Inner Virtue

Nicolas Bommarito

B.A., University of Michigan, 2005

Thesis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2014

This dissertation by Nicolas Bommarito is accepted in its present form by the Department of Philosophy as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date: Nomy Arpaly, Advisor

Recommendation to the Graduate Council

Date: David Estlund, Reader

Date: Jay Garfield, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date: Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii

CURRICULUM VITAE

Nicolas Bommarito was born in 1983 in Detroit, Michigan. He attended the University of

Michigan, Tibet University (), and Brown University. He received a Fulbright

Institute of International Education Fellowship to study Tibetan philosophy in Kathmandu,

Nepal and also a John Cargill MacMillan Graduate Fellowship at the Cogut Center for the

Humanities.

His publications include “Patience and Perspective” (2014) in Philosophy East and

West, “Modesty as a Virtue of Attention” (2013) in The Philosophical Review, “Bile &

Bodhisattvas: Śāntideva on Justified Anger” (2011) in The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, and

“Rationally Self-Ascribed Anti-Expertise” (2010) in Philosophical Studies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nothing can happen without the proper conditions. I’ve had both good fortune and the help of many people.

Here are the ones I can fit on a single page:

Family: Charles, Laura, and John Bommarito – you’ve given me a lifetime of support, often from half the world away.

Past teachers: I got so much encouragement early on in philosophy from Louis Loeb, Rachana Kamtekar, Allan Gibbard, and Stephen Darwall (who lent me the first book on virtue I ever read!).

Current teachers: I’ve learned so much from my teachers at Brown University, especially David Christensen, Jamie Dreier, Mary-Louise Gill, Doug Kutach, Chris Hill, Josh Schecter, Charles Larmore, Richard Heck, and Hal Roth. Many of my current teachers are my fellow students, particularly Alex King, Sean Aas, Derek Bowman, Dana Howard, Eoin Ryan, Steven Yamamoto, and Paul Klumpe.

Institutional support: I received a lot of support from Brown University, particularly from Joanna Rolfes and Aimee McDermott, who helped me to navigate through so much red tape. I was also fortunate to receive a Fulbright-IIE grant in Nepal and benefited greatly from the help and flexibility of Laurie Vasily. I also was lucky enough to use the resources at the Lumbini International Research Institute through the help of Christoph Cüppers. I was also incredibly fortunate to have support from the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, without which I would not have been able to complete this dissertation.

Special thanks, of course, must go to those who have helped me write most directly:

Tim Schroeder: If my committee were the Beatles, you would be George Martin. Though not an official member, I would have been lost without your contagious optimism and creative problem solving.

Dave Estlund: You are, in my mind, the very model of the analytic philosopher-gentleman. If I ever get to be half as conceptually sharp as you, I will be more than satisfied.

Jay Garfield: You not only gave me insightful comments at lightning speed, but took pity on me when I was a lost graduate student wandering India. Perhaps most importantly you not only taught me to stop comparing philosophies and start doing philosophy, but serve as a living example.

Nomy Arpaly: When I knew you only as words on a page, you showed me what was possible in philosophy. In person you inspire, encourage, and challenge me every time we speak. I’m so thankful to have you as my teacher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction ...... 1

2. Pleasure and Displeasure ...... 38

3. Emotions and Affective States ...... 72

4. Anger and Fear ...... 115

5. Virtues of Attention ...... 166

6. Conclusion ...... 229

CHAPTER I : INTRODUCTION

Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

- Emerson

I. AIMS, TERMS, AND DISCLAIMERS

Emerson’s comments provide an apt description of contemporary discussions of virtue and vice. An undue focus on overt behavior has led to a neglect of inner virtues and vices that do not require behavioral manifestation. This is partly the result of a limited diet of examples. When asked to give a list of virtues, most ethicists are likely to reply with, in no particular order: justice, courage, generosity, and temperance. As we will see, these are generally taken to be virtues of how we behave and so it is commonly assumed that overt, behavioral action is a necessary component of all virtues and vices (an assumption found in Moore 1903/1993, Sidgwick 1907/1982, Ross 1936/1963, Anscombe

1958/1997, McDowell 1979, Williams 1985/1998, and Harman 1999 among others). This is in the background of Robert Nozick’s claims about the moral character of someone who chooses to be hooked up to an ‘experience machine’ that realistically simulates any experience:

1 A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what a person is like who has long been in the tank. Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to tell; there’s no way he is. (1974, 43)

According to Nozick, someone in the machine can have no moral character. But those in such a machine can be morally better or worse in many ways, even though they cannot perform overt actions in the real world. After all, isn’t someone who feels intense pleasure in hyper-realistic, simulated rape still cruel? They sure seem like a worse person than someone whose pleasures don’t involve such ill will.

Though it may seem intuitive to think of a virtuous person simply as someone who performs good actions, this is not the case – there is a wealth of virtues and vices of our mental and emotional lives that need not be expressed in outward action.1 Some of these virtues and vices that are not about our outwards behavioral actions, but inner mental actions like voluntary attention, while still others do not involve actions at all, but are involuntary responses like emotions, pleasures, an involuntary attention. I will argue that there are many ways of being a morally good person that do not require overt behavior or even intentions and off an account that explains how such states can be virtuous or vicious.

A Few Disclaimers

The account I will offer here differs in its aims and scope from influential accounts offered by Philippa Foot (1979) and Rosalind Hursthouse (1999) in several important ways: I will not take character to be the one and only fundamental moral notion, take The

Good to be rooted in human function, or take being virtuous to be synonymous with

1 For example, Driver (2007) argues that immoral actions in a dream can reflect bad character.

2 living the good life. The truth of these claims are, or course, interesting and important questions (I happen to think they are false), but I will not deal with them here.

Julia Driver (1996, 111) makes a useful distinction between virtue ethics and virtue theory: The project of virtue ethics is to develop a theory of all of morality founded exclusively on virtues and vices, while the project of virtue theory is to provide an explanation of virtues and vices – the what, why, and when of being a good person. This work will be in the realm of virtue theory rather than virtue ethics. I will not attempt to ground all of morality in the notions of virtue and vice; I take issues of character are merely one part of moral theory. But this part of moral theory, I will argue, does not reduce to claims about right action or praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.

Nor will I attempt to provide a metaethical account of The Good. Again, because of views like those of Foot and Hursthouse, talk of the virtues has been strongly linked with a metaethical view of goodness as natural human function. Though I will call things good and bad, I will not offer an account of what this goodness or badness consists in and my discussion of virtue and vice will not presuppose any particular account of what it is to be good or bad. This is a work in virtue theory, not in metaethical theory.

I will not assume that virtue is sufficient for the good life nor will the good life feature prominently in my discussion. What I am concerned with when discussing moral virtue is what it is to be a morally good person, a decidedly more narrow question that what it is to flourish or live the good life – a task that, as Aristotle and Susan Wolf (1982) have pointed out, requires moral as well as non-moral goods. Despite this more narrow aim, I do not intend the sanctimonious connotations of phrases like ‘morally virtuous’ or

‘virtuous person’. Such phrases should not conjure up images of overly pious, self-styled

3 moralists like Ned Flanders. I mean such phrases to refer to a good-hearted people, to those who inspire and genuinely deserve to be called a good person in the moral sense.

I will not assume praiseworthiness and blameworthiness to have a necessary connection with virtue and vice. Whether or not vice is always blameworthy and virtue always praiseworthy is a complicated matter – it largely depends on what you think about praise and blame. Thomas Scanlon (2008) takes blame to be simply a negative character assessment, which seems to make blame and vice conceptual bedfellows. However, he also claims that blame in general has to do with action – that we blame someone for doing something. This may be the case, but it need not be so. As Robert Adams (1985) and George Sher (2006, 51ff.) point out we also blame people for character traits like being ungrateful or attitudes like being racist even when they do not manifest. It is common to assume that blame (and perhaps praise)2 entail some assessment of responsibility – that you can only be blameworthy (or praiseworthy) for something voluntary. This could make blame separate from virtue and vice since they are often involuntary: consider vices such as selfishness, carelessness, or impatience and virtues like courage, integrity, or tolerance.3 However, Adams makes the case that we can be blameworthy for such states even when they are not under our voluntary control. On this view, someone who is ungrateful deserves blame for this state of mind even if it is involuntary. If we take vices to be bad qualities (or as Hursthouse calls them, ‘defects’) of a person, they do not always warrant blame. It manifests a vice when I am angry at the

2 Susan Wolf (1980) suggests an asymmetry between praise and blame; blame presupposes self-power in a way that praise does not. Common sense often seems to support this: we feel people who are attractive or who learn quickly are praiseworthy, while we take people with physical deformities or learning disabilities not to be blameworthy because “it's not their fault.” 3 Roger Crisp (2005, 168) notes that Hume considers many moral virtues, such as fortitude, to be involuntary.

4 slow-moving line at the post office or when I feel pleased upon seeing someone I dislike fall down, but it is a distinct (and open) question whether or not I deserve blame in these cases. I will remain agnostic on this question; it has more to do with what you think blame is and what it requires than with virtue and vice.

I will not offer an account of morality in general, the nature or moral goodness, or the good life. I will offer an account of how and why various mental states relate to our moral evaluation of agents. This is not to be confused with an account of what makes such states good; such states can be good in many ways – for example, because they are pleasant or because they have beneficial effects. My focus will be on how such relate to our moral evaluation of persons, how they relate to one’s moral character.

Overview and Terminology

Virtue theory is, at its heart, about evaluating persons.4 We use talk of moral virtues and vices to make moral evaluations of people.5 States and actions are virtuous when they reflect well on someone and vicious when they reflect poorly on them. Generosity, honesty, and other virtues reflect well on one’s moral character while vices like greed and cruelty reflect poorly. I will argue that some states can be virtuous or vicious, that is they can make one a morally better or worse person, without requiring overt behaviors or intentions.

I will offer a substantive account of how these states are connected with being a good person. To be a morally good person is to have a positive orientation to moral goods. The best way to understand this is in terms of care or concern: The core of being a

4 I will not take virtues and vices to be primarily about action explanation or prediction as Doris (2005) and Baier (2008) do. If I want to explain why Jane returned the book, I’m willing to bet that action theorists have a better explanation than virtue ethicists. 5 There is some ambiguity here since we can evaluate people at a time, evaluating a snapshot of the person or over time. My discussion of stability will deal with this in more detail.

5 morally good person is to care about moral goods like justice and the wellbeing of others.

Particular states, then, are virtuous when they manifest this care. When I discuss particular virtues, I mean to refer to complexes or patterns of virtuous states that have similar objects and similar domains – temperance involves a pattern of responses to consumables, patience involves responses to setbacks, etc.6

Things are a little more complex in the case of vice. There are two ways to be a vicious person: one can either to lack such a positive orientation or have a negative orientation to moral goods.7 States (or actions) count as vicious by manifesting either a lack of concern (indifference) or a positive concern for evils (malice). As with virtues, I will take vices to be patterns or complexes of vicious states in a particular domain.8

It will be important for my discussion to distinguish between a state being good or bad and being virtuous or vicious. There is a difference between asking why a state is good and what it says about someone who has it. A state may be good in a variety of ways, it may produce good consequences, it may be pleasant, or it may be useful for moral development. A state can be good in these ways, I will argue, without saying much about the moral character of the person who has it.

6 One might object here that this is too broad. On this account, can’t anything at all be a virtue? Carrying boxes can manifest moral concern, so is box-carrying a virtue? I would first note that some things cannot be virtues, like purely cognitive or bodily behaviors, since they don’t manifest our cares. More broadly, distinguishing virtues and vices is largely a matter of taste – recall that Aristotle takes giving small gifts to be a different virtue from giving large ones. I only aim to show that there are natural patterns virtuous states that do not require behavioral action. I thank Derek Bowman for raising this issue. 7 Some, for example Julia Annas (2011, 102) and Gabriele Taylor (2006, 4-5), deny the existence of the latter type of vice. No one, they claim, aims to be a coward or envious. It is not central to my account, but this strikes me as too naïve; many people have the positive aim of becoming more selfish (an Ayn Rand convert), less temperate (many college freshmen), or less honest (a budding con-artist). Aside from such examples, there many people who are sadistic and cruel who are thereby vicious even if they do not aim to be sadistic and cruel. 8 This will be particularly relevant in contrast to a common notion of vice as a kind of defect. I will reject this account of vice because, though all vices may be defects, not all defects are vices.

6 A key concept in my account of how states are virtuous or vicious is care or concern. I use these terms in a largely non-technical sense, the same sense when we say

“Joan cares about her children” or “I’m concerned about finding a job”. Having care or concern for these things means they matter to us or are important to us – as Harry

Frankfurt (1982/1988) puts it, such things make a difference to us.

This has general affinities with a variety of accounts of the positive orientation to moral goods: Thomas Hurka (2001) talks of loving the good and hating evils and Robert

Adams (2006) sees it as “being for” the good. More recently, Nomy Arpaly and Timothy

Schroeder (forthcoming) see it as a special kind of intrinsic desire for moral goods.

I prefer to talk of care or concern rather than desire for a few reasons. Some like

Harry Frankfurt (1982/1988) and Stephen Darwall (2002) have highlighted ways in which desire is insufficient for care. For them, one can like and want something and even desire it and find it valuable without caring for it. Caring has closer ties to our emotions and requires, as Frankfurt puts it, being invested in something in a way that desire does not. More importantly, the object of desire is often taken to be states of affairs. Though this is enough for my account, I wish to allow a broader ranger of objects. We care more directly about people, ideas, rules, and objects and not just about states of affairs that contain or promote them.

Though I will often talk about care, my view differs in important ways from what is commonly called ‘ethics of care’. Proponents of care-based ethical theories take care to be a relationship between persons – the object of care is another person.9 But as I have

9 This notion of care can be found in Noddings (1984/2003), Held (2006), and Slote (2007).

7 mentioned, I will allow that care can be for a variety of things aside from other persons; we can care about rules, rights, ideas, practices, and states of affairs.10

I will talk of care or concern for moral goods in my account, but my claims can accommodate a variety of positive relations to moral goods as a foundation. Care and concern seem to me to be naturally connected to the essence of being a good person, but other pro-attitudes can be substituted for care in my discussion with relative ease.

So far I’ve claimed that caring about moral goods is what is essential to being a morally good person, and that states and actions are virtuous or vicious by their relation to this care. Now more must be said about the nature of this relation. Caring will be a necessary condition for virtuous states and since such states express care, they can be evidence that one is a virtuous person.

The moral concern can be said to cause the virtuous state. This is common in everyday explanations – “He feels guilty about it because he cares about following the rules”.11 Causation may be enough, but one might still wonder, what is so good about being the effect of something morally good? After all, if moral concern were to cause bright green freckles, having the freckles doesn’t seem particularly virtuous – they would be just a symptom of being a good person.

One way to respond to this problem is to specify the particular kind of causation involved. Arpaly and Schroeder, for example, claim that a virtuous state must be caused in virtue of the content of the concern (which is, for them, an intrinsic desire). The green freckles are symptomatic because though they are caused by moral concern, the content

10 Proponents of care-based ethics, such as Held (2006, 63), are often critical of so-called “ethics of justice” for supposing the individual can exist independently of others. This is an assumption I also make – I will allow that one can be a good person even on a desert island. 11 This is analogous to views about right action that take right action simply to be one caused by a morally good intention.

8 of the concern plays no role. In contrast, if I help an injured friend because I care about his wellbeing, the wellbeing plays an important role in the causal explanation.12

One can accept my account and think that virtuous states are simply ones that are caused in the right way by moral concern. I will, however, describe a closer relation: manifestation. Talk of causation, I think, implies a separation between the care and the virtuous state. When Richard is sad over a terrible Red Sox season because he cares about the team, his care is not something separate from his sadness. The care and the sadness are unlike two billiard balls knocking into one another; his care is, in a way, present in the sadness. When Ben gets upset about union busting because he cares about justice, his emotional reaction embodies his care. This is what allows the goodness of his concern to explain the virtuousness of his reaction. It displays and instantiates his care; it is how his care manifests in the emotional realm.

This does not mean that the various states I will describe as virtuous are all kinds of caring. Rather, the care is an orientation that underlies many different kinds of states

(pleasure, emotions, attention, and so on). The states are virtuous by involving care, and so they display our moral character in different modalities.

One might wonder at this point: Why not simply call states virtuous or vicious based on whether or not the states themselves aim at moral goods?13 I will, again, leave it open that states can be morally good or valuable in a variety of ways and aiming at moral goods may well be one of them. There are, however, two reasons states and actions are not virtuous on this basis. One is that a state may aim at a moral good without being connected to one’s moral character. For example, someone with a pathological

12 For more on causation in virtue of content, see Arpaly (2009). 13 I thank Dave Estlund for raising this issue.

9 compulsion to pick up litter may be in a state that aims at a good, but is also disconnected from her will and deepest values (she may even engage in such behavior against her will). More importantly, such account cannot explain states that stem from concern for the good but misfire and do not aim at the good. For example, gratitude can be virtuous even when directed at the wrong person or for the wrong benefit.14 Such gratitude doesn’t actually aim at a good, but still reflects well on one’s moral character.

This manifestation, like virtues, comes in degrees – to say that Tim is more generous than Michael is to say that Tim better manifests moral concern in a certain respect. It is not a necessary condition for being a virtue that it makes one a good person, only that having it make one a better person. Michael might be a bad person despite being very generous. His generosity, however, makes him a better person than he would be without it.

