethics. (12)While the specification of such enlightened self-interest has until recently been neglected within academic philosophy, it has continued to occupy the thoughts of intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike. In a recent study of the ancient virtue ethics tradition, Julia Annas writes that in our society, we have to turn to popular self-help manuals to find extensive discussion of questions of the best life, self-fulfillment, the proper role of the emotions, personal friendships and commitments, topics which in the ancient world were always treated in a more intellectual way as part of ethics. (13) Along with self-help writers, Annas might have included religious leaders promoting spiritual growth, psychotherapists holding out the hope that we can uncover secrets from our early development that block the way towards happier, more fully integrated adult lives, and many other writers and "service providers." All have more or less explicit understandings of fulfilled or excellent human lives, and conversely of failed, immature, or substandard human lives. All have beliefs about what foils the achievement of a good life, and what sort of knowledge and techniques will help an individual achieve happiness. (So too do medical doctors, whether they treat sick bodies or psyches, and athletic trainers, who seek to improve physical performance.)

A revived virtue ethics may point the way towards a better philosophical ethics; one which includes a "more intellectual" yet still broadly useful consideration of the good life. Like our ancient predecessors, modern ethical philosophers may give good advice to those aspiring to live well. But we are more likely to do so, if we work to clarify and improve our and their eudaimonist judgments, rather than treating virtue ethics as primarily a new way of dealing with the meta-ethical issues which have bedeviled twentieth-century ethics or a new way to speak about moral goodness and other essentially deontological concerns.

Deontological and Eudaimonist Judgments

I began by stating that deontological and eudaimonist judgments should be carefully distinguished. Of course, ethical decisions involve both kinds of judgments, so at some point they must be related, in thought and in action. But these judgments articulate very different aspects of our ethical situation, and previous attempts at comprehensive ethical theories have often mischaracterized one type of judgment in an effort to legitimize the other. For these reasons we should first carefully characterize the two kinds of judgments, keeping an open mind as to how far they may be harmonized and a healthy skepticism regarding all comprehensive theories.

Consider an environmental example. Jim owns a 40-acre stand of second growth forest on his Wisconsin farm. It is a beautiful area, with a brook running through it which Jim, his father and his own sons have often fished. It has been the scene of family walks, birdwatching expeditions, and courtships. It also has been the source for the family’s firewood, and of extra income when sections have been sold and cut from time to time. Now Jim has had an offer from a regional timber buyer for the trees. The money, of course, would come in handy. He has a decision to make.

What might he believe to be his duties in this case? Certainly the duty to provide for his family’s well-being; perhaps also to protect the forest; perhaps to keep the farmstead in the family. He might feel as if he "ought" to do all of these things. These "oughts" limit his choices. Such duties mean that he might not get to do what he wants to do — whether he wants to sell the trees or preserve them.

What is in his "enlightened self interest"? Here he might consider what he could buy with the money from the sale; and also the various activities and enjoyments made possible by living next to a beautiful forest, as compared to living next to cut-over land. He will also consider the happiness of his family as it would be affected by one course of action or the other; and perhaps also the effects on the farmstead itself, both on the forest and on the adjoining lands (perhaps the forest serves to buffer neighboring farmlands from floods and erosion). For these other entities, too, may flourish or fail, excel or decline. (14) All of these considerations might play a part in his judgments on the advisability of one course of action or another.

Clearly there is one decision to be made here (not to say that there are only two choices: perhaps the 40-acres could be harvested in part; harvested in different ways, etc.). Also one family, one farm, and one forest. Jim’s deontological and eudaimonist judgments must both be grounded in the nature of the entities concerned and his relationships to them. But the key point is this: he cannot define his duties in terms of his enlightened self-interest, or vice versa.

Duties cannot be defined in terms of enlightened self-interest. For our duties are not merely to ourselves but to other beings, and their good sometimes conflicts with our own. Jim may come to the conclusion that the course of action which will lead to his own happiness or self-development is to sell the trees and use the money to go to college or buy a new business. Nevertheless he may have a duty to protect them, based on their intrinsic value; on their goodness, which is different than his own. He may, contrarily, decide that his enlightened self-interest dictates protecting the trees and enjoying them in his old accustomed ways. Nevertheless, he may have a duty to sell them in order to support his family. We cannot assume that our self-interest will harmonize with our duties towards others, any more than we can assume they will conflict.

To deny this is to fail to understand the nature of duty. In "Resistance to Civil Government." Henry Thoreau writes that we must consider those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself . . . he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. (15)

The key point here is that duty overrides expediency and self-interest, by definition. This is true, whether or not duty ever calls for the absolute sacrifice of one’s life. It holds regardless of how often duty and expediency do, in fact, conflict. (It also holds, of course, whether or not Thoreau is right in this case, as to the existence of a duty to resist a government which protects slavery and promotes foreign aggression.)