I will also draw a distinction between overt actions and covert actions. Overt action is what we normally think of when we think of actions; they are observable bodily behaviors like eating lunch, reading a book, or playing a ukulele. Covert actions are internal, mental actions like attending, imagining, contemplating, or deliberating. They are distinct from other mental phenomena like emotions or pleasures in that they are doings rather than things that happen to us. There are cases that straddle this distinction.

Sometimes thinking, remembering, or worrying are actions, they are something I do.

Other times thoughts, memories, or worries are things that happen to me. When these are cases of doing rather than happening, I will call them covert actions.

14 At least when the misdirection is the result of an “honest mistake” – I will discuss the virtue of gratitude in much more detail later.

10 The states I will focus on can reflect one’s moral character without overt behaviors. However, those who wish to explain virtue in terms of overt action need not require actual behaviors, but only the intention for such behavior. If will sometimes talk of the mental states of those who cannot act, like people who are paralyzed. I take it that if someone knows that they cannot do something, they cannot intend to do that thing.

Intentions and behavior are closely linked and the states I describe will be virtuous or vicious independently of either overt behavior or intention. I will not deny that, in normal circumstances, such states will typically be accompanied by certain behaviors or intentions – I simply wish to argue that these states can be virtuous or vicious independently of such associations.

To summarize: The heart of being a good person is caring about moral goods.

States (and actions) that manifest this concern are virtuous by displaying one’s moral character. Many of these states and concerns do not require intentions or overt behaviors; virtue and vice do not, as is commonly supposed, always require behavior action. This care can be embodied in covert, non-behavioral mental action like voluntary attention but also in involuntary mental responses, like pleasure, emotion, and involuntary attention. In the following section I argue against views that characterize virtue as a disposition to behavioral action and argue that non-dispositional account in general are better explanations of virtue and vice.

11 II. TWO STRANDS IN VIRTUE THEORY

Before discussing the sorts of virtues and vices that do not need to manifest as overt action, it will be helpful to examine some of the existing philosophical literature on virtue. Accounts of virtue and vice can be broadly divided into two classes: dispositional and grounding. Dispositional accounts explain virtues as dispositions to have certain actions and responses while grounding accounts explain them in terms of the grounds of such actions and responses. This should not be confused with Thomas Hurka’s (2006) distinction between ‘dispositional’ and ‘occurrent-state’ views. Hurka’s distinction is about act evaluation, in particular whether or not a virtuous action must be the result of a disposition. My distinction is about agent evaluation: whether virtue is identified with a collection of dispositions or some non-dispositional trait.

Dispositional properties are sometimes contrasted with categorical properties, though as Stephen Mumford (1998, 64ff.) points out, the distinction is far from clear-cut.

Nevertheless, dispositions are in general about what is possible, what would happen in certain situations, while categorical properties are about what is actual. To use a somewhat tired example, being water-soluble is a dispositional property of a sugar cube

(it would dissolve, if it were put in water) while its volume is a categorical property (how much space it takes up right now). Many traits lend themselves to either kind of analysis.

Suppose I am furniture shopping and the salesperson tells me that a particular chair is sturdy. On a dispositional account being sturdy just means that the chair would not break if it were subject to various stressful situations. On a grounding account, being sturdy means having certain categorical properties, like a particular molecular structure or a

12 certain design, that cause the disposition not to break in certain situations. After describing these two strands in virtue theory, I will argue that grounding accounts offer better explanations and better accommodate many particular cases.

Virtues as Dispositions

A common way to understand the virtues is to see them as dispositions. These dispositions are often described simply as dispositions to act, but are sometimes also extended to dispositions to feel pleasures, pains, or emotions. This view of virtue has been common for as long as philosophers have been writing on virtue. Many take inspiration from Aristotle’s description of virtue (Greek: arete) as a stable disposition

(Greek: hexis) to certain actions and feelings (see NE 1106a11-12, 17-18, and 1107a1).

These views come in a variety of versions depending on what kinds of dispositions are included and whether or not such dispositions are sufficient for virtue, or merely necessary.

A particularly strict form of this view is one that identifies virtue with a disposition to behavioral action. This characterization of virtue is commonly found in criticisms of virtue theory that stem from social science research. These criticisms generally proceed by assuming that virtues are stable dispositions to act in certain ways and that the situational variation in behavior suggests that no such stable dispositions exist. Implicit in this characterization is the notion that virtues and vices are merely dispositions to behave in certain ways. Gilbert Harman (1999, 317) offers such a criticism, claiming that virtues are “… relatively long-term stable disposition to act in distinctive ways. An honest person is disposed to act honestly. A kind person is disposed to act kindly.” We can include among those who assume that virtues are dispositions to

13 act more than a few illustrious philosophers. G.E. Moore writes that virtues “may be defined as an habitual disposition to perform certain actions” (1903/1993, 221). Henry

Sidgwick (1907/1982, 219) defines virtues as “qualities exhibited in right conduct” and

W.D. Ross (1936/1963, 292) identifies virtue with “tendencies to behave.” Elizabeth

Anscombe (1958/1997, 43) takes a just person to simply be one disposed to perform just acts. More recently, Bernard Williams (1985/1998, 8-9) gives a similar account, calling virtue “… a disposition of character to choose or reject actions because they are of a certain ethically relevant kind” while Judith Jarvis Thompson, offers a similar account of justice to Anscombe:

In sum, I shall take the noun phrase 'being just' to refer to what all just acts have in common, just people being just only derivatively, in the sense that they are prone to performing just acts. But I shall follow a common usage according to which the noun 'justice' refers to a character trait possessed by people, namely, the character trait that consists in proneness to performing just acts. (1997, 280)

Many philosophers have recognized this view as far too simple (see Hursthouse 1999,

11). After all, virtuous people are not simply robots programmed to make the proper movements. It matters why we do what we do. Recall that the actions of Kant’s prudent grocer, who charges fair prices only because he believes it good for business, are indistinguishable from the grocer who charges fair prices because it is the right thing to do.15

Dispositional accounts then must take virtue to be not simply a disposition to behavioral actions but actions done for the right reasons and with the right emotions. This idea can also be traced to Aristotle. Though he tells us that it is how we behave in our dealings that make some people just and others unjust and what we do in terrifying situations that makes some people brave and others cowardly (NE 1103b14-17), he

15 More recently, John Rawls offers a similar description of virtue, calling them “sentiments and habitual attitudes leading us to act on certain principles of right” (1971/1999, 383).

14 continues to say that this also applies to our appetites and emotions like anger (NE

1103b17-18). It is important to remember that for Aristotle, the continent person is different from the virtuous person (see NE 1102b26-8 and 1151b43ff); performing a virtuous action is not the same as merely acting in accordance with virtue (see NE

1105a33) – being a good person is not simply a matter of acting like one. This is reflected in recent work in the Aristotelian tradition; Rosalind Hursthouse (1999, 108ff.) explicitly includes dispositions to feel the proper emotions in her influential account of virtue.

Though her account takes virtue to require dispositions (1999, 11 and 108), it also takes it to be a benefit to their possessor and to involve a skill in judgment (Greek: phronesis), which may or may not be purely dispositional. Other dispositional accounts posit a particular relationship between the behavioral dispositions and the mental dispositions associated with virtue. Owen Flanagan claims, “On every view the virtues are psychological dispositions productive of behavior” (1991, 282) while Richard Brandt

(1988, 46) claims “… virtue is (a certain kind of) relatively unchanging disposition to desire an action of a certain sort”. Virtues on this account are not simply a collection of behavioral and psychological dispositions, but psychological dispositions that reliably produce actions of a certain kind.

In practice, many philosophers who talk of virtues as dispositions are not particularly concerned about whether these involve only actions or include other mental and emotional reactions; John Rawls (1971/1999, 167) for example, calls virtues “… related families of dispositions and propensities regulated by a higher-order desire” without making any claims about what sort of disposition families these are. We might let

Rawls off the hook since he is not in the business of offering a theory of virtue. However,

15 dispositions often go underspecified in the works of virtue theorists too. Julia Driver, for example, sometimes talks about virtues simple as dispositions to behave or act well; she describes virtue as a disposition to “produce intentional action” (2001, 25 and 107) and claims, “what is crucial is whether or not the person is disposed to act well” (2001, 53).

However, she at times talks about them as dispositions to “feel, behave, or act well”

(1996, 124) and describes blind charity as a virtue “in thought rather than in deed” (2001,

28). Similarly, Julia Annas tells us that the dispositions involved in virtue are different from physical dispositions like the fragility of a glass because “… glass does not have a disposition by way of doing anything” (2011, 8), but goes on to claim that “virtues involve a range of emotional feelings and expressions.” (2011, 67-8). Emotions, however, are not doings – sulking is something I do, feeling sad is not. So if emotions are part of the dispositions necessary for virtue, it is an important oversight to say that the dispositions relevant to virtue are dispositions of acting or doing.

Other theories take the relevant dispositions must be of a certain kind; they must be intelligent, sophisticated dispositions. Later situationalist critics in the style of Harman have also been sensitive to the shortcomings of seeing virtue as a simple disposition; John

Doris offers a subtler version of Harman’s social science style criticisms by taking a more nuanced view of the dispositions he takes virtue to require:

Virtues are not mere dispositions, but intelligent dispositions, characterized by distinctive patterns of emotional response, deliberation, and decision as well as by more overt behavior. (2005, 17).

Christine Swanton offers an account in this vein, calling virtue “a disposition to respond to, or acknowledge, items within its field or fields in an excellent or good enough way”

(2003, 19ff.). On this account, virtues are dispositions to respond to a variety of sources of value in a variety of ways (respecting, honoring, promoting, loving, etc) – many of

16 which require more sophisticated dispositions. More recently, Annas (2011) offers a dispositional theory that requires intelligent dispositions. By this, she seems to mean dispositions that respond to changing circumstances, developed through education, sustained through practice, and are central to one’s character (8-11). Virtues are dispositions in the way that Yo-Yo Ma is disposed to play the cello well rather than the way a sugar cube is disposed to dissolve in water. Even theories that require more robust dispositions for virtue, take the simpler “dumb” dispositions to be necessary conditions for virtue. This requirement stems from the common-sense idea that virtue requires behavioral regularities. This is explicitly articulated by George Sher:

For anyone who is kind must, at a minimum, be disposed to act kindly under some suitably broad range of conditions. Having such a disposition is a necessary condition for bring a kind person at all. (2002, 385)

Dispositional theories, then, take virtue and vice to be collections of psychological and behavioral dispositions and take dispositions to act to be a necessary condition for having a virtue.

Virtues as the Grounds of Dispositions

Many theorists have identified virtues and vices not with particular mental, emotional, and behavioral dispositions, but with the states that underlie such tendencies.

The nature of these underlying states has been characterized in different ways – as a state of the soul or the will, as compassion or caring, sentiments, commitments, desires, and as more complex phenomenological and motivational states like bodhicitta. What these distinct accounts have in common is the characterization of virtue and vice not in terms of what an agent would feel or do in a particular situation, but as an occurrent state that grounds such dispositions.

17 An early example of a non-dispositional account can be found in Plato’s understanding of justice in the Republic. For Plato, justice is not simply a disposition to perform just actions. Instead, justice is a harmonious state of the soul (see Republic IV, especially 441d-e). This state will, under normal circumstances, result in certain mental and behavioral tendencies, but it is not itself a disposition – it is a particular relation of the parts of one’s soul. This state tends to produce good results, but it is in itself good.

Socrates makes this clear when he explicitly draws a comparison between virtue and health (444e-445b, see also Irwin 1995, 192) and claims that only the slavish choose virtue only for its results (again, see Irwin 195).

Another historical example of this kind of account is Kant’s account of virtue found in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Doctrine of Virtue. For

Kant, having good will and being a morally good person is a matter of how we weigh or prioritize our predispositions in forming our maxims—virtue is having a will that puts

The Moral Law first (see Religion 6:29-32 and Doctrine of Virtue 6:394ff.). Onora

O’Neill (1996, 95) describes it as a will that subordinates self-love to morality when they conflict. This will is not simply a psychological disposition, but an occurrent state. This becomes clearer when considering the will associated with the more warm-and-fuzzy formula of humanity – to have respect for persons is not simply a disposition to treat certain creatures in a particular way, but having a will that recognizes their dignity and relates to them as a person is particular ways (for example, consider the complexity of the account found in Darwall 2006). Kant’s own claims in his Anthropology from a

Pragmatic Point of View lend support to a non-dispositional understanding of virtue:

18 So we cannot define virtue as acquired aptitude for free lawful actions; for then it would be a mere mechanism in the exercise of our forces. Virtue is, rather moral strength in pursuing our duty, which never becomes habit but should always spring forth, quite new and original, from our way of thinking. (1798/1974, 26-7 emphasis in original)

Virtue, then, is a kind of strength that allows us to put morality before self-interest. This strength, however, is unlike the dispositional sturdiness of a chair; it is not merely that one is apt to put morality first in a variety of situations. Rather, it is an occurrent state that comes from how we relate to ourselves and others.

Another influential class of grounding theories are those that root virtue in certain emotions or sentiments. The most influential version of this view in the West is the one offered by David Hume. Hume himself, and indeed many of his interpreters (see Mackie

1980, esp. 5-6), saw his project as an empirical and descriptive one – a sort of anthropology of morals. On this understanding, virtues and vices seem to be dispositional; they are simply whatever traits that would, in general, produce pleasure or displeasure when contemplated (Treatise 3.1.2). However, many views have taken inspiration for an account of virtue and vice that grounds them in sentiments, in particular sympathy (see Treatise 3.2.3). One such view, offered by Michael Slote (2001 and 2007) grounds virtue in the presence of motives of caring and benevolence; such altruistic concern is taken to be “warm” (2001, 20) which suggests an emotional component. Slote often uses the terms ‘motive’ and ‘disposition’ interchangeably (2001, especially 21, 35, and 58), but is not particularly concerned whether or not caring is dispositional. Other theorists like Annette Baier (1985) and Nel Noddings (1984/2003, especially 79ff.) offer care-based accounts of virtue (though they may well object to the idea that they are engaged in theory-building at all). The notion of care in play resists a dispositional understanding: Baier describes virtue as “involving both motivation and ability” (1985,

19 257), while Noddings describes caring as a social phenomenon of “feeling with” or

“receiving” or “engrossment” (30-33). These are all occurrent states that involve attention, emotion, and imagination to say the least – not simply dispositions. Harry

Frankfurt (1982/1988, 82-4) discusses the relationship of caring to our agency, self- reflection, and identification in a way that resists a simple dispositional account. Caring essentially involves a fact of identification, not simply facts about what would happen under certain conditions.

It is an interpretive issue whether or not some accounts are essentially dispositional. One such an account is that of John McDowell (1979), who characterizes virtue as a reliable sensitivity to the morally relevant aspects of a situation. One can take

‘sensitivity’ to simply be a cluster of dispositions, or as something more.16 Another

Hume-style (though historically prior) account that faces similar interpretive challenges can be found in the work of the neo-Confucian Mengzi. For Mengzi, virtue is rooted in the Four Sprouts, which are all taken to be states of our hearts and minds:

The mind’s feeling of pity and compassion is the sprout of humaneness (ren); the mind’s feeling of shame and aversion is the sprout of rightness (yi); the mind’s feeling of modesty and compliance is the sprout of propriety (li); and the mind’s sense of right and wrong is the sprout of wisdom (zhi).” Mengzi 2A6

Stephen Angle (2009, 77ff.) explicitly draws a parallel between Slote’s notion of caring and Mengzi’s humaneness. Feelings like pity, compassion, and shame are not only what it means to be human, but are the source of virtue. Again, whether this is a dispositional view or not depends on an account of sympathy; Bryan Van Norden (2007, 249) explicitly analyses benevolence in Mengzi as a disposition – on his interpretation it is a disposition to notice and be pained by the suffering of others. However, Stephen Darwall

16 Although early on the in same essay, McDowell himself describes virtue as a disposition to behave rightly.

20 (1997/1998) interprets Mengzi as referring to what he calls ‘sympathetic concern’ which requires an interest not just in another’s well-being, but actively adopting their perspective or standpoint. This is more than simply a disposition to react in particular ways, but an active and occurrent state of mind.

Though not inspired by Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, in his On the Basis of

Morality, offers a similar grounding view of virtue (and vice) that roots it in compassion or loving-kindness (and malice). Though much of his discussion centers on the moral worth of actions, his account of virtue rests on compassion. He focuses on motives and offers a hydraulic model, claiming that humans are susceptible to three kinds of incentives: egoism, malice, and compassion. We have these incentives in differing amounts and also have different sensitivities to them (1839/1995, 192ff.). This is an occurrent fact about us, not a dispositional fact about what would happen in certain situations. Actions with moral worth are the ones done from compassion, which underlies the virtuous person’s tendency to perform good actions. He writes,

… if we attempt to say, “This man is virtuous but knows no compassion,” or, “He is an unjust and malicious man yet he is very compassionate,” the contradiction is obvious. (1839/1995, 172)

For Schopenhauer, compassion is central to the very notion of virtue. He also makes it clear that he does not think of compassion simply as a disposition to engage in what today’s social scientists call “pro-social” behavior, but instead sees it as an active and experiential state that blurs the boundaries between self and other and participates in another’s suffering (165-6).17

17 Compare this with the account of compassion offered by Lawrence Blum (1987, 231) who agrees that compassion is a complex emotional attitude, but denies that a blurring between self and other is necessary.

21 Compassion (Sanskrit: karuna, Tibetan: snying rje) in a Buddhist context, though distinct from the sense used by Schopenhauer, is also a grounding state. In Buddhism, compassion is a particular attitude towards the suffering of others (indeed, it is one of the

Four Boundless Attitudes). The compassionate person wishes for all types of suffering to be eliminated; the compassionate person is sometimes described as being strongly committed to ending all suffering (for example, see Tsongkhapa 2004, 28). This is not simple a dispositional, but is a categorical trait of a person; Kangyur Rinpoche writes that

“[Compassion] is a sensation felt in the very roots of the heart, an inability to tolerate the fact that beings suffer.” (150). Though it entails facts about what would happen in certain situations, compassion is not essentially counterfactual, but is an occurrent fact about a person’s relation to suffering.

We can also see discussions of virtue in the Buddhist tradition as offering a grounding account. In drawing this comparison, I do not mean to suggest as Damien

Keown (2001, 2005) has that virtue is the basis of all Buddhist ethics.18 Buddhist philosophers, like their Western counterparts, are engaged in many projects, one of which is the evaluation of agents; this common project makes philosophical exchange worthwhile for both parties. Śāntideva's influential text The Way of the Bodhisattva

(Sanskrit: Bodhicaryāva-tāra) offers an explanation of how one can become a bodhisattva – a particular spiritual and ethical ideal of Mahāyāna Buddhism. What distinguishes a bodhisattva is presence of bodhicitta, a notion often less-than-helpfully explained etymologically as a mind (citta) of enlightenment (bodhi), is a particular

18 Keown’s virtue based account has been attacked by Charles Goodman (2008 and 2009) who favors a consequentialist account. I am not interested in the project of classifying Buddhist ethics into the Western consequentialist/deontologist/virtue taxonomy of ethical views, a taxonomy that has not escaped criticism even in the West: See Dreier (1993), Portmore (2007), and Brown (2011).

22 psychological state. The first chapter Śāntideva's text is devoted to praise of this important state; it is not identical with compassion, bodhicitta implies compassion but is itself much broader. It is an especially strong aspiration to eliminate suffering (of both others and oneself) by cultivating particular abilities and understandings about the nature of reality. These understandings are not merely intellectual but insights that change how one experiences the world, particularly the distinction between ourselves and others and our moral perception.19 For example, Keiji Nishitani (1982, 5-6) and Victor Hori (2000,

304) use the term ‘realize’ to translate the Japanese term genjō precisely because of the double meaning of the English term: to realize something about reality is to both understand it and to manifest it in our lives. For now, what is important is that an ideal agent, a bodhisattva, is defined not by what she would do in certain situations, but by non-dispositional aspirations, understandings, and how she experiences the world (this phenomenological aspect is emphasized in Garfield 2011).

More recent work in virtue ethics has also identified virtue not with dispositions but their grounds. Thomas Hurka (2001), for example, provides a grounding account of the virtues by rooting them in the attitudes of loving the good and hating evils. ‘Loving’ here is a term of art that includes desires, actions, pleasures, and attitudes. These are, according to Hurka, occurrent states of a person, not merely facts about how a person would be in certain situations. Another account of this kind is offered by Robert Adams

(2006), whose sees virtue as an attitude of “being for” the good, which is similar to

Hurka’s notion of loving goods (though as Adams notes, for Hurka the goods that one is for are states of affairs, while for Adams includes objects and persons). More recently,

19 This is only a very brief sketch of bodhicitta. More detailed explanations can be found in Gareth Sparham’s introduction to Khunu Rinpoche (1999) and in Garfield (2011).

23 Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder argue that the relevant relation to the good is one of intrinsic desire (which Schroeder 2004,17ff. previously argued cannot be dispositional).

Accepting grounding account of virtue and vice does not require taking dispositions to be irrelevant. For example, Adams often suggests that dispositions to act are a necessary condition for virtue:

It would be difficult, if not, impossible, to ascribe virtue to people without assuming that they are capable of being for and against goods and evils in disposition as well as in action. (Adams 2006, 18)

This is not, however, central to the account (as Adams himself notes). In the following section I will argue that virtue cannot be explained solely in terms of dispositions to overt actions. Though virtue can still be described by a wider range of dispositions, I will claim that a non-dispositional account better explains the variety of virtuous and vicious states and helps to explain why a virtuous person has the dispositions that she does.

III. AGAINST A DISPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT

One might reject dispositional accounts for the simple reason that there seems to be strong empirical evidence suggesting that the required dispositions do not exist.

Situationalists like John Doris (2005), inspired by social science research, attack virtue theory on the grounds that situational factors play a far greater role in how people behave than dispositions (no matter how “intelligent” such dispositions are taken to be). What really determines whether or not you give to the homeless person is not your generous or stingy disposition, but whether or not you are late for a meeting or whether or not the street smells bad. There have been a number of replies to this charge: Kamtekar (2004),

24 Arpaly (2005), Adams (2006, 115ff.), and Annas (2011, 172-4) among others. Social science research, however, only rules out dispositions to overt behavior that are “broad” or “robust” (Doris 2005, 18-30). These criticisms leave open a range of dispositional accounts, including those that make the relevant dispositions psycholgical or sufficiently narrow.

It is also open to dispositional theorists to posit a psychological disposition that can be blocked from resulting in broad behavioral dispositions. John McDowell, for example, describes virtue as a sensitivity to certain morally relevant factors, which could plausibly be understood as a kind of psychological disposition. He takes this to be linked with behavioral dispositions, but claims that if someone with the relevant sensitivity does not act as a virtuous person would, one’s sensitivity must be “clouded” (1979, 332-4).

Grounding accounts of virtue have an advantage here – they do not rely on the existence of suitably broad dispositions, only a broad trait that underlies such actions and feelings.

It is telling that John Doris’ review of Robert Adam’s account of virtue is entitled

“Heated Agreement” (Doris, 2010).

Thomas Hurka (2001, 42-44) also argues that virtues do not require dispositions.

Hurka’s argument, however, really shows only that virtuous action does not require a stable disposition. He offers parallel cases of two people who both perform kind actions but one does so out of a stable disposition of kindness and the other does so only this once with no such kind tendencies. This echoes a different debate about whether or not an action performed from a stable disposition is more virtuous than one that is not the result of such a disposition: Hartz (1991, 151) and Aristotle (NE 1105a31–b12) claim that being the result of a stable disposition does make the action more virtuous while those like

25 Montmarquet (1998, 153-4) and Śāntideva suggest that it does not. This does not speak to the question of whether or not virtue itself is dispositional. Whether or not the kindness shown by the kind person is somehow more kind than the one-off kindness shown by a

“jerk”, the kind person is still a better person than the “jerk.” If we are concerned with evaluating agents, one can accept Hurka’s point about act evaluation while also taking stable dispositions to be necessary for being a good person.

There are, however, other cases that cast doubt on dispositional accounts of virtue and vice. Let’s consider two common-sense dispositional accounts: one is that virtue is a disposition to perform good actions for the right reasons; the other is that virtue is a psychological disposition that produces behavior (as Flanagan 1991 suggests). On these views, being ‘disposed’ to do something means that we would do it if we were in certain situations. However, consider the following example:

Weather Watchers: In his book Mental Reality, Galen Strawson (1994, 251ff.)

describes imaginary creatures called weather watchers. Like us, these creatures

are sensitive, intelligent, and feeling beings; they also happen to care very deeply

about the weather. However, they are rooted to the ground and are physiologically

incapable of performing any overt actions so their mental lives can have no effect

on the external world.

Just as someone in Nozick’s experience machine can have virtuous or vicious reactions, there are many virtues and vices open to weather watchers. They can be empathetic with others, be indifferent to the suffering of others, or harbor malicious thoughts. They can be

26 jealous, envious, angry or patient, grateful, and compassionate.20 These are features that one could use to evaluate weather watchers, features that make one particular weather watcher better than another – they are virtues. However, because of the sort of beings they are, weather watchers cannot have virtue or vice on either of the common-sense dispositional views. There are no possible situations in which they would perform overt actions, so they cannot be disposed to perform them for the right reasons; because of the kind of things they are they are unable. They may have certain psychological dispositions, but these are not at all productive of behavior.

One might object here that discussion of weather watchers is changing the subject. When one gives an account of virtues and vices, one gives an account of human virtues and vices. Philippa Foot (1979, 8-14) claims that virtues counter common human temptations to vice; if humans had no temptation to run from danger or avoid painful facts, there would be no such virtue as courage. Though this notion of courage seems far too narrow (after all, a weather watcher could courageously face an impending hurricane), the general point is still relevant: If we were not the kind of beings who could consume food and drink, there would be no such virtue as temperance. It is true that radically different kinds of beings, like weather watchers, are apt to have radically different virtues and vices. However, what is striking is that we seem to be able to share many virtues and vices with these radically different beings, which are unable to act. We can also describe a similar case involving human beings:

20 Doris (2005, 29) reads Blum (1994, 179) as claiming compassion is a disposition to perform beneficent action. This is a misreading of Blum, who only claims that compassion “involves” such a disposition “when it is possible” and continues on the following page, “Compassion, however, is not always linked so directly to the prompting of beneficent action.” It is only in a very contrived social science sense that compassion is impossible for weather watchers.

27 Paralysis: Roger is a regular guy who is virtuous in the sense defined by the

common-sense dispositionalist. He had dispositions to care about others and about

doing the right thing, desire to help others and feel pleasure at their successes and

pains at their sufferings, and these dispositions produce virtuous behavior. One

day Roger is in a car accident; he survives, but his brain is badly damaged. The

particular part of his brain that is damaged is the part connecting his cares,

desires, pleasures, and beliefs to the part that allows him to perform behavioral

action (though it is unlikely that there are single parts of the brain that do this, let

us specify that the damage is only to whatever it is in the brain that gets us from

believing and desiring to acting). Roger still has all of the cares, desires,

pleasures, and beliefs that he had the day before, but he is no longer able to overly

act on them.

Like the weather watchers, Roger seems to pose a problem for the common-sense dispositional theories. There are no situations in which he would act, so he cannot be disposed to act (let alone act for the right reasons) and though he still has psychological dispositions, these are no longer productive of behavior. The dispositional theorist has two options: Either claim that Roger is no longer virtuous or that he still has dispositions to perform overt actions. The Flanagan-inspired theory of virtue as psychological dispositions productive of behavior must take the first option, since Roger’s psychological dispositions are no longer productive of behavior.

But this seems to get it wrong about Roger. On this view, along with his ability to walk and talk, Roger also lost his status as a morally good person in the car accident. It

28 does not seem like Roger lost his virtue in the accident, but only the ability to manifest that virtue in action. Roger seems like the same good person he was before the accident who happens to have a physical disability. The dispositional theorist tries to claim that

Roger is less virtuous, but there are many virtues Roger has, the ones that he can share with weather watchers, that are unchanged after the accident.21

A theory of virtue as dispositions to act (for the right reasons) can take the second option and claim that even though Roger is unable to act, he still has the disposition to act. The disposition in question cannot be simply that I would perform the action if I wanted to. If being disposed to do something means that I would do it if I wanted to, then

Roger no longer has the relevant virtuous dispositions. After all, he may still want very much to perform many behavioral actions, but because of his body he cannot.

Perhaps dispositions are not about what we want, but how we would act if we were different. Even if he cannot act, it can still be true that he would act if he could.

After all, if we just changed his body, he would perform good actions. Sometimes an inability does not rule out a disposition: If I have no car and my favorite coffee shop is ten miles away, we might say that I am disposed to visit it because if there was a bus that goes there, I would take it. However, when we allow the ‘if’ clause to include changes to the subject, there are counter-intuitive results. If changes to the subject are allowed, then it turns out that we all have many more dispositions than we normally assume. I have a disposition to fly because if we just changed by body by adding wings, I would fly. I am also disposed to solve the free will problem because if we just changed some of the neurons in my brain around I would write a ground-breaking paper. We are all disposed

21 Adams (2006, 16) offers a similar example of an aged and debilitated person.

29 to take heroin because if we just change the reward system in our brains, we would seek out the drug.

If being disposed to do something simply means that I would do it if I were just a little different, then it seems everyone is disposed to be virtuous; after all, if their cares, desires, and beliefs were different, then they would perform good actions for the right reasons. Even worse, everyone is, for similar reasons, also disposed to be vicious at the same time. Apples have a disposition to sprout apple trees, but an apple with the core- removed is not disposed to sprout an apple tree, even though if it had a core, it would sprout a tree.22 In the same way, someone without the required mechanisms in their brain to produce overt actions is not disposed to behavioral action (even if it’s true that they would if they could).

What does this argument show? It shows that virtues are not merely dispositions to action. This applies not only to dispositional accounts, but grounding accounts that add dispositions to overt action as an additional necessary condition, as Robert Adams does with his account (2006, 18). However, this condition can easily be dropped or amended by grounding accounts, while dispositional accounts will have more difficulty accommodating my examples. It does not show that all accounts that involve dispositions must fail, nor does it show that it is impossible to cook up a dispositional account to give the same verdicts about virtue and vice as a grounding account. A grounding account, however, does a better job of explaining why the dispositions are as they are and can give an account that gives a unified explanation of why various types of states can all count as virtuous or vicious.

22 I thank Tim Schroeder for this analogy.

30 What motivates dispositional accounts, I think, is not that dispositions are particularly elegant or explanatory theoretical tools, but that we want virtue to be stable and reliable. When defending virtue as a disposition, Julia Annas (2011, 8-10) talks about how we want virtue to be ‘persisting’ and ‘reliable’; recall that Aristotle thought virtue was a hexis – a settled state. Robert Adams (2006) often talks about virtue being a

‘persisting’ state and muses about the vagueness of this persistence, claiming that a day would not be enough, but five years might do the trick (2006, 18).

Stability is often taken to be probabilistic: For someone to have a virtue is just for her to be likely to exhibit the trait in the appropriate situation (see the discussion in

Adams 2006, 122ff. of “probabilistic virtues”). Thus if we had a God’s eye view, we could know who has reliable or stable honest tendencies simply by getting statistics on how often they behaved honestly. But as any good sports fan knows, stats can be misleading. Consider the notion of a “clutch player” – such a player performs well when the stakes are high. Another player may have better overall stats than a clutch player, that is, their tendency to score is more stable and reliable, but the small percentage of situations where they fail includes the important ones when the game is on the line. We can imagine a moral version of our clutch player who, though their overall honest or bravery “stats” are lower, they are able to be honest and courageous “when the chips are down.” It is difficult to tell whether a clutch player is a better overall player than her more statistically reliable teammate, but it can seem so. After all, who would you rather have on your team? In the moral case, would you rather your child grow up to be someone who with clutch honesty or someone who has more total instances of honest behavior but fails to be honest in important situations? I’m inclined to say the former, in

31 part because clutch performance seems to be evidence that their commitment to honesty is deeper.

Even if you don’t feel the intuition about clutch players, all this talk of stability and persistence can still seem beside the point. What we want is not simply reliability, persistence, or stability, but a depth of concern. What we want is deep reliability. Depth of concern often results in persistence; Robert Solomon (1998, 94) notes that to say “He loves passionately, but only for a few minutes at a time” is most likely to make a biting joke. Though stability can be evidence of depth, it is not sufficient for it. Nomy Arpaly

(2004, 94) points out that in a calm climate, fair-weather friends can stick around for years. Of two professors who never miss a class, both have reliable and stable tendencies, though one might care deeply about education while the other is simply stuck in a rut.

Though our deepest concerns tend to be stable, but not all stable concerns are deep.

We can see how shallow stability falls short of virtue by considering an example.

Suppose a well-intentioned scientist kidnaps me and implants a device that randomly, but frequently stimulates my brain in a way that gives me benevolent desires. The device is quite reliable and gives me a stable psychological disposition that leads me to behave in a benevolent way. On some accounts, the scientist has thereby made me fully virtuous.

However, it might seem that there is an important difference between me and someone who has reliable benevolent desires because the needs of others matter to her. Though we both have reliable and stable psychological tendencies, mine is shallow in a way that hers is not – hers is grounded in a particular orientation to the good, one that responds to the well-being of others.23 Stability is important, but it is not all that we want when it comes to virtue. When a professor’s perfect attendance is a result of caring deeply about her

23 Arguments of this form can be found in Hurka (2001, 8-9) and in Arpaly and Schroeder (forthcoming).

32 students, she is virtuous; when it is a result of having “nothing better to do” it is not.

Virtue is connected with stability, but the connection is a contingent psychological one, not a conceptual one.

Because of concerns like these, I will not use the term ‘disposition’ in giving my accounts of different virtues and vices (though in most cases my accounts can be adapted to use such terminology). Instead I will talk of how virtues and vices are manifested or instantiated. My particular focus will be on the variety of ways in which virtues and vices manifest in ways other than overt action.

IV. INNER VIRTUE AND VICE: EMOTIVE AND COVERT MANIFESTATIONS

As Michael Stocker (1979) notes, most studies in normative ethics have focused on act evaluation. Surprisingly, this has been true of the virtue ethics literature too. Rosalind

Hursthouse’s (1996, 1999) attempt to show that virtue ethics can give us advice on how to act, that it provides action-guiding “v-rules” has generated gallons of ink. For just a recent slice, see Everitt (2007), Russell (2009), van Zyl (2009 and 2011), Hurka (2010),

Stangl (2010), and Svensson (2010). These all focus on the question of whether or not virtue ethics can provide an account of right action. Of course, there is nothing wrong with theorizing about actions. Often, we don’t care at all what the internal life of a person is. Someone might feel strongly that people should not litter, but care very little about the internal life of a stranger in the park, as long as her trash makes it into the garbage can.

Other times, however, we care very much about what kind of a person someone is – it’s not enough that my friend simply refrain from making sexist comments, it is important to

33 me that he actually lack a sexist outlook. What I care about are mental features like his opinions, beliefs, and desires (among others).