On the other hand, enlightened self-interest cannot be defined by our duties. Even if we exhaustively specified Jim’s duties to himself, his family, his neighbors and his forest, we would not have specified his enlightened self-interest. For assuming that he is in the enviable position of having enough money to support his family without selling the trees, and leaving open the question of whether he has a duty to protect the trees for their own sakes, the question remains: what would be in his best interest? And if we assume that he decides not to sell the trees and instead to protect them, the question remains: how may he best enjoy the forest and get the most out of its presence? (16) Whether the answer involves hunting, fishing and skylarking, or ecological study, or painting and composing poetry, it is clear that none of these activities are duties. Still less can their proper pursuit be explicated in terms of duty. To assume that the best human life is the most dutiful one is to forget that we have freedom as well as constraint in our ethical decisions, legitimate self-interest as well as duties to others, and possibilities for excellence as well as basic injunctions to help and not harm. (17)

However, this leaves Jim with the problem of acting on the basis of these two different sorts of judgments, and the problem can become acute if they push him in opposite directions. For instance, he might come to believe that duty calls for him to preserve the trees, while his own best interest involves selling them. Conversely, he might come to believe that he has a duty to his family to sell the trees (let us say his two children need the money in order to go to college), while his own happiness and the good of the land dictate that he preserve them. How might he resolve such dilemmas?

I believe that we must leave open the possibility that these will be genuine dilemmas, resolvable in action but not in reason. There may be no best choice here, but rather a number of equally choiceworthy possibilities. Certainly choice often involves trade-offs between scarce goods, whether or not we recognize genuine ethical dilemmas. Jim might bow to paternal duty and cut the trees for the sake of his children’s education — but with the understanding that his own happiness will suffer. Or he may believe his own happiness and the preservation of the farm dictate preserving the trees, and do so — but recognize that he is failing to perform a legitimate duty, which his children have a right to demand that he perform.

But it is important to realize that even if this is true in Jim’s case, that is not the equivalent of saying "anything goes" or asserting that all choices are equally good. For we must distinguish cases where duty overrides enlightened self-interest, or vice versa, from cases where one or both are overridden by thoughtlessness or mere swinishness. It is simply not the same case if Jim sells his trees without a thought as to what they have meant to him and his family, or their role in preventing disastrous floods on his farm. Nor is it the same case if he sells them in order to buy a new Lexus, or to pay off his gambling debts, or "to cover each one of his dollars with another." (18) In none of these cases can we dignify his actions with the name of acting from duty or enlightened self-interest.

Furthermore, duty and enlightened self-interest often coincide. It may be that the money Jim would get from selling his trees would not compensate him for the pleasure, health benefits, scientific knowledge, poetic inspiration and cherished associations that he would forego if the forest disappeared; and that the intrinsic value of the forest and its many inhabitants places a duty on him not to harm them unnecessarily. Still, we may fail to do right in such cases, "through mere ignorance and mistake"; through acting complacently in "the ruts of tradition and conformity"; or through "gross feeding": the "betrayal" of our health, ideals and better selves by our "vast abdomens." (19) Here both deontological and eudaimonist considerations will condemn us.

This paper was given at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, in Boston, Massachusetts (August 10-15, 1998).

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Notes

(1) These terms come from the Greek words for necessity and obligation, and happiness, respectively. David Heyd describes this as a difference between deontological and axiological theories: "Generally speaking classical ethics . . . is axiological rather than deontological. It takes as its basic conceptual framework the notions of goodness, virtue, and perfection rather than those of duty, right, and justice. It aims at a definition of the good man and the good for man, rather than at a formulation of a system of interpersonal principles of just and obligatory action." (Supererogation: Its status in ethical theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 36) Charles Larmore makes a similar distinction, following Sidgwick: "The nature of moral value assumes two fundamentally different forms . . . depending on whether the notion of right or the notion of good is thought to be more basic." ("The Right and the Good," Philosophia 20 (1990): 15)

(2) Many philosophers will prefer to divide ethical theories into three basic types: eudaimonist, deontological and utilitarian (Aristotle, Kant, Mill). And in another legitimate usage, deontological theories are merely one among several types of theory in modern philosophical ethics: one likely typology divides ethical theories into deontological, utilitarian, contractarian, eudaimonist (back under consideration after a long hiatus) and skeptical (this last less a "theory" than a point of view). However, it is fair to say that twentieth-century moral theory has been preoccupied with the nature and possibility of "the moral ought," and to a lesser extent with a detailed specification of particular duties. It is also fair to say that it has neglected questions concerning human excellence and flourishing. In that sense, modern moral theory has been essentially deontological.

(3) Good summaries are Roger Crisp, "Modern Moral Philosophy and the Virtues," in Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1-18; and Gregory Trianosky, "What is Virtue Ethics All About?," American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1990): 335-344.

(4) Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 299-306; Taylor, "Atomism," in Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187-210; Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 23-26, 38-39; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 265-72.

(5) J.B. Schneewind, "The Misfortunes of Virtue," Ethics 101 (1991): 43-44.