One of the often-mentioned selling points of a virtue-based framework is that it allows us to examine not just questions about how we should act, but how we should be.

To be sure, it has its share of misfortunes, but virtue theory allows us to examine not just which actions should be performed, but what the best condition of our hearts and minds is and why. I will focus on case studies of virtues and vices that need not manifest in overt action. The first part will focus on virtues and vices that do not manifest in action of any kind: virtues of emotions. The second part will focus on virtues that manifest as covert, mental action: virtues of imagination and voluntary attention. Finally I will discuss these cases and suggest that a grounding account better explains what makes these different phenomena virtues and vices.

Chapter Structure

The first chapter will focus on the role that pleasures and pains play in our moral evaluation of persons, such as those who feel pleasure or pain at another’s misfortune or success. Pleasures and pains are not things that we do, but things that happen to us; though we may seek out certain pleasures and pains, this is separate from the moral status of having them. For example, Julia Driver offers the case of a hangman who deeply enjoys his work (Driver 1996). Even if we stipulate that all of his hangings are just, something still seems wrong; those who take capital punishment to be morally right and think that people should enjoy their jobs are apt to think there is something about the hangman’s enjoyment of his work that reflects poorly on his moral character.

34 I will argue that what is unsettling is not, as Driver suggests a psychological fact about pleasures, but important features not specified in the example: whether or not the hangman also experiences pain at the suffering of other and whether or not his pleasure manifests only pro-attitude towards the execution as justice or simply as suffering. Cases of suffering for justice, I will argue, warrant both pleasure and pain. A lack of either can be vicious in that it manifests a lack of concern for some good (justice or the well-being of others). I will also draw on the Buddhist notion of Mudita or sympathetic joy. I will argue that this is a virtue because it manifests a concern for others and a lack of excessive concern for oneself. Pleasures and pains can be morally relevant when they manifest a particular relationship (or lack of relationship) to the good. Neither schadenfreude nor mudita must manifest in action but are, as with emotions, relevant for our assessment of moral character. I will also deny two common claims in this area: First, that the relevant moral attitude in the virtuousness or viciousness of pleasure centers on what is deserved, and second, that the pleasures or displeasures are virtuous only when proportionate to the goodness or badness of their object.

The second chapter will focus on how affective states like emotions can count as virtuous or vicious. Virtue theory is often touted as a good framework for accommodating the moral value of the emotions (for example see Hartz 1990 and

Hursthouse 1999), and I will offer an account of how emotions can be virtuous or vicious by their connection with our moral cares and concerns. After a brief overview of how other philosophers have taken emotions to be morally relevant, I will offer an account of how some emotions can be morally virtuous or vicious independently of the actions they produce and even when the emotion is unwarranted or irrational.

35 The third chapter will focus in more detail on two emotions in particular: fear and anger. Discussions about the morality of anger and fear tend to be polarized, with philosophers either arguing that virtue requires such emotions (though in a restricted way

– think of Aristotle’s right time, right place, right way) or that such emotions are incompatible with virtue. I will reject both of these views and instead claim that emotions like fear and anger can be virtuous, though they are not necessary for being a good person. Despite being involuntary, anger or fear can be virtuous or vicious independently of overt behavior by manifesting one’s moral concerns. They can also be virtuous even when they are irrational or unwarranted and even when they do not produce behavioral action. The underlying concern illuminates the difference between the type of vicious anger rooted in self-concern described by Buddhists and Stoics, and virtuous righteous indignation rooted in a concern for justice. Though both of these are types of anger, the concerns they manifest are very different.

The fourth chapter will argue that attention (and inattention) can be morally virtuous or vicious in the same way, by manifesting moral concern. I will consider attention as directed consciousness that can be either an involuntary response or a kind of covert mental action. Though I will deny that attention itself is virtuous or vicious, I will argue that it can be when it is connected with our moral cares or concerns. Then I will offer accounts of some virtues of attention. These virtues are not important solely because of the patterns of attention associated with them, but conscious attention plays an essential role in each of them. Though these virtues all have behaviors associated with them, the associated behaviors are distinct from the virtue itself. One can behave as if one is modest, grateful, or mindful, without actually being any of these things.

36 Finally, I will discuss how this account best explains the variety of mental phenomena that can count as virtuous or vicious and shows that evaluations of virtue and vice do not reduce to judgments about the moral status of behaviors and intentions; that there is more to being a morally good person than simply having morally good intentions and performing right actions. Evaluations of virtue do not simply reduce to act-centered evaluations like obligation, permissibility, and blame; virtue is a distinct mode of moral evaluation.

37 CHAPTER II : PLEASURE AND DISPLEASURE

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. - Clarence Darrow

I. HEDONIC VIRTUE AND VICE

Peter experiences a warm sense of satisfaction whenever he learns one of his colleagues has been fired. Whenever Laura reads about the plight of refugees, she finds that she feels a certain emotional pain. The pleasure and displeasure experienced by Peter and Laura are not voluntary – they are not things they do, but things that happen to them. These reactions need not motivate voluntary action either; Peter may never take any steps to get others fired and the refugees that Laura reads about may have vanished hundreds of years ago. And yet, these involuntary reactions themselves seem to say something about Peter and Laura: “What kind of person” Peter’s wife might find herself asking, “would feel pleased when a colleague is fired?” while Laura’s friend might try to alleviate her uneasiness by telling her, “You feel that way because you’re such a kind-hearted person”

Cases like those of Peter and Laura show that pleasure and displeasure can be relevant in our moral evaluation of persons. Not all pleasure, however, is relevant to these evaluations. The pleasure we experience when tasting a fine Scotch or when our favorite team wins the championship does not reflect on our moral character.24 Neither does the

24 A Buddhist might claim that such pleasures are vicious in that they entail attachment and so cause suffering. Though it is true that pleasures often bring with them attachments, I will assume that pleasure

38 displeasure we feel when the weather is too humid or when we stub a toe. In what follows, I will defend a particular account of when such pleasures and displeasures are relevant to moral character assessment and why. In brief, my answer will be that the virtuousness or viciousness depends on why we are pleased or displeased – pleasure and displeasure are relevant when they manifest a positive or negative relation to moral goods. My discussion will focus on a particular class of pleasures and displeasures related to others such as Schadenfreude, though the view extends to other sorts of pleasures.

It is important to distinguish the question of how pleasures are related to our moral character from other neighboring moral questions involving pleasure. The most common of these tends to be whether or not pleasure is useful, either in moral development or in producing morally good actions. Though Aristotle takes pleasures and pains to be relevant factors in being virtuous (recall the difference between virtuous action and simply acting in accordance with virtue), he sometimes describes its value in terms of the actions it produces: “For moral virtue is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of the pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of the pain that we abstain from noble ones.” (NE 1104b8-11). Here he focus is on pleasure’s relation to behavior and not how the pleasure itself can reflect on our character. Many philosophers,

Henry Sidgwick for example, take the role in action to be the only moral issue related to pleasure. Sidgwick notes that, like Peter, we often take pleasure in the misfortunes25 of others, but concludes that “… these facts, though psychologically interesting, present no important ethical problems; since no one doubts that pain ought not to be inflicted from

and attachment are separable in theory, if not in practice. It is possible to enjoy a meal or the sight of leaves falling on an autumn day without thereby being attached to such things. 25 I use the terms ‘fortune’ and ‘misfortune’ here and following to refer to any good and bad things that happen to someone. I do not intend the connotation that such things must happen as a result of chance. In this sense, both murder and getting struck by lightning are misfortunes.

39 such motives as these.” (1930, 321f.). I agree with Sidgwick that Peter’s boss ought not fire his colleagues simply for his own amusement, but Peter’s pleasure seems to make us think less of him even if he cannot (or will not) inflict firings on his colleagues.

I am also not concerned here with whether or not certain pleasures or displeasures

“count” as considerations in favor of certain actions. It is an interesting question whether or not Peter’s pleasure counts in favor of firing someone or the pleasure that viewers of pornography experience counts in favor of producing it, but it is not the question I will explore here. What I will attempt to answer is when and why certain pleasures and displeasures might be virtuous or vicious – when they reflect on our moral character. In many cases, considerations of “counting in favor of” are not relevant; if the refugees

Laura is reading about are long dead, then her displeasure doesn’t seem to count in favor of any course of action. It does, however, seem possible that it can count in our moral estimation of her character.

In what follows, I will claim that pleasures and displeasures can be relevant to our moral character and that it is relevant when it is a manifestation of attitudes or concerns regarding moral matters. Peter’s pleasure is vicious if it is a result of morally relevant attitudes such as a desire for his colleagues to be harmed or even an indifference to their well-being. It may be objected here that perhaps Peter wants the best for his colleague even though he enjoys the worst – He may even feel guilty about his schadenfreude. Of course, Peter’s reflective attitudes about his pleasure may be virtuous, but that does not mean the pleasure itself is not vicious; after all, he has something to feel guilty about. As

I will argue, if Peter’s pleasure really does not manifest ill will towards his colleague, then it will count as vicious.

40 I will also deny two common claims in this area: first, that the relevant moral attitude in the virtuousness or viciousness of pleasure centers on what is deserved, and second, that the pleasures or displeasures are virtuous only when proportionate to the goodness or badness of their object. Before getting to my reply, however, it will be helpful to clarify some important terms.

II. PLEASURE AND DISPLEASURE

It is no easy task to give an account of what pleasure is. There seem to be innumerable varieties: Pleasures can be gustatory, aesthetic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual, and social to name just a few. To complicate matters, many pleasures have several of these aspects at once – the smell of a food your mother made you as a child can provide pleasure that is at once gustatory and social. It can be difficult to tell what is common between enjoying a well-made espresso, an orgasm, and finally understanding a Japanese sentence. Overly technical definitions such as “experiences with a positively valenced qualitative aspect” seem to offer little more than saying “pleasures are experiences which are pleasant.” I will not attempt to provide an account of pleasure itself here, but simply attempt to characterize the features of the sort of pleasure that is relevant in character evaluations.

For the most part, the pleasures relevant to character evaluation are mental rather than physical. Peter’s pleasure at his colleague’s dismissal reflects on his moral character in a way that completely physical pleasures do not. The pleasure he feels when entering an air-conditioned room on a hot day or eating a delicious meal do not reflect on his moral character. There are, however, some exceptions to this. Laura’s uneasiness at

41 reading about the plight of the refugees may well have physical aspects of displeasure; she might also feel a tightness in her chest or nausea. Psychosomatic displeasure, that is, physical pain that is the manifestation of mental displeasure seem unlike the simple pain of stubbing one’s toe. This kind of physical pain is always accompanied by a mental displeasure: Someone who vomits because of their mental anguish at seeing photographs of concentration camps has both mental displeasure and physical pain, while someone who vomits because they ate rotten food experiences only physical pain. For this reason, I will focus in my discussion only on mental pleasure and displeasure.

In part because I will focus on mental pleasures, I will contrast the term ‘pleasure’ with ‘displeasure’ rather than ‘pain’.26 Though we often talk about emotional (or less commonly, intellectual) pains, the paradigmatic sense of the term is physical and some physical pains can be pleasurable, for example, the pain of an intense workout or of particularly strong wasabi. In using the term ‘displeasure’, however, I mean something stronger than the common usage meaning something closer to a cold sense of disapproval coupled with slight annoyance (as when a supervisor tells his employee that chronic lateness is “displeasing”). In this sense I will ask the term to do more work than it usually does; though the term ‘displeasure’ does not seem to capture the intensity of the negative reaction of learning that a friend has cancer, my use will include such reactions.

Some have taken pleasure and displeasure to be emotions, and indeed pleasures and emotions share many features.27 Though pleasure and displeasure are elements of emotions like joy, glee, misery, and sorrow, they are not the whole story of these

26 I follow Schroeder (2004, especially 72ff.) in using this terminology. 27 For example, Hartz (1990, 147-8) treats them together on the grounds that pleasure and displeasure can be reveal things about our emotions, while bare sensations like being ticklish do not. However, many things that reveal things about our emotions are not themselves emotions such as facial expressions and tone of voice.

42 emotions. Some evidence that pleasure and displeasure are not themselves emotions is that we often say that certain emotions are pleasurable or displeasurable, suggesting that hedonic tone is not simply another emotion.

Pleasures are occurrent conscious states. They are occurrent in the sense that they have duration in time with a beginning and an end; when I find some money on the sidewalk I feel pleased for a while and eventually it wears off. They are conscious in the sense that they disappear when we fall into a coma or dreamless sleep (see Schroeder

2004, 76). They also, like emotions, generally take an object.28 I am pleased with the delicious meal or displeased with my brother’s rude behavior. While it seems possible to have objectless pleasure, perhaps when feeling a general sense of wellbeing, my discussion will focus on pleasures and displeasures that take an object.

In general, experiencing pleasure at bad things and displeasure at good things is taken to be vicious while experiencing displeasure at bad things and pleasure at good things is taken to be virtuous (see Hurka 2001, 13ff.). The objects of morally relevant pleasure and displeasure must be in the moral domain; pleasures at paintings, whiskeys, geometry proofs and the like are not morally virtuous or vicious.29 This is different from other moral virtues that can take non-moral objects. Immodesty, for example, is a moral vice that can take as its object non-moral qualities or skill. Someone who constantly brags about their basketball skill or their ability to find bargains has a moral vice, even though playing basketball and finding bargains are not morally valuable.

28 Emotions are sometimes contrasted with moods in this respect with emotions taking an object and moods not (see Oatley et al. 2006, 30). Some mental phenomena like boredom, however, blur this distinction – I might be bored with the talk I am hearing or simply bored in general. 29 I take myself to be in disagreement with a view endorsed by Robert Adams (2006, 20-1) that considers bad aesthetic taste to be a minor moral vice. I take it for granted that being more pleased by a Thomas Kinkade painting than that of a Dutch master makes one a philistine, but not a morally worse person.

43 The most obvious cases of pleasures and displeasures that have a morally relevant object are those like that of Peter and Laura’s, which focus on the fortunes or misfortunes of others.30 I will discuss many of these such as mudita (a virtue in Buddhist ethics referring to pleasure in the successes of others), but I will start by focusing on

Schadenfreude.

III. PLEASURE AND DESERT

Virtuous Pleasure in Undeserved Suffering

Of the pleasures and displeasures that focus on the fortunes and benefits of others, the one that has received the most ink in the Western philosophical literature is

Schadenfreude, pleasure at another’s misfortune.31 Schopenhauer offers the strongest condemnation of Schadenfreude; for him, it is always unconditionally vicious. He writes:

In some respects the opposite of envy is the malicious joy at the misfortunes of others [Schadenfreude]. Yet to feel envy is human; but to indulge in such malicious joy is fiendish and diabolical. There is no more fallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and moral profound moral worthlessness than an inclination to a sheer and undisguised malignant joy of this kind. (1840/1995, 135)

Many philosophers have found this blanket condemnation too strong. John

Portmann (2000) offers two replies to Schopenhauer’s view that all pleasure in the misfortunes of others is vicious. First, he argues that such a view does not adequately

30 Though I will be most concerned with the fortunes and misfortunes of others, my claims will often apply just as well to our own fortunes and misfortunes. How much my claims apply will depend on how much self/other asymmetry is found in morality. For some views on this complex issue, see Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra (especially chapter 3), Nagel (1970), and Williams (1981) among many many others. 31 Though the German term often refers to a more robust and complex emotional reaction, I am concerned here with only the hedonic element of taking pleasure in another’s misfortune.

44 distinguish different degrees of suffering or misfortune (see Portmann 2000, 81ff.). The objections seems to be that some misfortunes are too trivial for pleasure in them to count as vicious. However, it seems to be Portmann who is the one ignoring distinctions here; vice too, after all, comes in degrees. It is not a serious vice for me to feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction when I see my friend in a frustrating struggle to get his key to find in the lock or when I see that traffic going the opposite direction on the highway is at a complete standstill. Assuming that my pleasure in these cases is actually at the misfortunes of others and not, say, the absurdity of modern life, one who takes all

Schadenfreude to be vicious does not need to say I have a major moral vice. She can simply claim that my pleasure at these minor misfortunes constitutes a minor moral vice.

Taking pleasure in these minor misfortunes need not make me a bad person, but I might be a slightly better person if I didn’t delight in the everyday setbacks of others.

Portmann’s second claim is more promising – whether or not Schadenfreude is vicious depends on whether or not the misfortune is deserved. After all, if Peter’s colleague really “had it coming” then it need not be vicious for Peter to feel pleased at the firing, even though it is a misfortune for the colleague. Others have agreed with Portmann in this assessment of Schadenfreude; Aaron Ben-Ze’ev states the view clearly:

Pleasure whose object is undeserved misfortune must be considered morally unacceptable. It is ethically wrong to take pleasure in the undeserved misfortunes of others. However, when the misfortune is deserved, being pleased about this is not necessarily a vice. (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 375)

On this view, a misfortune’s being undeserved is sufficient for taking pleasure in it to be vicious. This claim stems from the idea that the heart of the viciousness of Schadenfreude

(when it is vicious) is a concern for justice, for what is deserved: Portmann (2000, 116) writes, “… Schadenfreude indicates something about how a person views justice and

45 moral triviality.” Ben-Ze’ev (2000, 376) agrees, “The important role deservingness plays in pleasure-in-others’-misfortune implies that this emotion can be found only in people who are sensitive to moral considerations.” Both correctly point out that the moral status of Schadenfreude stems from our moral sensitivities and concerns. What I wish to deny, however, is that these concerns and sensitivities are limited to the domain of what is deserved.

Not all pleasure in undeserved suffering is vicious. Pleasure in underserved suffering for its own sake is always vicious since undeserved suffering itself is always bad. Pleasure in undeserved suffering for some other sake, however, is not always vicious and can sometimes be virtuous. This can happen in different ways. One common type is when the suffering is taken to lead to something that is on-balance beneficial, better than the alternative, or meaningful in a larger sense.

Sometimes we are pleased at an undeserved misfortune because it provides an opportunity for the future. If Peter knows that his colleague was a good worker and did not deserve to be fired, but is pleased because it is an opportunity for his colleague to spend time with his family and land a better job. Peter might take this misfortune to be the catalyst that pushes his colleague to strike out on his own, a chance he would not otherwise have taken. The fact that these things might result from the firing does not mean that the firing is not a genuine misfortune; it is, after all, quite painful to go through. When Peter’s pleasure is described in this way, however, it does not seem to reflect poorly on his moral character. If our tastes in virtue include the so-called

‘theological virtues’, we may even think Peter has the virtue of hope.

46 Here Peter takes pleasure in the undeserved suffering of his colleague, but because he sees it as an opportunity for development. Peter need not deny that the event that pleases him is an instance of undeserved suffering to avoid being vicious, he can simply point out that the firing pleases him as an opportunity for future benefits for his colleague.

Another common situation in which undeserved suffering is the object of pleasure is in cases of unavoidable sufferings. In some tragic situations, we feel pleasure at an undeserved misfortune because it is not as bad at the misfortune we expected. Imagine you live in a town under the thumb of a ruthless gang. This gang occasionally engages in violent shows of force; they show up at a house chosen at random and publicly execute its owner. This is done to maintain an atmosphere of fear and for their own amusement.

Suppose that your neighbor has been selected for one of these visits and is dragged out to be killed. At the last minute, however, the thugs change their minds and instead simply punch him and take the cash he has on him. You may feel pleased at this outcome, despite the fact that he did not deserve the misfortune of being hit and robbed, because this misfortune was far better than the alternative. Your pleasure at his misfortune in this case does not seem to reflect any vice, but reflects a virtuous attitude of concern for him.

This can also happens in cases involving euthanasia. Suppose someone has the option of continued life at severely reduced quality or having their death hurried along

(either passively or actively, it does not matter for my purposes). Whatever one’s stance on the status of euthanasia, one is apt to feel pleased when what they take to be the better of the two misfortunes occurs. A supporter of euthanasia might think to herself, “Dad didn’t deserve to die this way, but I’m glad that he didn’t have to linger in pain” while an

47 opponent might reflect, “Mom doesn’t deserve to suffer this way, but I’m happy that she will die with dignity.” In either case, one feels pleasure in an undeserved misfortune, but it does not seem to make them morally worse for it.

Here again, the event that results in pleasure is an instance of undeserved suffering but not in the suffering itself, but because it is “better than what could have happened.” In these cases the person takes pleasure in a suffering or misfortune that was undeserved, but takes pleasure not in the suffering for its own sake but because of some other benefit.

This can also happen when undeserved suffering occurs for the sake of some larger cause. Martyrs, by definition, suffer terrible misfortunes they do not deserve, but do so for the sake of some larger cause. It is this feature that leads some to feel a kind of celebratory pleasure upon contemplation of such figures. Consider Nicola Sacco and

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants to America who were unjustly executed in 1927 after an infamously corrupt trial.

Many songs about this incident have an undeniably celebratory tone, particularly when focusing on the increased awareness of important issues (in this case, the treatment of immigrants) and strength of character that suffering such undeserved misfortunes manifested. Woodie Guthrie, for example, celebrates them as exemplars, offering the refrain, “I'll remember these two good men / That died to show me how to live.” Joan

Baez sings of the two Italians, “The last and final moment is yours / That agony is your triumph.”32 The implication is that the agony they experienced is undeserved, but also a political and symbolic triumph deserving of awed pleasure; it has meaning in a larger

32 The songs are entitled “Two Good Men” and “Here’s To You” respectively.

48 context. These verses have a celebratory tone about an undeserved misfortune, not because the suffering itself is valued, but because it plays a role in a larger cause.33

It is important to keep in mind here that things can be good without being normative. One can think that the undeserved suffering of Sacco and Vanzetti was good, in the sense that it was meaningful and beneficial, and still think it would be better if they had not been executed. One can think that bravery in battle or standing up to repressive governments is good, even though it would be better if there were no wars or repressive governments at all.

This kind of celebratory pleasure in undeserved suffering is not vicious and can be virtuous if it manifests a care for moral goods like justice, salvation, or even the inspiring character it reveals. Though it is pleasure in undeserved suffering, it is pleasure not in the suffering itself but for the sake of some moral good.34 Such pleasure is not always vicious; there can be something triumphant about some undeserved agony, particularly when faced bravely, and pleasure in such triumph does not reflect poorly on those who experience it. These cases each involve their own complexities, but together serve as counter-examples not only to those who, like Schopenhauer, take all pleasure in another’s misfortune to be vicious, but also to the claim that whether or not a misfortune is deserved is sufficient for pleasure in it to count as vicious. It is only pleasure in undeserved suffering for its own sake that is categorically vicious.

33 This is common in religious contexts too. Judith Perkins (1995) discusses how martyrdom was central to how early Christians saw themselves as suffering for an important cause, leading some to “embrace death” (40). Of course, they did not embrace just any death, but one that involved meaningful spiritual struggle. In contemporary Catholicism one often celebrates Christ’s suffering on the cross (for example by going over in detail the Stations of the Cross) not because the suffering itself is important, but because it plays a key soteriological role. 34 This can also happen on a less dramatic scale; consider pleasure in undeserved suffering that allows for valuable bonding or building character. Of course, if the suffering is too severe, such benefits are not on- balance worth it.

Vicious Pleasure in Deserved Suffering

We have seen that the mere fact that a misfortune is undeserved is not sufficient for pleasure in it to count as vicious. Also, the mere fact that a misfortune is deserved is not sufficient for pleasure in it to fail to be vicious. Julia Driver describes a particularly puzzling character in this regard:

Consider the happy executioner, and our suspicions of such a character. A happy executioner enjoys his job; he loves the feel of the rope slithering though his fingers as he fashions a noose, he loves to hear the snap of the neck bones breaking, etc. Most believers in capital punishment also think that it is good for people to enjoy their work. Why then the repugnance toward the happy executioner? (Driver 1996, 120-21).

Driver is right that something seems amiss in the executioner’s character, but what? Even if we stipulate that all of the executions are just, that is they are deserved, something still seems unsavory about the executioner. Driver’s answer is that it is a fact of human nature that our pleasures are not so narrow. For her our repugnance is “Because [we] know that, given human nature, there is a distinct possibility that this chap’s pleasures are not restricted to the punishment of vicious criminals.” On this view, it is simply psychologically implausible that our hangman enjoys only just executions.

Driver’s claim about the nature of pleasures in human beings is both false and irrelevant to our negative reactions to a character like the hangman. Reflection on our own pleasures reveals that they are often quite narrow. Consider, for example, my enjoyment of a family gathering. I might tell a friend that I generally enjoy family gatherings, except of course, if uncle So-And-So comes, in which case I am miserable. If

So-And-So brings his wife, however, it is enjoyable since he is less contrarian around her. If she is in a bad mood, though, it is not enjoyable at all. But if the gathering is held outdoors, the attendance doesn’t matter so much to my enjoyment, unless of course it is

50 raining or chilly. I would have little trouble going on like this for some time, and the longer I go on, the more it seems as though my pleasures in family gatherings are actually very specific.35

Another way to see this is to imagine you are confronted with a wish-granting genie you know to be a trickster. You try to describe to the genie something that would please you, but the genie will always conjure up something that fits the letter of description you give, but in fact displeases you. In such a situation describing what would please you is very difficult. “I wish I was married to Francesca”, you say. But then you must continue, “but I don’t want her to be disfigured and I don’t want us both turned into ducks and I don’t want her to be bullied into it by her father and I don’t want one or both of us in a coma and I want the marriage to be happy and …” The longer you go on, the more it looks like, contrary to what Driver claims, your pleasure is quite narrow after all.

Even if we grant Driver’s claim about he nature of pleasures in human beings, it doesn’t seem to fix the problem. Suppose we stipulate that our happy executioner does have a very narrow pleasure – he only enjoys hangings that are deserved. He loves to hear the sound of criminal’s necks snapping and the heavy breathing of criminals as they anticipate the drop. The source of the viciousness is not a simple fact about the broadness of human pleasures. Something still seems unsettling about this character even after we stipulate that his pleasures are narrow and only apply to deserved suffering.

Judgments about what is deserved are not the only kind of morally relevant judgments. Consider, as Nomy Arpaly has pointed out, how our judgments about what people deserve and what they should be given can come apart. Often, we are pleased by the latter rather than the former. For example, the board of a company might think the

35 Arpaly (2005, 643) offers examples of similar narrowness in character traits.

51 CEO deserves a modest salary, but also think that she should be given a very high salary so that she will not leave for another company. As a stockholder, I am apt to be pleased that she got the high salary, even though I do not think she deserves it. Nomy Arpaly

(1999, 51ff) offers other intuitive examples of this the moral domain: One might think that a despot who tortured many people deserves to be tortured himself, but think that what he should be given is a life sentence. One might think that everyone who drives with an open container of alcohol should be punished, but not think that everyone deserves such a punishment. There are also similar cases regarding benefits – a teacher might rightly judge that a student’s work deserves unstinting praise, but also wisely judge that he should be given only mild praise because anything more would go to the student’s head and ruin his work ethic. Again in this case, it seems that the virtuous person would feel pleasure if the student does not get the praise he deserves and displeasure if he does – after all, it is not what is best for him.

I do not mean to suggest that the virtuous person is deeply consequentialist and is pleased or displeased only by what has good results. I do mean to suggest that determining whether or not misfortune is deserved is not enough to know whether or not pleasure in it is virtuous or vicious. One way of understanding ‘what should be given’ is in terms of what is best the better outcome. When Peter is pleased at his colleague’s firing because he optimistically believes it will be better for his colleague, he is pleased at the benefits that an undeserved misfortune will bring. When a terrorized citizen is pleased that his neighbor was merely robbed and assaulted and not killed, it is because he cares for his neighbor and knows being robbed is better than being killed. In these cases, what

52 warrants pleasure is the resulting outcome and not simply whether or not the misfortune was deserved.

IV. AN ACCOUNT OF HEDONIC VIRTUE AND VICE

Modes of Pleasure and Displeasure

Let’s return to the happy executioner. His pleasure in the hangings seems to be vicious, that is, it seems to be pleasure that a he would be a better person for lacking. Julia

Driver’s response is that his pleasure is vicious because facts about human nature mean that he must have other vicious pleasures – in unjust hangings. Even if we assume that his pleasures are narrow, however, there still is something unsettling about him. In fact, even if we stipulate that he is only pleased not only by executions that are deserved, but also those that are to be given, something still seems amiss. How can we diagnose what seems to be vicious about this character?

The resources for an answer, I believe, can be found in a similar case from

Catholic theology regarding the pleasure that the saints in heaven have towards the suffering of sinners in hell. Aquinas in the Summa, (in)famously claimed that the saints in heaven do take pleasure in the suffering of sinners. Presumably, if saints in heaven have any pleasure in the suffering of sinners, it is very narrow (they are, after all, saints). It also seems that if God doles out punishment, such punishment is not only deserved, but also to be given. And yet, even Aquinas thinks that the pleasure the saints experience is in need of some explanation – something seems fishy about the idea that saints might enjoy suffering. Aquinas is quick to add that though the saints enjoy the suffering of sinners,

53 they enjoy it in the right way. The saints, he claims, enjoy the suffering of sinners as justice and so the suffering itself is merely the indirect cause of their joy (Summa

Question 94, Article 1-3). We need not accept the details of Aquinas’ solution to make use of his insight that pleasure in something is often pleasure in it in a particular regard.

Pleasures are rarely simply pleasure in an object, but more often an object as something. This becomes clear when we think of cases where we agree with someone on the object of pleasure, but disagree on the respect in which it is pleasing. My brother and

I might both take the same coffee to be pleasurable, though for him it is pleasing as a source of caffeine and for me it is pleasing as a taste experience. Getting the object right is not enough to make pleasure virtuous, we must also be pleased in the right way – If I am displeased by torture only because torture displeases my girlfriend and I hate for my girlfriend to be displeased, I am displeased by the right thing, but in the wrong way and so am not a better person for it.36

An essential part of understanding what about the happy executioner makes us uneasy is that the same object can warrant both pleasure and displeasure, in different respects. Schroeder (2004, 72) describes pleasure and displeasure as, like hot and cold, driving each other out. Though this is true of our all-things-considered hedonic state, it is not true of pleasure and displeasure in a single object in different respects. Imagine

Catherine, who is in financial dire straits and unable to properly provide for her children.

Now suppose that Catherine’s father, to whom she was somewhat close, has died and left her a sizable inheritance. To simply ask, “Should Catherine be pleased or displeased at her father’s death?” is to ask an incomplete question. Though there is a an overall

36 Aristotle (NE 1118a32-4) offers the example of a gourmand who only enjoys the bare physical contact with food and so wishes he had a very long throat. More recently, Nomy Arpaly (2004, 71) offers a similar example of someone who takes pleasure in reading Lolita simply because they enjoy scandal.

54 hedonic description of her state, we expect this overall state to include both pleasure and displeasure – she will be pleased with it as a financial event allowing her to provide for her children, and displeased with it as a personal loss.

This is the key to what strikes us as vicious about the happy executioner and with the saints who rejoice at the suffering of the wicked. These stories mention only the pleasure of the punishments as justice. Such punishments, however, are also instances of great suffering and as such, also warrant displeasure. It is not vicious for Catherine to be pleased with her father’s death as a financial event, but it is vicious for her to feel only pleasure and not also feel displeasure as a personal loss. Just as we expect a reflective and sensitive person to feel both pleasure and displeasure at these events, we expect a morally sensitive person to feel pleasure with the event as justice and displeasure with it as suffering. What is vicious about the happy executioner is not his pleasure in executions as justice, but his lack of displeasure in them as suffering. Insofar as his lack of displeasure reflects a lack of concern for suffering, he is vicious.

We do not call the happy executioner vicious based on his overall hedonic state, but because we take his lack of displeasure to manifest a lack of sensitivity to human suffering. Looking only at the overall hedonic state is not enough to know how pleasure and displeasure reflect on one’s character. Catherine might be displeased overall about her father’s death not because she cares deeply about her father, but because she cares very little about her financial responsibilities. Similarly, the happy executioner might be pleased overall because he is displeased with suffering, but also is very pleased by justice or he might be pleased overall because he derives the normal amount of pleasure from

55 justice but is not displeased at all by suffering. The latter is more vicious than the former because he lacks an important moral concern that the former has.

But isn’t the executioner still vicious if he simply cares a lot about justice?

Simply claiming that he cares too much about justice can sound strange – Is it even possible to care too much about justice? I will have more to say about proportionality later, but for now it will be enough to point out that he may be vicious in this case for caring disproportionately about justice, for caring about it at the expense of other moral goods like well being.

Desires, Cares, Concerns

I would like to suggest a more general claim: Pleasure and displeasure reflect on our moral character when they are manifestations of morally important cares or concerns.

More must be said, of course, about the connection between pleasure and what we care about. There are, in general, strong connections between our concerns and our pleasure; caring about something generally produces pleasure and displeasure regarding it and a lack of concern for something usually results in a lack of such pleasure and displeasure. If

I don’t care about baseball, usually I will not be pleased to see it on TV nor will I be displeased to hear that the players have gone on strike. If I care deeply about abstract art, then I will likely be pleased to learn of a Morris Louis exhibit in my city and feel displeasure when I discover it has been cancelled. This also applies to moral cases – if someone does not care about the rights of women, they are not likely to be displeased when they are violated and pleased when such rights upheld. While someone who cares deeply about the homeless will likely be pleased to learn that a new shelter has opened and displeased to see policies that harm them passed by local government.

56 I use phrases like ‘likely’ and ‘usually’ because these connections are not necessary connections, but contingent facts about the mental lives of humans in general. I may, for example, care a great deal about abstract art but do not feel pleasure upon hearing of the exhibit because I am exhausted from lack of sleep or under the influence of a sedative. I only mean to claim that having or lacking pleasure and displeasure can reflect on our moral character, and when it does, it is because we feel (or fail to feel) it in virtue of our cares or concerns. If I fail to feel displeasure at the unfair treatment of a female colleague because it is my first day on a new sedative, it does not reflect on my moral character. If I am displeased at the success of a colleague because a brain tumor is affecting the pleasure center in my brain, such displeasure does not reflect on my moral character.37

Despite cases like these, experiencing pleasure and displeasure is intimately connected with our cares, concerns, and desires. William Lycan (1988, 58) and Timothy

Schroeder (2004, 74) both mention a common decision-making strategy. When faced with two options, say two very good restaurants, we can find ourselves unable to decide between them. In these situations it can be helpful to flip a coin; “heads Italian, tails

Japanese”. The coin-flip is not to decide, but to provide insight to what we want – we see how the coin lands and notice whether or not we are pleased with the outcome. Do we feel pleased (“oh good! It’s heads”) or displeased (“I guess Italian is okay”)? This kind of method is helpful because our pleasure or displeasure at the outcome is reliable evidence of which option we want. This phenomenon is at the heart of many instances of self- discovery. A teacher might discover that he does care about teaching after experiencing

37 Schroeder (2004, 88ff.) discusses a stronger view on which pleasure conceptually entails getting something one represents as a reward. This suggests a tighter connection between our pleasures and our cares. This kind of view would only strengthen my claims, but I will not rely on it.