(6) Among many examples see Harold Alderman, "By Virtue of a Virtue," Review of Metaphysics 36 (1982): 127-153; Larry Blum Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 148-149; Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1-2; David Norton, "Moral Minimalism and the Development of Moral Character," in Peter French et al. (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XIII: Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 180; and Guy Axtell, "Recent Work in Virtue Epistemology," American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997): 2.

An emphasis on "the whole person" is perhaps a natural consequence of focusing on eudaimonist rather than deontological judgments; certainly "the good life" cannot be discussed if the sense of that life is lost in its atomization into a series of unrelated acts. (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 204-19) It is less clear that this marks an important and essential difference between eudaimonist and deontological ethical theories, because it seems that a full consideration of my duties and rights must also take an encompassing view of my life as a whole.

(7) As Amartya Sen notes, it is not clear that reason demands that we privilege either of these aspects in judging human excellence. "Three different notions may be distinguished: (1) agency achievement, (2) personal well-being, and (3) the standard of living [defined materialistically]. The distinction between agency achievement and personal well-being arises from the fact that a person may have objectives other than personal well-being." (Sen, The Standard of Living (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 27-28)

(8) Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 46.

(9) Annas, Morality, 49-52, and the following, all in French et al., Midwest Studies: R.B. Brandt, "The Structure of Virtue," 64; Martha Nussbaum, "Non-Relative Virtues," 35; Amelie Rorty, "Virtues and Their Vicissitudes," 137-38. For a critique of this view see Walter Schaller, "Are Virtues No More Than Dispositions to Obey Moral Rules?" Philosophia 20 (1990): 195-207.

(10) Kant specifies such a moralistic and inward, intentionalist understanding of ‘virtue’ in a very pure form: "virtue is . . . the moral strength of a man’s will in fulfilling his duty." (Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of The Metaphysic of Morals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 66. For a defense of the Kantian conception of virtue see Onora O’Neill, "Kant’s Virtues," in Crisp, How?,77-97.

(11) Of course, we must leave open the possibility of ethical positions which are formally eudaimonist but with a strong deontological content. One may argue that human excellence consists essentially or even exclusively in acting morally, and that the best human life is one of rigorous attention to duty (even that all other considerations have no bearing on the goodness of a human life). However, it is difficult to sustain such a position.

Within an eudaimonist theory, the virtues should not be defined narrowly in terms of dispositions to act morally. For we reckon physical, intellectual and psychological qualities as virtues if they typically help people to live well and achieve great things; to create great works of art or scholarship, for example. Such achievements as these are not typically considered moral (in our restricted modern sense) or a matter of duty. Yet they are examples of human goodness and excellence.

(12) Perhaps only a minority of writers on "virtue ethics" support an eudaimonist ethics in this sense. Among them see Charles Taylor, "The Diversity of Goods" and Sabina Lovibond, "Realism and Imagination in Ethics," both in Stanley Clarke and Evan Simpson (eds.), Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); and Richard Taylor, "Ancient Wisdom and Modern Folly," in French et al., Midwest Studies. However, the majority of the authors in these two representative collections are either critics of eudaimonist ethics or "formal" virtue ethicists who are in substance deontologists. Such for example is Iris Murdoch, the author of The Sovereignty of Good, who writes that "in the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego." (quoted by Lovibond, 270). Too many modern philosophers and ethical thinkers take enlightened self-interest and the desire for fulfillment as a form of "narcissism" (Christopher Lasch), hedonism (Daniel Bell) or lack of intellectual discipline (Allen Bloom). Modern philosophy has "an extraordinary inarticulacy" about these issues (Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 13-18).

(13) Annas, Morality, 10.

(14) Such judgments concerning the best interests of the soil or the health and biodiversity of the forest are only in Jim’s enlightened self-interest on an expansive definition of both ‘enlightened’ and ‘self-interest.’ See Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8-9.

(15) Thoreau, Reform Papers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 68. "He that would save his life . . . shall lose it" refers to Luke 9:24. While the word ‘duty’ does not occur in the passage quoted, the previous paragraph mentions "this duty" "for honest men to rebel and revolutionize."

(16) Similarly, if Jim accepts a duty to protect the forest, the question of how best to protect it remains. This, once again, involves him in the effort to understand the excellence of the forest.

(17) Just as we cannot define duty in terms of enlightened self-interest or vice versa, so we cannot "reduce," define or explain deontological ethical concepts in terms of eudaimonist concepts or vice versa. Many philosophers have made such attempts; for example, Jorge Garcia holds that "certain virtue concepts are more basic than major deontic concepts" and that "understanding right and wrong action in terms of certain virtue concepts helps us toward understanding and defending traditional Western morality." (Garcia, "The Primacy of the Virtuous," Philosophia 20 (1990): 69) I see little value in such reductive attempts. Our concepts of duty, law and responsibility, on the one hand, and happiness, excellence and goodness, on the other, are of disparate provenience and often serve different purposes. Their conflation, far from providing guidance or clarifying ethical issues, is more likely to cover up genuine ethical dilemmas and allow for their arbitrary resolution.