57 unexpected displeasure at negative teaching evaluations. A doctor might discover that she does not care about professional awards after all when failing to feel much pleasure upon learning that she has received an important award.

Our judgments about the moral status of certain desires and concerns are at the heart of distinguishing seemingly similar instances of Schadenfreude. Consider the difference in what Ben-Ze’ev (2000, 375) terms the “focus of concern”. Imagine a wartime scene in which a young man, let’s call him Richard, is in a lineup of potential draftees; those selected from this lineup will be conscripted into the army and sent to the front lines. The sergeant walks down the line and selects those on either side of Richard for service, but passes him over. Richard will likely feel pleasure at the two men on either side of him being selected, certainly a grave misfortune for them. Richard’s pleasure does not seem vicious if it is focused on himself, if he is glad that he wasn’t chosen. If his pleasure is focused on the other men, however, it does seem vicious. If he is glad that they were chosen, his pleasure is much more unsettling. This is because those these pleasures demonstrate very different concerns: the “phew, I’m glad that wasn’t me” sort of pleasure demonstrates a concern for one’s own safety, while the “I’m glad it happened to him” sort demonstrates an active desire for other’s to be harmed. The reason these two instances of pleasure at another’s misfortune seem morally different is they manifest different desires and concerns – A desire for self-preservation is not vicious, while a desire for the harm of others, sometimes known as malice, is a paradigm of a vicious desire.

Many intrinsic desires are themselves vicious. Intrinsic desires for injustice, to abuse the weak, or to rape are themselves vicious. Instrumental desires can also be

58 vicious by aiming at fulfilling a vicious intrinsic desire. Desiring a sharp knife is not vicious, but desiring it as a means to kill my roommate is. Wanting a fast car is not vicious, but wanting it as a means to run over pedestrians is. Pleasure at the fulfillment of these various desires is correspondingly vicious.

It is important to note that the vicious desire need not be a desire for the particular misfortune that causes pleasure. Feeling pleasure is evidence that some desire has been satisfied, but it need not particularly involve the specific cause of the pleasure. Consider what Timothy Schroeder (2009) has termed ‘realizer desires’.38 Suppose I experience pleasure when a friend takes me to a baseball game even though I did not previously have the specific desire to attend one. The pleasure may be a result of the fulfillment of my desire to get outside and do something social, of which attending a baseball game is one possible realization. Similarly, though Peter was pleased when his colleague was fired, he may not have specifically desired that his colleague’s termination. The vicious desire may be a more general realizer desire – perhaps he desired that something bad happen to

“those jerks in accounting” or simply that “one of those button-down east-coast guys gets the wind taken out of his sails”. These are also vicious desires, they aim at the suffering of others, and they are directly connected with his pleasure – Peter is pleased because his malicious desire has been realized. But in neither of these cases does Peter have a desire for the specific outcome that causes him pleasure.

Not all realizer desires that allow for pleasure are as obviously vicious. If Peter is pleased at his colleague’s misfortune because he wanted something to gossip about or because he wanted something dramatic to cut through the boredom of his workplace, the

38 In personal communication, Schroeder has modestly denied coining this term and though others like Richardson (1994) and Schmidtz (1994) discuss similar notions, since neither makes use of this phrase, lexical credit goes to Schroeder.

59 realizer desires do not seem as obviously vicious. If Peter’s pleasure is a result of these realizer desires, he is less vicious than he would be if he had more malicious desires.

Peter’s vicious in these cases is similar to the happy executioner – if he fails to also feel displeasure at the way in which his desire is fulfilled, it manifests a lack of concern for his employees. He is vicious, then, for failing to be more concerned with the lives of others than with his own amusement. We can imagine a bored virtuous person thinking to herself, “I guess I’m glad something exciting happened, but not at the expense of someone’s job!”

The concerns and cares that underlie pleasure can be difficult to distinguish.

Consider evaluations of those who experience pleasure over the death of vicious people.

When Osama Bin Laden was killed, many people in America experienced great pleasure and celebrated wildly. This spurned much public debate about whether or not it is morally acceptable to celebrate a death. Much of this debate focused on the practical consequences of celebration, about whether or not it would make future terrorist attacks more likely. Practical concerns aside, however, not all who were pleased at the event seem equally virtuous or vicious – Whether or not being pleased at the death of Bin

Laden was virtuous or vicious depends on which concerns such pleasure manifests. It matters, for example, whether or not one was pleased with the event despite the fact that it was a death, without regard for the element of death, or because it was a death.

Those who experienced pleasure at Bin Laden’s death did so for a wide variety of reasons. For some, the pleasure was simply the satisfaction of a desire to have a large party.39 This does not seem particularly vicious; if they are to count as vicious at all, it is

39 One celebrator told the New York Observer, “It's weird to celebrate someone's death. It's not exactly what we're here to celebrate, but it's wonderful that people are happy.” (Weeks, 2011)

60 because of a lack of concern for the fact that the occasion of this particular party was someone’s death. Others were pleased for reasons hard to evaluate simply – for example, someone concerned for patriotism über alles, happy simply that “we” came out on top.

Others may have simply been adventure seekers, pleased to hear the details of an exciting combat mission. Such pleasures count as vicious for manifesting limited and parochial concerns (as if non-American deaths “don’t count”) or for a lack of concern for the moral weight of killing someone (as if adventure is more important than human life). As positive concerns, however, these are not as vicious as someone who loves to see casualties of war or someone who wanted an increase in religious animosity.

Other positive concerns seemed to many to be less vicious; the philosopher of law

Brian Leiter described to Time magazine the “emotional cleansing when the wrongdoers get what they deserve” (Kluger 2011). Many, like Aquinas, saw nothing wrong with pleasure at the death as long as it was not as death, but as comeuppance. Such pleasure is not vicious, according to this view, because one does not simply want just any old witch to be killed, but only the wicked one. Of course, the persuasiveness of this reply partially hangs on whether or not a concern for retributive justice is good (many, such as Gandhi, have suggested that it is not). I do not mean to presume an answer to this, but simply to point out that those who do accept that concern for retribution is good, distinguish virtuous pleasure from non-virtuous pleasure by claiming that virtuous pleasure manifests this concern while non-virtuous pleasure does not.

Even less controversial are those whose pleasure manifested a concerned for their own safety and the safety of others. This is the pleasure we experience when the hurricane is over. This pleasure seems not only less vicious than the pleasures described

61 above, but even virtuous. Pleasure at Bin Laden’s death only because they take the danger to innocent lives to be lessened seems to reflect well on the person who experiences it. This is because of the concerns the pleasure manifests are morally good – a concern for one’s own safety and the safety of others. The reason a Basque who celebrated the death of the repressive Francisco Franco because now she can legally and openly speak the language she loves is a better person than an American who was simply happy to see a foreign country thrown into political disarray is because the pleasure of the two manifests very different concerns.

In practice these concerns are difficult to distinguish and come together – those celebrating the death of Bin Laden or Franco likely had desires for safety, retribution, and an occasion for a party. The lack of isolated cares or concerns is not a problem for the account; we can simply say that one is virtuous to the extent that their pleasure manifests morally good cares and concerns. These cares and concerns can be difficult, if not impossible, for us to know simply by observing those expressing pleasure. This is why we should not be too quick to judge an entire crowd on TV as virtuous or vicious.

In everyday life our evaluation of how pleasure or displeasure reflects on moral character changes when we get information about the concerns it manifests. Consider the following passage from the Chinese philosopher Mengzi:

As for the relation of gentlemen to birds and beasts, if they see them living, they cannot bear to see them die. If they hear their cries, they cannot bear to eat their flesh.

When I read this I’m apt to think that the displeasure of gentleman in question reflects well on his moral character; after all, he probably can’t bear to see animals slaughtered because he cares about their wellbeing. Things change, however, when Mengzi continues, “Hence, gentlemen keep their distance from the kitchen.” (Mengzi 1A7). Now

62 the gentleman does not seem to be such a good person after all. His conclusion reveals that what he cares about is not so much the suffering of the animals, but his own displeasure at the suffering of the animals. What changed when I read that final sentence was not anything about the displeasure I thought the gentleman experienced or the object of this displeasure, but what kinds of concerns I took it to manifest.

Other Hedonic Virtues and Vices

In the case of Schadenfreude, pleasure in the suffering misfortune of others is vicious when it is a result of a lack of concern for their wellbeing or a malicious desire for their harm. Schadenfreude is not the only morally relevant hedonic state; this account of the root of hedonic virtue and vice also applies to other pleasures and displeasures. Most notable of these is a virtue emphasized in Buddhist ethics known in Sanskrit as mudita.

Often translated as ‘sympathetic joy’ or ‘appreciative joy’ it is, like Schadenfreude, a more robust and complex reaction than simply pleasure (it also includes, for example, the ability to notice and recognize the success of others). Though it is not simply a matter of pleasure, like Schadenfreude, pleasure is central to the notion. An essential part of mudita, and the part I am concerned with here, is feeling pleased at the success and good fortune of others. If Peter and his colleague are both up for an important promotion and the promotion goes to his colleague, it reflects well on Peter if he is able to be pleased at his colleague’s success.

One might object that mudita is not pleasure in any good fortune of others, but only in their virtues or spiritual merits. Such readers can take my discussion of mudita to be about a similar but broader virtue, which I happen to use the same name for. A narrow

63 notion of mudita, however, conflicts with many canonical descriptions of the virtue. For example, consider Buddhaghosa’s instructions on developing mudita:

Or on seeing or hearing about a dear person being happy, cheerful and glad, gladness [mudita] can be aroused thus: ‘This being is indeed glad. How good, how excellent!’ … But if his boon companion or the dear person was happy in the past but is now unlucky and unfortunate, then gladness [mudita] can still be aroused by remembering his past happiness and apprehending the glad aspect in this way: ‘In the past he had great wealth, a great following and he was always glad’. Or gladness [mudita] can be aroused by apprehending the future glad aspect in him in this way: ‘In the future he will again enjoy similar success and will go about in gold palanquins, on the backs of elephants or on horseback, and so on’. Visddhimagga IX.85-6

The mudita Buddhaghosa has in mind in his instructions is clearly not limited to another person’s spiritual or moral benefits, but includes mundane benefits like how comfortable and flashy their transportation is – things that change when one gets a promotion.40

Though it is an important concept in Buddhist thought, it too often receives little analysis about why it should count as a good quality.41 Writers on mudita often tout the desirability of such a state; for example, Sayadsaw highlights that a person with mudita will feel real joy on meeting a successful person and Edward Conze (1967/1973, 86) points out that it counters the melancholia that can accompany compassion. This may be true, but it is not enough for mudita to count as a moral virtue – after all, the pleasure of

Schadenfreude is no less pleasant to experience than that of mudita. The above framework for evaluating the moral status of pleasures and displeasures, however, can illuminate what makes mudita a moral virtue – mudita is a virtue because pleasure associated with it is a manifestation of morally important concern for the benefit and wellbeing of others. To see this, it will be helpful to consider the vices to which mudita is opposed.

40 Sayadaw also takes the object of mudita to include “property and wealth” (2006, 48). 41 Jackson (1971, 6) also laments this lack of discussion. As I write this, a search of journals such as Philosophy East and West and The Journal of Buddhist Ethics yields mentions, but a few discussion of mudita.

64 Mudita is often contrasted with jealousy and envy, suggesting that selfishness desires are always the root enemy of mudita.42 They are often the main obstacles to taking pleasure in other’s good fortune; Peter cannot be happy for his colleague’s career success because he wanted that promotion for himself. This contrast, however, is too narrow.

Jealousy and envy paradigmatically involve another person having something that I wish to have (see Farrell 1980, 531ff.). Peter might fail to take pleasure in his colleague’s promotion not because he wants it for himself, but merely because he want he colleague not to have it. Or perhaps Peter just simply doesn’t care about his colleague at all one way or another. These failure to be pleased also seems vicious and opposed to mudita, but are not rooted in Peter’s desires for his own benefits. The vices opposed to mudita, then, are not limited to jealousy and envy, but also include malicious desires for the suffering of others and indifference to others. These vices are not rooted solely in selfishly desiring benefits, but in a more general self-centered orientation that includes an indifference to others and actively desiring misfortunes for them.

This essential aspect of self-centeredness is why not all pleasure in the success of others counts as mudita – it is possible to take pleasure in the good fortune of others for selfish reasons. L.R. Oates mentions this feature:

Not only does genuine joy in the prosperity of others require some element of affection – it requires this to be of a quite high order. A great deal of what passes for love is really aimed at mere emotional gratification on the part of the lover, for whom the “beloved” is little more than a prop for acting our some drama satisfying a purely subjective need – the beloved’s own needs being treated less seriously. (Oates 1971, 23)

Just as someone who cares about another for selfish reasons does not really love the other person, a person who take pleasure in the success of another for selfish reasons does not really have the virtue of mudita. A mother who takes pleasure in her son’s good grades

42 Mudita is contrasted with envy and jealousy in recent discussions such as Sayadaw (2006) and Conze (1967/1973), and also older texts like Buddhaghosa’s Visddhimagga (for example IX.95).

65 not because she cares about he son but because it reflects well on her does not experience mudita.

The pleasure associated with mudita is morally virtuous when (and only when) it manifests a morally good concern – a selfless concern for the wellbeing of the other person. The various vices opposed to mudita are the hedonic manifestations of failing to have this concern: the jealous care too much about their own benefits, the malicious actively want others to suffer misfortunes, and the indifferent do not care for others at all.

This account also explains why not all failures to experience mudita count as morally vicious. If I fail to experience pleasure at your promotion because I do not care about what happens to you, my lack of pleasure is vicious. If I fail to be pleased because I am too exhausted, however, I do not count as vicious. The latter manifests something about my orientation to others that the former does not. One may even fail to feel pleasure at another’s benefit because one knows that it is not a long-term benefit. It is a kind of success for a friend to break into a social circle that provides expensive heroin very cheaply. Knowing that such a short-term success if likely to lead to long-term misfortune, we are not likely to experience much pleasure in the short-term success of our friend precisely because we care about him.

A similar virtue to mudita is feeling displeasure at the misfortunes of others. This is similar to compassion; since compassion is a much more complex notion, however, it is more accurate to call it sympathetic displeasure. This is the sort of displeasure that

Laura feels when she reads about the suffering of political refugees. Again, this displeasure is only virtuous if it is a manifestation of her concern for others. If she is displeased at the suffering of the refugees because her Nietzschean contempt for their

66 weakness is so intense that it is unpleasant or because she finds it displeasing that they were not all exterminated earlier then her displeasure is not virtuous. If her displeasure is because she cares about them and does not want them to suffer, then her displeasure is virtuous. This can also be true of a lack of displeasure; if Laura fails to experience displeasure because she doesn’t care about others, then her lack of feeling is vicious. If she fails to feel displeasure because she is on a new anti-depressant, then her lack of displeasure is not vicious. I will discuss these issues in more depth in my account of fear as a moral virtue.

Phenomenology and Proportion

I have claimed that pleasures and displeasures are relevant to our moral character when they manifest morally important cares or concerns. This does not, however, require that the person who experiences these pleasures or displeasures is consciously aware of such concerns. We are often unaware of our own concerns, cares, and desires – friends may see clearly that our pleasure that a hiking trip has not been cancelled stems from a romantic interest in a fellow guest rather than, as we may insist, our newfound love of the outdoors. A racist may insist that is displeasure with black neighbors is simply because he finds African American patterns of speech and music to be annoying, while we can see that it stems from a deep disgust with black people.

If Peter’s displeasure at his colleague’s success really is because he feels malicious desires towards him, it reflects poorly upon his character whether or not he is consciously aware of it. Similarly, if you feel pleased at a colleague’s publication acceptance, but mistakenly think that it is simply because you are in a good mood when it is really because you genuinely wish them well, your pleasure reflects a good character

67 despite your lack of awareness of your concern. What is morally relevant is what concerns and desires (or lack thereof) are manifested in pleasure or displeasure, not whether or not we consider such concerns or are aware of their connection to our pleasure and displeasure.

So far, I have accounted for the virtuousness or viciousness of hedonic states by appeal to the desires, cares, and concerns that such states manifest. This does not account for issues of proportionality, of the moral relevance of the strength of such states. It is intuitive to think that when pleasure in another’s success or displeasure in their misfortune is virtuous, that it must be proportional to the degree of the success or misfortune. This is true other things equal, but other things are rarely equal and what really must be proportionate is the concern that the pleasure or displeasure manifests.

Some, for example Thomas Hurka (2001, 83ff.) claim that it is vicious (in his terms

“intrinsically evil”) to love something out of proportion to its value, where pleasure is explicitly included with in the scope of somewhat technical use of ‘loving’.43

But many morally irrelevant factors affect the intensity of our pleasure and displeasure other than our evaluation of its object’s goodness. Recall the role our expectations play in cases where we are pleased at the lesser of two misfortunes. If we expect a normal day, then we are likely to experience displeasure if our neighbor is robbed. If we expect that our neighbor will be murdered, however, we may well feel pleasure when he is merely robbed. Optimists and pessimists may experience different degrees of pleasure at an event not because of their different values or concerns, but because they have vastly different expectations.

43 For example, Hurka (2001, 13) writes that “One can love x by desiring or wishing for it when it does not obtain, or by taking pleasure in it when it does obtain.”