The concept of ‘duty’ may be understood by analogy with man-made laws. We must follow these, or we will be compelled to do so and punished if we do not. From this we move to the idea of a moral law, which holds even in the absence of an obvious law-giver, even in the absence of coercion, even if we are not worried about being found out and punished for breaking it. The moral law holds, regardless of . . .. The concept of ‘goodness,’ on the other hand, is used to describe the physical worlds of biological organisms and human artifacts. Organisms flourish or succeed in particular environments; artifacts further their makers’ purposes more or less well. From this we move to the idea of ethical goodness, the goodness of human beings. We are another kind of thing in the world (albeit a kind of thing in which we are unusually interested, which is unusually variable in its activities and purposes, and which transforms the context in which it understands itself). Ethical goodness is the goodness of human beings in their proper context, properly described, but just what that proper context and description is . . .. There is nothing to be gained by reconceptualizing duty in terms of goodness or vice versa. Nor are we likely, by mere wordplay, to reconcile those situations where duty and happiness, or duty and the pursuit of excellence, conflict.

(18) Thoreau, Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 294.

(19) Ibid., 6; 323; 215.

Morality and emotions

By Martha Nussbaum

Emotions such as anger, fear, grief, envy, compassion, love and jealousy have a close connection to morality. Philosophers have generally agreed that they can pose problems for morality in a variety of ways: by impeding judgment, by making attention uneven and partial, by making the person unstable and excessively needy, by suggesting immoral projects and goals. The place of emotions in moral theories depends on whether they are conceived of merely as impulses without thought or intentional content, or as having some sort of cognitive content. Plato argued that emotions form a part of the soul separate from thought and evaluation, and moved, in the course of his writings, from a sceptical view of their contribution to morality to a more positive appraisal. Aristotle connected emotions closely with judgment and belief, and held that they can be cultivated through moral education to be important components of a virtuous character. The Stoics identified emotions with judgments ascribing a very high value to uncontrolled external things and persons, arguing that all such judgments are false and should be removed. Their cognitive analysis of emotion stands independent of this radical normative thesis, and has been adopted by many philosophers who do not accept it.
Modern theories of emotion can be seen as a series of responses and counter-responses to the Stoic challenge. Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche all accepted many of the Stoics’ normative arguments in favour of diminishing the role played by emotions in morality; they differed, however, in the accounts of emotion they proposed. Focusing on compassion or sympathy, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith and Schopenhauer all defended the role of some emotions in morality, returning to a normative position closer to Aristotle’s (though not always with a similarly cognitive analysis).
Contemporary views of emotion have been preoccupied with the criticism of reductive accounts that derive from behaviourist psychology. By now, it is once again generally acknowledged that emotions are intelligent parts of the personality that can inform and illuminate as well as motivate. Philosophers’ views have been enriched by advances in cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and anthropology. Feminist accounts of emotion differ sharply, some insisting that we should validate emotions as important parts of moral character, others that emotions shaped by unjust conditions are unreliable guides.

1 Morality and conceptions of emotion

Emotions are usually considered to be distinct both from bodily appetites, such as hunger and thirst, and from objectless moods, such as irritation and endogenous depression (see Emotions, nature of). Major members of the class have traditionally been love, anger, grief, fear, envy, jealousy, guilt and pity (compassion) (see Love; Moral sentiments; Rectification and remainders). Some philosophers have adopted an account of these experiences that makes them rather close to appetites after all: emotions are surges of affect or energy in the personality, unreasoning movements that push people into acting without being very much connected to their thoughts about the world. This view is frequently connected to the idea that emotions derive from an animal part of our nature, often by thinkers who do not have a high regard for animal intelligence.

Seen this way, emotions figure in morality only as forces that either advance or impede the purposes of moral judgment or will. They can be trained and to some extent conditioned, but in a relatively mechanical manner. Thus they will never be what makes a virtuous character virtuous, though a virtuous person can take pride in having exercised an appropriate degree of discipline over them (see Self-control; Virtues and vices §3).

Other philosophical theories about emotions hold that they involve interpretation and belief. An emotion such as grief is not simply a mindless surge of painful affect: it involves a way of seeing an object, an appraisal of that object as important, and the belief that the object is lost. Fear involves the belief that bad events are impending, and that one is not fully in control of warding them off. Such theories hold that changes in the relevant beliefs entail changes in emotion: one who learns that danger is not really at hand will cease to fear. When we scrutinize the beliefs involved in the emotions, it emerges that they are of two sorts: beliefs about what is happening in the world (Is the person really dead? Is the enemy really at hand?) and evaluative beliefs (Is the person really worth getting upset about? Is the danger serious?). Many of the evaluative beliefs derive from social teaching, some of it moral in nature. We learn what insults are worth getting upset about, what losses are serious, what damages are to be avoided.

Seen this way, emotions become intelligent parts of the moral personality, which can be cultivated through a process of moral education (see Moral education §3). Such a process will aim at producing adults who not only control their anger and fear, but experience anger and fear appropriately, towards the appropriate objects at the appropriate time in the appropriate degree. Merely self-controlled persons look to these theorists like those whose moral development is incomplete or imperfect. If we find them hating foreigners, but controlling their behaviour towards them, we will judge that there is some further moral work they should be doing before they can claim to be fully virtuous.