68 The strength of our pleasures and displeasures are also affected by situational factors about what we are used to. Consider a story from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win

Friends and Influence People in which a salesman, Sid Levy, makes a call on a customer whose name is particularly difficult to pronounce:

When I greeted him by his full name: “Good afternoon, Mr. Nicodemus Papadoulos,” he was shocked. For what seemed like several minutes there was no reply from him at all. Finally, he said with tears rolling down his cheeks, “Mr. Levy, in all the fifteen years I have been in this country, nobody has ever made the effort to call me by my right name.” (1936/1981, 77)

For most of us, being called by our “right names” does not result in much pleasure. If we have gotten used to hearing people mispronounce it, however, we are likely to experience much more pleasure at hearing it pronounced correctly. This doesn’t mean that the rest of us value the correct pronunciation of our names less than Nicodemus, but we do take less pleasure in it because we are used to hearing our names pronounced correctly. A resident of a country with frequent power cuts is likely to be very pleased when they flip a light switch and the lights actually come on, whereas an average first-world resident is unlikely to experience much pleasure at all. This does not mean that the first-world person values electricity less or cares less about having power; they are, after all, quite upset on the rare occasions when they do lose power. They experience less pleasure at the lights coming on not because they care less, but simply because they are accustomed to it.

Pleasure and displeasures also diverge from judgments of objective value. I may be more pleased when my mother returns from the hospital than when a stranger does, but not because I think my mother’s life is more objectively valuable.44 Other positive mental orientations diverge from simple judgments of value too. For example, ‘being a favorite’ is a positive orientation towards something that involves valuing, but does not

44 This example is adapted from issues raised in Adams (2006, 26ff.).

69 reduce to it – Tim’s sister may be his favorite person without him thinking that she is the best person or the most valuable person.45

Pleasure and Displeasures are virtuous or vicious because of the desires and concerns they manifest. Often, these desires and concerns will be disproportionate to the intrinsic values of the objects in ways that are non-vicious or even virtuous. The intensity of our pleasures and displeasures is often affected by factors that do not reflect on one’s moral character such as expectations and what one become used to. Pleasure and displeasure should be proportionate other things equal, but other things are rarely equal.

Some disproportionate pleasure or displeasure can be vicious, but only when it is a result of desiring or caring about the wrong things, not because proportionality itself is a virtue.46

V. THE RELEVANCE OF HEDONIC VIRTUE AND VICE

Pleasure and displeasure can be relevant to our moral character. It is relevant when our pleasures or displeasures manifest morally relevant cares or concerns and when the lack of pleasures or displeasures manifests a lack of such concerns. Caring about something or being concerned with something usually manifests in the form of pleasures and displeasures – caring about a particular sports team generally involves pleasure when the team wins and displeasure when they lose. This relationship is not a conceptual truth about caring or concern, but a psychological fact about human beings; many factors can get in the way of concerns manifesting as pleasures and displeasures such as drugs,

45 I take this example from a conversation with Tim Schroeder. 46 Hurka (2001, 96) claims there are many virtues of proportion and vices of disproportion such as modesty and immodesty; I will disagree with him on this point in more detail later.

70 expectations, and moods. Nevertheless, to say for the father of a writer, “he cares deeply about his daughter’s professional success, but he doesn’t feel pleasure when she publishes a book” calls out for an explanation precisely because caring about someone’s success usually entails pleasure in instances of it.

Being pleased or displeased is not an action. It is not something we do, but something that happens to us. These hedonic states are not virtuous or vicious simply because of their relationship to overt behavior or a tendency to behave in certain ways, but because they embody a particular relationship to moral goods. Taking pleasure in a rape because one enjoys others being harmed reflects a negative relationship to moral goods independently of one’s behavior. Someone with complete body paralysis, a disembodied spirit, and someone watching a real rape take place in a far away land are all vicious when they experience pleasure in this way, despite the fact that such pleasure does not result in any behavior or tendency to behave. Not all virtues and vices require behavioral aspects, many, like hedonic virtues and vices, are simply the manifestation of a particular orientation to moral goods and ills.

71 CHAPTER III : EMOTIONS AND AFFECTIVE STATES

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. - Mark Twain

Think of a virtuous person, a genuinely morally good person. Now suppose you discovered that this person routinely experiences disgust at people of a certain race.

Would you think less of them? We expect a good person to not only behave in a certain way, but to have a certain kind of emotional life. Odds are the person you thought of doesn’t experience racial disgust. Even if such emotions are never expressed, wouldn’t they be better without such emotions?

This suggests that emotions can be relevant to how we evaluate people morally.

Spelling out exactly how and when emotions are morally relevant is difficult not only because the relationship itself is complex, but also because emotions and morality are themselves complex and subtle concepts. I will offer an account of how emotions are relevant to moral character outside of being useful for motivating good actions or simply being themselves bearers of value (though my account is compatible with both of these).

After a brief overview of what I take emotions to be and how other philosophers have taken emotions to be morally relevant, I will offer an account of how some emotions can be morally virtuous or vicious independently of the actions they produce. Emotions, unlike states such as hunger, can manifest moral concern and so can be virtuous. When they manifest morally relevant cares or concerns such as a concern for justice or for the wellbeing of others, emotions display good moral character.

72 I will also argue that emotions are virtuous or vicious when they manifest care and so I will deny that their virtuousness depends on the cognitive aspects being rational or warranted. Emotions may display good moral character even when they are irrational.

Though I will argue that emotions can be virtuous in this way, I will not claim that particular emotions are necessary for being a virtuous person since a lack of emotion does not necessarily entail a lack of concern. The link between concern and emotion is a contingent and psychological one, but one that is common to most people. The following chapter will examine two emotions, anger and fear, in greater detail showing how the account applies to particular emotions.

I. EMOTIONS: SOME PRELIMINARIES

Which Emotions?

I take emotions to be complex states including both affective and cognitive aspects. They are involuntary states typically with both mental and physical aspects, though my claims can accommodate views that take them to be either purely mental or purely physical. I will focus on states that are object-directed, but my account can allow that objectless states can also be virtuous. I will assume that emotions have duration in time, though I will remain agnostic on the limits of this duration. I will also remain agnostic about whether emotions have a distinctive “feel” or unique phenomenal quality. I do not intend these conditions to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being an emotion; it is not my aim here to provide a theory of emotion.

73 Being angry, frightened, or aroused all involve certain bodily changes like an increase heart rate, sweating, or muscle tension. This suggests that, as Aristotle claimed

(De Anima 403a2ff), emotions have a physiological or bodily aspect. Some accounts of emotions, famously the one offered by William James and Carl Lange, take them to be nothing more than these bodily changes.47 Though such theorists can accept my ethical claims, I will take emotions to have both mental and physical aspects. This is in part because there are many bodily states that do not seem to be emotions and, more importantly, are not relevant to moral character. For example, having a craving for sushi or a being exhausted after a run are bodily states but do not seem to be emotions; Recall that both Descartes (The Passions of the Soul, I.24-5) and Hume (Treatise I.1.2) took passions to involve the soul in a way that bodily sensations like hunger do not. We also use non-bodily aspects to distinguish between different emotions.

Many different emotions can have the same bodily changes. The difference between anger and fear or excitement and nervousness is not always physical – these mentions often have nearly identical physiological states. This makes misattribution possible: We can be wrong about our emotions because we misread the physical effects.

In a famous study, (Dutton and Aron 1973) men who crossed a dangerous-looking suspension bridge were likely to mistake their fear for attraction to a female interviewer.

But in order to say that the men misinterpreted their increased heart rate, that they really were afraid of the bridge and not attracted to the interviewer, requires that there is something to fear or attraction beyond these bodily changes associated with each.

47 Antonio Damasio has this view about what he calls ‘primary emotions’ but not all emotions (1994, 133ff.)

74 Another feature of emotions is that they take objects, a feature sometimes used to distinguish them from moods. I am, for example, envious of the success of others, proud of my accomplishments, amused at a well-timed joke, and angry with a rude friend. I am not lonely, cranky, chipper, or listless with or at anything; these objectless states are often called ‘moods’. Some states do not cleanly fall into only one of these two categories. I may be bored with a philosophy talk I am attending or simply bored in general. I may be stressed over an upcoming deadline or simply stressed. Though my claims about emotions may be extended to allow for moods to count as virtuous or vicious, my discussion will focus on states that take an object. It is my aim to show that some emotions can be virtuous or vicious independently of their expression in overt behavior.

My account can allow that some emotions are not object-directed or can float freely from object to object.

Emotions have a cognitive aspect; sometimes our emotions are warranted and sometimes they are not. The fear of being attacked by a drunken bar patron who has threatened you is warranted in a way that the fear of being attacked by an oak tree is not.

This is because emotions have a cognitive aspect; to feel afraid of a stray dog one must, at some level, take the dog to be dangerous. This cognitive aspect allows the emotion to be sensitive or insensitive to evidence and so allow it to be warranted or unwarranted.

The exact nature of this cognitive aspect is described in different ways: The Stoics (see

DeBrabander 2004, 202-3 and Long 2002, 213ff.) and more recently Robert Solomon

(2007) take it to be a judgment. Others describe it as belief (Kenny 1963, Marks 1982, and Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 52ff), a construal (Roberts 1988), or a representation (Charland

75 1997).48 I do not wish to presume a particular theory in my discussion; one can take it to be their own preferred cognitive state or nothing more specific than Rosalind

Hursthouse’s discussion of emotions as having “ideas” or “thoughts” (1999, 111).

It is, however, important to distinguish being warranted from being appropriate.

When I get angry with my computer for deleting my work, my anger counts as unwarranted because cognitive component of my anger presupposes some agency on the part of my computer. Since my computer is not in fact and agent and does not delete my work “on purpose”, my anger is unwarranted.49 This is not, however, the same as appropriateness: If, while I am in church, I learn that a friend has betrayed me, my anger may be warranted (I was in fact wronged) but also inappropriate (getting angry in a church is unacceptable). My fear when watching a horror film does not seem to be inappropriate, a horror film is an acceptable situation in which to feel afraid. But my fear may still be unwarranted because the representations about danger it includes are unwarranted.50 We say to children who have been frightened by a movie not that their fear is inappropriate, but that it is “just a movie” and is “nothing to be scared of” – that it is unwarranted. I will argue that being warranted is neither necessary nor sufficient for an emotion to be virtuous; both warranted and unwarranted emotions can be virtuous (or vicious).

I will not take emotions to have a necessary connection with action. This view can be found clearly in the work of Nico Frijda straightforwardly claims that “Emotions are

48 This assumption is denied by Jesse Prinz, who suggests that emotions are warranted when caused in the right way (2004, 54-6). Even his view, however, seems to appeal to representations in unpacking what the right causal chain involves. 49 Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra (especially VI.22ff) argues that all anger is unwarranted on similar grounds. Modern incompatiblists like Pereboom (1995) have similar views. 50 I assume here, contra Walton (1990 and 1997), that we do feel genuine fear towards what we take to be fictions. This is not, however, essential to my claims.

76 action tendencies” (1987, 71). He is followed in this by Jon Elster (2004) who notes that these tendencies are not merely dispositions, but “already triggered by the emotion”

(2004, 151n4). Jesse Prinz endorses the weaker claim that emotions must "instigate the search for appropriate actions" (2004, 228). I will take this claim to be false.51 It does not seem to be required by the concept: It is easy to imagine the sentient Weather Watchers made out of stone feeling disappointment, anger, or joy when the weather changes.

Imagining the emotions of creatures does not involve some conceptual contradiction even though they have no action tendencies and are unlikely to mentally search for any actions at all.

More realistically, someone who has had full-body paralysis for some time can feel happy, angry, or envious without searching for any action whatsoever. Even able- bodied people may feel emotions without acting, planning to act, or searching for action.

Consider a father who feels such disappointment towards his son that he has given up not only any action regarding his son but thinking about him altogether. Part of the character of negative emotions like depression and despair is that they often remove the will to act or even search for action – that is partly what makes them so damn difficult to overcome.52 Even positive emotions can have this feature; if I feel satisfaction about my answers on last weeks test, what action am I searching for?

I am not claiming that emotions are never connected with action – they certainly often are. I am denying that action has a necessary or conceptual connection with having an emotion. Behavior is not necessary for emotion in the same was as the cognitive or desiderative aspects – a student cannot be joyful about having passed an exam unless he

51 As does Roberts (2003, 63). 52 A more obscure example of this might be the Greek Acedia; a kind of listlessness usually applied to monks and nuns characterized by an inability to work or pray (see Taylor 2006, 19).

77 both believes he passed and wants to pass. The student can, however, be happy without being able to act on it or express it in the same was that a Weather Watcher might feel happy about yesterday’s pleasant weather. Of course, emotions will typically be associated with certain behaviors and expressions, but these are not necessary conditions.

Emotions are characteristically involuntary; they are not things that we do, but things that happen to us. This is widely accepted aside from Existentialists like Sartre

(1948/1993) and Solomon (1997).53 We can, of course, take steps to regulate emotions, to encourage or discourage happiness, sadness, fear, or anger and to prevent or cultivate the expression of such emotions, but the emotions themselves are involuntary. Feeling angry or afraid is not something I do; this has been relevant in discussions of the moral relevance of these emotions in the theories of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hume. It will be important in my discussion to distinguish an emotion itself from the expression of an emotion. I can, for example, express fear without feeling afraid or act as if I am overjoyed without actually being overjoyed.

Emotions are sometimes distinguished by their duration (see Oatley et al. 2006,

30) with emotions having shorter duration than moods. Annette Baier (2010, 161), for example, suggests emotions last for “minutes rather than days”. This distinction, however, is at best a fuzzy heuristic. When I have a bout of worry that puts me on edge for the rest of the day or week, it is difficult if not impossible to tell where the short-term emotion begins and the long-term mood ends. In many cases, the duration of the state is not always the same as the duration of the phenomenal aspect: A political dissident in an authoritarian country can feel threatened even when drinking tea with friends long after the police have left. Nico Frijda (2007, 175ff.) argues convincingly that the duration of

53 See Adams (1985), Ekman (1992), Ben-Ze’ev (2000), and Roberts (2003) among others.

78 emotions can range from minutes to weeks and that duration boundaries are largely a matter of taste and theoretical simplicity. I will follow Frijda in taking emotions to admit of a wide range of durations.

Emotion and Culture

The use of emotion as a category of our mental lives is fairly recent and by no means universal. This is evident in language: There is no single term in, for example, Tibetan or

Sanskrit, that corresponds to the category. Even in the West the use of the term

‘emotion’, formerly referring to a public disturbance, did not acquire its current meaning until the early 19th century. Recall that early modern philosophers like Descartes,

Spinoza, and Hume preferred to write about the ‘passions’ or ‘sentiments’ rather than the

‘emotions’.

Even in modern English the meaning of the terms ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’, ‘passion’ and ‘mood’ are slippery and have overlapping senses. We might sometimes call love a feeling and other times an emotion. Being cheerful or restless might be a feeling or a mood. The distinctions found in English are by no means to only way of classifying the affective realm of our mental lives. One can find in India, for example, a distinction between bhavas (a kind of devotional and aesthetic response), kleśas (mental clinging resulting from ignorance), and rasas (a class of many various aesthetic responses).54 This does not mean that either our categories or Indian categories are the correct ones. Allan

Gibbard (1990, 143) cites the intricate vocabulary for cattle of Nuer of Sudan. Their system of classifying cattle is quite different from English terms. But we need not think that one of the systems of classification is the correct one; we can simply acknowledge

54 For more on rasa see Nāṭyaśāstra 31-3 (Rangacharya 2010, 55ff.) attributed to the sage Bharata. See also Bilimoria (1995, 67ff.) for more on categories of mental states found in various strains of Indian thought.

79 that we use different characteristics to classify cattle. The situation is similar for our mental lives. Different cultures will use different characteristics to sort and categorize mental states, but that does not mean there is only and only one correct system.

Despite having different categories, many particular emotions are found cross- culturally. Tibetan language, for example, lacks a term for the category ‘emotion’, but has terms that correspond more or less to particular emotions like fear (zhed snang), anger (gro ba), happiness (sems skyid po), and sadness (sems sdug). Research by psychologists like Paul Ekman (see Ekman 1992a for a summary) has found evidence for basic or universal emotions like these in facial expressions. The claim of this research is not that these particular emotions as they exist in contemporary American culture are universal; it is that certain more general ‘emotion families’ (1992b, 172ff. and 1997) are common to all humans. These families share clusters of features such as typical expressions, biological changes, and eliciting situations. The exact number of these families differs, but most lists include anger, fear, sadness, enjoyment, and disgust.

Some emotions are thought to be culturally specific, when it is really only a term for the emotion that is specific. Consider the Japanese notion of amae: a pleasurable feeling of dependence on another person. As Takeo Doi (1973, 28) notes, it is “basically common to mankind as a whole”. Teenagers in the Midwest can feel good that a friend

“has my back” and I have met many non-Japanese graduate students who take pleasure in feeling that their advisor is “taking care” of them. The emotion itself is not culturally specific, only having a specific label for it.

Sometimes, however, emotions and not just emotion terms, require certain cultural or social practices: Perhaps one cannot experience Catholic Guilt without being

80 brought up in a specific moral, metaphysical, and theological culture. Or perhaps someone in a culture with dramatically different expectations about how a life story should go cannot experience the particular combination of emotions that make up a mid- life crisis. This may be true, but it only means that certain emotions require certain conditions; I cannot be afraid of clowns unless I at least have the idea of a clown. In the same way, I cannot have a mid-life crisis unless I have certain ideas about how my life should go and one cannot have Catholic guilt unless one has certain ideas about one’s own sinful nature. Particular emotions within the general families may require particular situations and so will be less universal in nature.