2 Emotions and character-based theories

All moral theories have some occasion to talk about emotions, but some focus on their cultivation more than others. Theories that focus on the calculation of utility will see emotions as forces that either promote or eclipse such calculations and the appropriate acts (see Utilitarianism). Theories that focus on duty can have a substantial place for an account of emotion, since emotions will be seen as motives that either promote or impede action in accordance with duty (see Deontological ethics; Duty). But if the account of duty is not supplemented with an account of virtue, it will not be clear how these motives should be integrated into the personality. Kant’s theory of virtue (1797) shows us that a duty-based view need not neglect emotions as elements in virtue (see Kant, I. §10; Emotions, philosophy of §3). Since this theory has a noncognitive conception of emotion, and also a rather negative view of the contributions made by emotion, it gives emotions a rather restricted role; but there is nothing to prevent a virtue-theory such as Kant’s from giving more positive attention to the cultivation of emotion.

Theories of character based on Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, however, have been Western philosophy’s most substantial sources for thought about the proper cultivation of emotion within morality (see Emotions, philosophy of §2). Aristotle’s norm of a reasonable person is one whose character is infused completely by the correct reasons for action, which have shaped all their motives and attitudes. Because he aims to describe the cultivation of a whole person and way of life, rather than simply to prescribe a list of duties, he has ample scope for discussing emotional self-shaping.

3 Ancient Graeco-Roman theories of emotion: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics

Plato argues in the Republic that the soul contains three distinct parts: the calculative part, the appetitive part, and the ‘spirited’ part (see Plato §14). This last part seems to be where Plato locates emotions such as anger, grief and fear. Although his account is cryptic, he suggests that the emotions differ from appetites in their responsiveness to changes in belief, and also in the fact that they are less brutish and more discriminating. But he refuses to construe them as belonging to the ‘part’ that performs evaluative reasoning. In normative terms, the Republic argues that all pity, fear and grief should be prevented from developing by a process of moral education that teaches young people that there is nothing for a good person to fear or grieve over; anger is apparently allowed to remain, but is channelled for military purposes. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s account of the emotional ‘part’ seems more positive: focusing on emotions of reverence and awe, he shows how this element in the personality makes a crucial contribution to virtue and understanding.

For Aristotle, emotions are combinations of a feeling of pleasure or pain with a belief (or perhaps a more rudimentary cognitive attitude, a seeing x as y). Fear, for example, combines painful feeling with the thought that there are bad events impending. The combination is not casual: the pain is pain at the thought of that impending danger. Therefore, changes in belief will change emotions. (Aristotle makes these arguments in Rhetoric, showing how an orator can manipulate the passions of the audience.) In normative terms, Aristotle argues that the virtuous person is one who has attained balance and appropriateness in emotion as well as action. A person who completely lacked anger at an insult to loved ones, for example, would be culpably deficient; but excessive anger is strongly criticized, and the condition to aim for is ‘mildness of temper’ (see Aristotle §§22-4).

Epicurus and his school (including the Roman poet Lucretius) presented impressive accounts of several emotions, in particular the fear of death (see Epicureanism §13). They argued that this fear poisons individuals’ lives and causes social distress. Since they agreed with Aristotle about its cognitive basis, they argued that it could be completely removed by teaching people that death is not a bad thing for the person who has died.

The Greek and Roman Stoics were the great passion theorists of antiquity. They produced impressive analyses and taxonomies of the passions, arguing powerfully in favour of the view that they are essentially evaluative judgments that ascribe to things or persons outside our control great importance for our flourishing (see Stoicism §19). This analysis is continuous with Aristotle’s, but it goes a step further, denying that there is any bodily feeling over and above the cognition that is essential to the identity of a particular emotion. This apparently counter-intuitive view is rendered plausible by extensive consideration of the power of thought to transform the personality.

One might accept this analysis of emotion and still hold, with Aristotle, that many of the judgments involved in emotions are true and appropriate: when one’s child dies, for example, it is right to think that something of enormous importance has been lost. The Stoics, however, held that all the judgments involved in all the passions are false, because all ascribe too much importance to external things and persons, making people dependent on the world for their happiness. To this argument they added several others: emotions weaken the personality, robbing it of force and integrity; they make one prone to excessive and violent acts; and, finally, they are not necessary to motivate good acts, which can be chosen out of duty alone.

Their conclusion is thus that the emotions should be extirpated from human life. Moved especially by the damage done by anger in social life, and convinced that there is no getting rid of anger without getting rid of the attachments to externals that are also involved in love and grief and fear, they came to the radical conclusion that we can stop cruelty and violence only by cultivating utter detachment from everything that used to matter to us. They then strove valiantly to show that we can motivate an active concern for humanity without relying on emotion. Removing emotions is not expected to be like removing false beliefs about more trivial matters: because the evaluations involved are transmitted early through social and parental teaching, they have become deeply habitual, and can be changed, if at all, only through a lifetime of patient effort. Their hope was that as this effort is exercised with greater success, the personality as a whole would become enlightened.

Because their analyses are so compelling and humanly rich, and because they focus with convincing examples on the depredations of emotion in politics, writers such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius continue to make this radical thesis compelling.

4 Modern supporters of the Stoic normative thesis

The Stoics set the agenda for early modern moral theories of emotion. Most thinkers, though not all, accept some version of the cognitive Stoic analysis of passion; they then differ sharply over the normative thesis. Descartes (1649) modified the Stoic analysis to fit into his divided account of mind and body, but his definitions of the passions are related closely to those of the Stoics; his normative judgments, while not quite as severe, are similar (see Descartes, R. §10).

Spinoza accepted the Stoic analysis and the radical normative thesis, holding, with Seneca, that philosophical therapy can free us from bondage to our emotions (see Spinoza, B. de §9). He gave the normative programme new urgency by insisting that all strong attachments are essentially ambivalent: we love an external person or thing because we find that it assists our efforts to flourish. But anything that can assist us, so long as it is separate from us, can also frustrate us; so all love is mixed with hate. Like the Stoics, Spinoza held that there is a type of joy that is not an emotion in the sense that it is not based on a overvaluation of the significance of externals; it is the contemplative joy with which one regards the deterministic system of the universe as a whole. Like the Stoics, Spinoza identified that order with god; thus the good state is designated the ‘intellectual love of god’.

Kant did not accept the Stoic analysis of the passions. Oddly enough, he presented no arguments against it, and no substantial analysis of his own; but he plainly conceived of passions as pre-rational, impulsive and undiscriminating. Thus, the only role he saw passions playing in virtue was a rather mechanical one, as forces that either aid or impede duty. In general, he thought they impede it, and he therefore conceived of virtue as a kind of strength of will, in which the will maintains its control over the potentially disrupting passions.

Kant was well aware of the Stoic normative view. To a great extent he shared it, praising the Stoics for cultivating detachment from passion, and for promoting active beneficence rather than relying on compassionate emotion. But he showed considerable ambivalence, and was unwilling to dismiss compassionate emotion utterly. He understood that it may be difficult to motivate beneficence without this emotion, that motives of duty by themselves may not suffice. He therefore urged people to seek out experiences in which they will naturally be moved to compassion, so that their beneficence will have the strength of passion behind it.

A surprising ally of the Kantian position was Nietzsche (1881), who objected to pity as an emotion that insults the dignity of the suffering person by implying that this is a person who really needs the things of this world. Equipped with a rather romantic picture of strength and self-sufficiency, Nietzsche believed that the truly strong can rise above life’s ills through will, and therefore do not need compassion, grief or fear. Citing the Stoics, Spinoza and Kant as his predecessors, Nietzsche denounced the Christian/democratic tradition of praising compassion as a basic social motive.

5 Modern anti-Stoics: the defence of sympathy

Opposition to the Stoic normative thesis began in the ancient world, with Augustine, who insisted that the goal of self-sufficiency was an inappropriate one for a Christian to pursue. Characterizing the ideal Stoic wise man as obtuse in his detachment from longing and pain, he concluded: ‘The fact that something is tough does not make it right; and the fact that something is inert does not make it healthy.’ Subsequent Christian views have agreed in characterizing moral error as due to wrongly placed love, and in making love itself an essential ingredient of the cure. Dante’s Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (1313-21) famously ends with the visionary experience of a harmony of emotion and will. Because emotional error is understood (in an anti-Stoic fashion) to be rooted in the body itself and its sexuality, it is expected that this perfected state will arrive only in paradise, after the purifications of purgatory. Most important Christian thinkers make pity or compassion central parts of Christian life, arguing that these emotions are appropriate expressions of and responses to our vulnerable and imperfect earthly condition.

The eighteenth century saw the flowering of a number of distinct approaches to the sympathetic emotions. Although Christian views did not cease to exert an influence, the notion of original evil was contested increasingly in favour of a view of natural goodness in which basic emotional equipment played a salient role. Hutcheson and Hume made the capacity for sympathy a basic part of human nature (see Hutcheson, F. §2; Hume, D. §3). Hume (1739/40) made many valuable observations about the role of sympathy in motivating moral conduct (see Moral motivation §6). But his conviction that desires and passions are basically noncognitive, and that reasoning is capable only of devising means to ends set by desire, led him to short-change many aspects of the passions that even his own concrete analyses at times acknowledge. Although he connected passions with a characteristic object, he seems not to have treated the connection as essential to the identity of the passion: a passion is simply a particular type of impression caused by the object. Hume’s enormous influence has led to the sharp split between passion and cognition that characterizes much modern Anglo-American thought (see Emotions, philosophy of §§3-4).

Rousseau gave the emotion of pitié, compassion, a central role in social morality (see Rousseau, J.-J. §4). Describing the education of young Émile (1762), he shows that the experience of being astonished and pained at the pain of another is an essential foundation for all society. Compassion leads us to recognize the vulnerability that all humans share, and to appreciate the pain that disasters of various types cause others. Thus, the emotion leads us to be sceptical of distinctions that situate some people as high above others, their fortunes as vastly more secure. Rousseau evidently thought that emotions, involving complex imagining and thought, convey moral information that it would be difficult to obtain in any other way. Accepting a version of the Stoic idea of original human innocence, he seems to have held that excesses in self-love derive from experience of unequal social conditions.

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provides one of the modern tradition’s most detailed analyses of the moral contributions of emotion. Heavily indebted to the Stoics, Smith develops a richly detailed account of the cognitive content of passions such as anger and sympathy. He differs with the Stoics on the normative question, taking up a more Aristotelian view about attachments to family and loved ones. His device of the ‘judicious spectator’, modelled on Stoic conceptions of self-scrutiny and conscience, gives the moral agent a way of estimating the point of propriety in passion: we are to ask what a concerned spectator, not personally involved, would feel at the events, and this will help us identify bias and irrationality deriving from our own personal immersion. Despite his positive view of sympathy and other emotions, Smith thought them inconstant and unreliable as guides to social choice, since he observed that we are most easily moved by events closest to ourselves: an earthquake in China means less to a person than an injury to his own finger (see Smith, A. §§2-3).

Another philosopher who defended the fundamental role of compassion in morality was Schopenhauer (1840). Criticizing Kant, he argued that all genuinely moral action must be grounded in other-directed emotion (see Schopenhauer, A. §6). Imagining compassion as involving a mysterious union of the self with the other, he leaves the reader unclear as to precisely why it is not, therefore, a form of self-concern. Schopenhauer’s account had, nevertheless, tremendous influence in a culture dissatisfied with duty-based views.

6 Contemporary views: influences from psychology and anthropology

The middle of the twentieth century saw the rise of noncognitive views of emotion in both behaviourist psychology and in Freudian psychoanalysis (see Behaviourism, methodological and scientific; Freud, S.; Psychoanalysis, post-Freudian). Philosophers such as Anthony Kenny, Robert Solomon, Robert Gordon, William Lyons, Ronald de Sousa and Michael Stocker have by now demonstrated the poverty of such accounts and our need for some type of cognitive view (see Emotions,nature of §2). (Kenny also in the process offered cogent criticisms of Hume’s elusive and influential account.) During this period, cognitive psychology was itself evolving. By now, psychologists no longer expect to be able to give purely behavioural accounts of emotion in terms of stimulus and response, and most of the dominant accounts hold that emotions are a form of intelligent interpretation in which an animal takes in news of how things are in the world with respect to its most important goals and projects. Richard Lazarus (1991) has argued that emotion’s evolutionary contribution is best explained this way: emotions give animals information that is essential to survival. Psychologists generally agree that we have reason to credit many animals at least with the capacity for complex appraisals suited to this account of emotion. Their work has enriched the philosophical debate.

At the same time, anthropologists have produced fascinating accounts of the role played by social norms in shaping the emotion-categories of different societies. These accounts raise questions about the extent to which an emotional repertoire is malleable; at least with respect to specific sub-types and internal demarcations within categories, there appears to be considerable cross-cultural variation in emotion-types, and also, presumably, at least some variation in emotional experience (see Moral sentiments §3; Morality and ethics §4).

This returns us to the moral problem with which the Stoics grapple: for if we see that emotions are learned with the learning of social norms, and we are convinced that our society is not perfect, then it might be unwise to trust the emotions too much as guides to conduct. One society described by anthropologist Jean Briggs (1971), the Utku Eskimos, actually embodies a relatively successful Stoic programme for the elimination of anger, thus prompting us to ask how we should think about our own goals and moral projects.

7 Feminist accounts of morality and emotion

Women have frequently been devalued on the grounds of being emotional and making decisions by consulting emotion. This has led many feminist thinkers to defend the contribution that emotions might play in moral reasoning, arguing that it is the (male) denigration of emotion that is mistaken. Philosophers such as Annette Baier, Lawrence Blum, Sara Ruddick, Virginia Held and Nel Noddings have defended a normative ethical view in which care for others plays a central role, and have seen this as a way of promoting feminist goals (see Feminist ethics).

On the other hand, feminists who consider the social origins of the appraisals involved in emotion have reasons for doubt. If women have a great propensity to care for others, is this always a good thing? Is it not the case that men have standardly urged women to see themselves as care-givers, rather than as sources of worth and agency in their own right? J.S. Mill (1869) argued that even women’s desire to please men has a social origin and is a legacy of women’s subordination. This line of argument has been continued recently in the work of Catharine MacKinnon (1989), who argues that women’s emotions and desires are in significant ways created by inequality and injustice, and that we should therefore be highly sceptical of the claim that women’s instincts of care are always trustworthy and morally valuable.

It is not necessary to choose between these extremes. We can hold that many emotions are valuable parts of the moral life without giving implicit trust to any that have been shaped in imperfect and unjust social conditions - judging, with Aristotle and Adam Smith, that emotions can be good guides as elements in a life organized and examined by critical reflection.

This article originally appeared in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

References and further reading

Aristotle (c. mid 4th century BC) Nicomachean Ethics, trans. with notes by T. Irwin, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985, books II-IV.(On the role of passions in virtue.)

Aristotle (c. mid 4th century BC) Rhetoric, trans. G. Kennedy, Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, New York: Oxford University Press.(Illustrates Aristotle’s view that, since emotions are combinations of a feeling of pleasure or pain with a belief, changes in belief will change emotions.)

Baier, A.C. (1994) Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Discusses the role of care in moral theory.)

Blum, L. (1980) Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, London: Routledge.(Defends the role of compassion in moral judgment.)

Briggs, J. (1971) Never in Anger, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Anthropological study of a society that removes anger.)

Dante (1313-21) Divina Commedia, trans. J. Ciardi, The Divine Comedy, New York: E.P. Dutton, 3 vols, 1989. (Highly influential medieval Christian account of love, which ends with the visionary experience of a harmony of emotion and will.)

Descartes, R. (1649) Les passions de l’âme, trans. The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 1, 1984.(Analysis of passions in accordance with mind-body dualism.)

De Sousa, R. (1987) The Rationality of Emotion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.(Excellent account of the cognitive content of emotions and its evolutionary role.)

Gordon, R. (1987) The Structure of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Valuable philosophical analysis of emotion/cognition relationship.)

Held, V. (1993) Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.(Care ethics and social justice.)

Held, V. (ed.) (1995) Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

(Collection of different feminist viewpoints on care ethics.)

Hume, D. (1739/40) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1978.(Influential account of the relationship between emotion and action.)

Kant, I. (1797) Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre, trans. J.W. Ellington, Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1964; repr. in Immanuel Kant: Ethical Philosophy, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983.(Discussion of role of emotions in virtue; critique of pity as moral emotion.)

Kenny, A. (1963) Action, Emotion and Will, London: Routledge.(Influential and devastating critique of behaviourist and Humean conceptions of desire.)

Klein, M. (1921-45) Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-45, London: Tavistock, 1985.(Central psychoanalytic account of emotion and morality.)

Lazarus, R. (1991) Emotion and Adaptation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(Critique of behaviourism and account of the field’s return to cognitive conceptions of emotion by leading cognitive psychologist.)

Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols.(Basic sources for Hellenistic views of morality and emotion, with fine commentaries.)

Lutz, C. (1988) Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.(Valuable anthropological study of role of social norms in emotion.)

Lyons, W. (1980) Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Well-argued defence of a cognitive-Aristotelian account.)

MacKinnon, C. (1989) Feminism Unmodified, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Argues that women’s subordination to men has shaped their emotions and desires.)

Mill, J.S. (1869) The Subjection of Women, in J. Gray (ed.) On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.(Argues that women’s emotions are shaped by unjust social conditions.)

Nietzsche, F. (1881) Morgenröte, trans. R. Hollingdale as Daybreak, ed. M. Clark and B. Leiter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.(The central locus for Nietzsche’s attacks on pity.)

Noddings, N. (1984) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.(Argues that women’s experience of maternal care should be the basis for ethics; opposes abstract principles.)

Nussbaum, M. (1994) The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.(Discussion of ancient Graeco-Roman views of passion and morality.)

Oatley, K. (1992) Best-Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Valuable account by a cognitive psychologist.)

Plato (c.386-380 BC) Symposium, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989.(Describes the ascent of love to contemplation of the immortal form of beauty.)

Plato (c.380-367 BC) Republic, trans. G.M. Grube, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992, book IV. (Account of the structure of the soul and the role of the passions in virtue.)

Plato (c.366-360 BC) Phaedrus, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995.(Illustrates how emotions play a positive role in connecting the person to beauty and truth.)

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762) Émile: ou, de l’éducation, trans. A. Bloom, Emile: or, On Education, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, book IV.(Contains a fundamental account of compassion’s role in social morality.)

Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.(Balanced account of the moral importance of maternal care.)

Schopenhauer, A. (1840) Über die Grundlage der Moral, trans. E.F.J. Payne, On the Basis of Morality, Providence, RI and Oxford: Berhahn Books, 1995.(Argues that all proper moral action must be grounded in other-directed emotion.)

Seneca, L.A. (before AD52) On Anger, in J.M. Cooper and J. Procopé (eds) Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.(Influential account of the removal of anger as social goal.)

Sherman, N. (1989) The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(Excellent account of role of emotion in virtue.)

Smith, A. (1759) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. (Rich account of balance in passion, and of role of sympathy in morality.)

Solomon, R. (1976) The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company; repr. 1993.(Influential philosophical account of emotion.)

Spinoza, B. (1677) Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner), trans. E.

Curley, Ethics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.(Analyses our ‘bondage’ to passions as cause of strife, urges a therapeutic programme to remove passions.)

Stocker, M. (1996) Valuing Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Valuable analysis of evaluative dimensions of emotion.)

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