My account will allow culturally specific emotions to be morally virtuous; recall that Hume’s artificial virtues are still virtues even though they depend on external social structures. Filial piety and spousal love can be virtuous even though there may be cultures without the family units or marriage customs that these depend on. Cultural relativism is, of course, a problem for everyone and is not one I can solve here. I will, however, try to be sensitive to these concerns. I leave it open that an emotion can be virtuous even though not everyone can experience it. Many virtues of behavior have this feature: It may be a virtue to be informed voter even though many people do not live in a political situation where voting is possible. Similarly, it may turn out that some emotions are virtuous and culturally specific.

Since certain emotions lend themselves to inter-cultural discussion better than others, I will focus on more general emotions. To talk of Catholic guilt or even resentment is to speak of emotions in a more provincial dialect than talk of anger or fear.

Discussing resentment with a Tibetan Buddhist monk or Confucian scholar is more

81 difficult (and often less productive) than discussing emotions like fear or happiness.55

Talk of basic or universal emotions presumes that humans are, to some extent, deeply similar. This similarity can be described in different ways: A psychologist like Paul

Ekman will talk of “fundamental life-tasks” (1992b, 171) while a philosopher like Robert

Solomon will talk of “the human condition” (2007, 248). The message is the same:

People everywhere share both biological similarities and situational challenges and triumphs; we all suffer loss, relate to others, achieve aims, and face dangers. I will not presume that all people experience the emotions I discuss, though I will aim to be more inclusive.

Emotion is Not a Natural Kind

I do not wish to claim that complex of states we call ‘emotion’ is the fundamentally correct division of our mental lives that, as Analytic philosophers like to say, “cuts reality at the joints”. Many philosophers (see Rorty 1980 and 2004 along with Griffiths 1997 and 2004) have argued that emotions do not form a natural kind. The term ‘natural kind’ is itself slippery, but most generally it means a category that allows for reliable extrapolation and scientific discovery; a natural kind is not just a conventional or arbitrary category, but somehow maps on to the basic scientific structure of the world. I will not assume that emotions form a natural kind. Fortunately, it will not matter for my purposes here.

Many prominent philosophers have taken the category of emotions for granted:

See Strawson (1962), Rawls (1971/1999), Blum (1980), Adams (1985 and 2006),

Nussbaum (1990), Korsgaard (1996), Hursthouse (1999), Scanlon (2008), and Annas

55 This is not to say that such discussions are impossible or always unproductive, simply that they are more difficult. This is my own experience with attempts at such conversations; your milage may vary.

82 (2011), among many others. Though all of them mention particular emotions and the category in general, none of their theories would turn out to be false if the category emotion is not a natural kind. After all, claims about categories that are not natural kinds can still be true. Even if ‘domestic animal’ is not a natural kind, the claims ‘domestic animals need food’ and ‘domestic animals should not be abused’ are still true. As Paul

Griffiths notes, ‘vitamin’ is not a natural kind; it is, in reality, a diverse group of chemicals. Nevertheless, when a doctor says that vitamins are good for me, it can still be true.56

One can understand my claims here as ethical claims about a class of folk psychological states. These claims can be true even if, as Donald Davidson (1970) suggested, there are no so-called “bridge laws” that translate the category to a physical or neurological category. In this sense, I am in a similar position to epistemologists giving an account of rational belief, aestheticians giving an account of beauty, or other moral philosophers giving an account of obligation. These theories can be true even if ‘belief’,

‘beauty’, and ‘obligation’ are not natural kinds and do not admit of scientific discovery.

Many claims about categories that are not natural kinds can be both true and meaningful.

After all, morality itself is unlikely to be a natural kind.57

If emotion is not a natural kind, then why is this chapter about emotions and not pathē, bhavas, or some other mental category? To be sure, interesting and illuminating chapters might also be written about these categories and much of what I say could be translated into these terms. I am interested in the ethical relevance of certain involuntary,

56 I take both of these examples from Griffiths (2004, 234ff.) 57 And, one might add, the category natural kind is itself unlikely to count as a natural kind. This would be very bad if claims about categories that are not natural kinds could not be true. For a more detailed discussion of this see Dupré (2002).

83 affective mental states and, in my own time and place, these states are best characterized by the word ‘emotion’. This does not, however, mean that all bets are off – I will discuss affective and cognitive aspects that are less arbitrary and more universal.

Distinguishing the Question

Many philosophers have taken emotions to be morally relevant in some way or another.

Only more recently could Bernard Williams (1965/1973) claim that moral philosophy neglected the emotions (a result, he claimed, of the linguistic turn and Kantian legalism).

Even then, just a few years before Williams, Peter Strawson (1962) emphasized the moral relevance of emotions like resentment and indignation. I am not interested here in whether or not moral judgments are emotions or require emotions (a question central in the work of David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Neo-Sentimentalism they inspired).

There has also been much debate about whether or not emotions are morally praiseworthy motives for action (see Stocker 1979, Blum 1980, Herman 1993, and

Korsgaard 1996). These are interesting questions, but not the one I am interested in here.

I am interested in whether emotions themselves can count as virtuous or vicious. That is, can we be morally better for having or lacking certain emotions? If so, why?

It is important to distinguish this question from similar questions about emotions and moral character. It is distinct from asking whether or not expressions of emotion are virtuous or vicious.58 It is important to distinguish between being angry (an emotion) and behaving angrily (an expression). A Buddhist who takes all anger to be harmful, can still accept that acting angrily is often good. For example, one might scream and shout at a child when doing so would prevent him from burning his hand or running into speeding

58 For example, Baier’s “Getting in Touch with Our Own Feelings” (2010, 123ff.) highlights the common gulf between what our emotions are and what we express.

84 traffic. In cases like this (instances of what is know in Sanskrit as upāya or “skillful means”), one acts as an angry person does, but does not have the internal experience of feeling anger. Epictetus, suggests a similar position about trivial grief: Though he takes grief over material loss to be vicious, he also notes that expressing such grief outwardly can often be a good thing, as when comforting a friend who is upset (see Enchiridion 16).

I also take the question of emotions role in our moral character to be distinct from questions about its role in building moral character (see Burnyeat 1980 and Gilligan

1982). Many traits aid in our moral development without being themselves virtues; for example, abstract reasoning and a good memory can both be very useful for becoming a better person, but are not themselves moral virtues. One is not a morally better person because she has a better memory or abstract reasoning skills. What I am concerned with here is whether or not emotions themselves can be virtuous, not whether or not they can help us to become so.

I take the question of virtue and vice to be distinct other ways in which emotions can be useful. Proponents of what is known as ‘simulation theory’ in philosophy of mind take emotions like empathy to be central in enabling us to understand the actions of others (see Gordon 1986, Heal 1986, and more recently Stueber 2006). Daniel Goleman’s popular Emotional Intelligence (Goleman 1996) emphasizes the social and career benefits of certain emotions. This is also not the same as moral virtue; being literate has social and career benefits and can help us to understand others, but knowing how to read does not make one a morally better person. This is a problem for consequentialist accounts of virtue like the one offered by Julia Driver. For Driver (2001, esp. 74ff) any trait that generally brings about human and social good is a virtue. An important flaw with this

85 kind of account is that it fails to distinguish useful traits from traits that reflect well on one’s moral character.

A consequentialist theory of virtue, like that of Julia Driver (2001), takes any emotion that produces beneficial effects to be virtuous. I will not offer a defense of this kind. The devil could not simply make any mental state vicious simply by harming others anytime someone experiences it. More realistically, someone in the midst of a political revolution might benefit others by becoming ruthless and callous, but that does not make such traits virtues. Traits may be good or useful by producing good consequences, but that does not make them virtuous. Simply producing good effects may not say much about the person herself, as when the effects are caused accidentally or in a deviant way.

If by historical accident a torturer’s cruelty happens to usher in an age of peace and harmony, there is a sense in which that person’s cruelty was good but the later effects do not seem to make the torturer a morally better person.

Can emotions themselves make one a morally better or worse person? Others interested in this question have found a friend in Aristotle. Glenn Hartz (1990, 147) and

Rosalind Hursthouse (1999, 108) both cite Aristotle’s claim that virtues are concerned with actions and feelings (for example NE 1104b14).59 Aristotle’s theory may not allow emotions themselves to count as virtues because for him virtues are related to choice (NE

1139a22-3) and we do not choose our emotions.60 Aristotle’s concern with the voluntary also shows up more clearly in the work of Aquinas, who only allows emotions to be virtuous or vicious only if they are voluntary:

59 The fact that emotions and actions are often treated together makes Aristotle difficult to interpret here. See Kosman (1980, 109), who suggests that only complexes of emotions and actions count as virtues. 60 This is an interpretive issue in Aristotle since he does not draw a sharp distinction between emotions and their expressions. For example, when discussing irascibility he talks both of feeling pained and the likelihood of defending oneself (NE 1126a5ff.).

We may consider the passions of the soul in two ways: first, in themselves; secondly, as being subject to the command of the reason and will. If then the passions be considered in themselves, to wit, as movements of the irrational appetite, thus there is no moral good or evil in them … If, however, they be considered as subject to the command of the reason and will, then moral good and evil are in them. (Summa II Q.24)

There are two issues here that must be distinguished. One is whether someone deserves praise or blame for their emotions and another is whether emotions can count as virtuous or vicious. Many philosophers have disagreed with Aristotle and Aquinas about emotions and blame. Hume, for example, seems to have this view in mind when he writes:

Philosophers, or rather divines under that disguise, treating all morals as on a like footing with civil laws, guarded by the sanctions of reward and punishment, were necessarily led to render this circumstance, of voluntary or involuntary, the foundation of their whole theory. Every one may employ terms in what sense he pleases : but this, in the mean time, must be allowed, that sentiments are every day experienced of blame and praise, which have objects beyond the dominion of the will or choice … (Enquiry IV.268, 322)

More recently Robert Adams (1985) has suggested that we are blameworthy for involuntary states of mind.61 Even if one agrees with Aristotle and Aquinas, however, that only what is voluntary is subject to praise and blame, one can still take such states to make one a better or worse person. I am disagreeing here with Bernard William’s claim

(1985, 177) that blame is the characteristic reaction of the moral system; there are many modes of moral evaluation, of which blame is one.

Even if someone with involuntary racist emotions is not blameworthy for those emotions, they make his moral character worse. He would, after all, be a better person if he did not have those emotions. We would be pleased if our children grew up without such emotions because they would be better people. My focus from here on will be on explaining the relationship between emotions and our moral character, how and why emotions are virtuous or vicious.

61 This is in contrast to many views, like the one forwarded by Edward Sankowski (1977), which require that it be open to us to affect our emotions in order for us to be praised or blamed for them.

87 My account will have a similar structure to the one offered by Aristotle: We agree that if emotions are to be virtuous or vicious it is because of the underlying state that these emotions manifest. We will, however, disagree about what the relevant state is. For

Aristotle, the relevant state is a stable disposition (Greek: hexis) that is concerned with choice, lies in a mean, is related to our distinctive function, and so on. For me, the relevant state will be the person’s moral cares and concerns. In what follows I will argue that emotions can manifest morally relevant cares and when they do, the emotions are virtuous. I will argue that emotions can manifest such concerns even when the associated behaviors and expressions are absent or when the cognitive aspect is unwarranted.

II. EMOTIONS AS MANIFESTING CONCERN

Emotions and Care

I wish to suggest the following: Emotions are virtuous or vicious when they manifest morally important cares or concerns (or a lack of such concerns). Let’s start with the idea that emotions can (and often do) manifest our cares and concerns. This is evident in everyday life. When my roommate is annoyed at our neighbor’s loud music, it manifests her concern for peace and quiet. When a high school English teacher get annoyed at my split infinitives, he manifests his concern for certain prescriptive grammar rules. A graduate student’s joy at the warm reception her advisor gives her paper manifests that she cares about writing good papers and about the opinion of her advisor. Annette Baier touches on a similar point when she claims that our emotions “… will speak the truth about if and how much something matters to us.” (2010, 166).

88 Having the same emotion towards the same object does not, however, always manifest the same concern. Consider different people who all feel disappointment at a baseball player strike. For some fans, it might manifest a concern for baseball in general, for others only a concern for the prospects of their favorite team. For a sports columnist, it might simply manifest a concern for a steady paycheck. A non-sports fan might also feel disappointment at the strike because baseball cheers up so many people he knows, manifesting a concern for the happiness of his friends. All of these people feel the same emotion towards the same event, but the emotion manifests vastly different concerns in each person. It is also important to keep in mind that the object of the emotion and the object of the concern that the emotion manifests need not be the same. When my balance is too low because of an error on the part of the bank, I am angry at the bank, but my anger manifests concern with my money.

There is room here for variations in culture and individual temperament. Even if it is true that people from southern Italy are more likely to get angry, say, when a friend makes a bad decision, than people from Finland, it does not follow that Italians care more about their friends. It simply means that their care is more likely to manifest in a particular way.62 Consider two students who have both failed the first exam in a class.

Though both care deeply about doing well, in one this caring manifests as sadness and in the other as anger. Neither emotion is the “correct” one, but both are ways in which a concern about the course and manifest emotionally.

It might seem that though neither anger nor sadness are the correct manifestation of concern for doing well in the class, perhaps emotions like joy would be incorrect. Even

62 Beyond appeals to cultural stereotypes and “national character”, there is evidence (see Tsai, Levenson, and McCoy 2006 and Tavris 1989, 44ff.) that emotional responses do vary between cultures.

89 joy at a failed exam, however, can manifest a concern to do well in the class. Consider

Dana, a deeply optimistic student. She does not have to try to be optimistic to console herself, but has an unflagging positivity “in her bones”. One imagines Dana explaining to her friend that she is happy to have failed the exam because it’s good to make mistakes early in the course because now she knows how to direct her studying and also because it is much better to have an upward trajectory in grades, and so on. Here Dana’s concern to do well in the class is refracted through her optimism and comes out as joy. What is important is that it is not particular emotions that reflect well on someone as a student, but rather the concerns that such emotions manifest.

Emotions and Moral Concerns

When the concerns that an emotion manifests are morally important, they reflect well on our moral character. Consider two people who feel joy at the release of hostages. For one it manifests a concern for the wellbeing of those in danger, but for another it manifests a concern for filling airtime on a news network. The joy of the former is virtuous in a way that the latter is not, even though the both experience the same emotion at the same event.

This is because the virtuous joy reflects well on the person’s moral character; it is an instance of their concern for others. The non-virtuous joy, however, does not reflect anything good about the person’s moral character because it is an instance of a concern that is not morally important.

This emotional reaction can be virtuous even if it goes unexpressed in one’s overt behavior. It can manifest morally important concern even if the hostages were released in a far away country and there is no action to be taken. Someone in a politically repressive situation can feel this emotion even though expressing it may be dangerous. Even without

90 any behavioral manifestation, the affective response of relief can manifest concern for others and so reflect well on one’s moral character.

The same goes for vicious emotions. These emotions reflect not only a lack of moral concern, but positive malevolent concerns. When an onlooker is angry that another person was not killed in a natural disaster or happily relieved when someone is killed, his emotions reflect poorly on his moral character. This is because they manifest at best an indifference to the wellbeing of another person, and at worst a positive concern to harm another. His emotions manifest at least a lack of concern for an important moral good, and likely that he cares for something morally bad (namely the life of another person) and so reflect poorly on his moral character.63 This emotional response manifests such concerns even when unexpressed in overt behavior – someone can silently experience them without any outward expression.

The various aspects of emotion are not themselves virtuous or vicious, but instead relevant to moral character by way of their connection with one’s moral concern. I am not making claims here about the specific content of such concerns, but I will take them to include common-sense moral goods like the concern for wellbeing of others, the rights of others, one’s own responsibilities, and so on. Determining what concerns an emotion manifests can be difficult in practice, but doing so is at the heart of what we do when we evaluate someone’s moral character based on certain emotions.

My claim that emotions themselves are not what reflects good moral character, but the cares on concerns they manifest might seem too strong. After all, aren’t some emotions themselves categorically virtuous or vicious? This may be so, but when

63 My account is similar in spirit to those offered by Dent (1984, 84) who claims emotions involve “loving attachment” or “involvement” and Taylor (1975, 391) who suggests that vicious emotions involve not looking at the world in the right way.

91 emotions are categorically virtuous or vicious, it is because relevant moral concern is built into the definition of the emotion itself. An easy way to see this is to consider would-be cases of vicious instances of virtuous emotions and vice versa. If we take sympathy to be merely sharing a feeling with someone, there are cases of vicious sympathy.64 This is clear when we consider people who want to engage in self- destructive behavior: an Anorexic who feels overweight and wants to skip yet another meal or a scholar in period of depression who feels a strong desire to sabotage his own work. Simply sharing in the feelings and desires of these people does not reflect well on one’s character – one could share in these feelings because one wants things to get worse for them. As André Comte-Sponville says, “Sympathy in horror is a horrible sympathy.”

(1996/2001, 105). This kind of horrible sympathy is horrible even when unexpressed in overt behavior; someone who feels this malicious sympathy is a worse person even if such sympathy is unexpressed in overt action (perhaps when directed towards those in the past or very far away). We want our children to become the sort of person who not only does not express such feelings, but who doesn’t have them in the first place.

Someone who takes sympathy to be categorically virtuous is likely to reply that such cases are not instances of real sympathy. What must be added to simply sharing a feeling with someone to get real sympathy? What is missing is concern for the person’s wellbeing. Even that is not sufficient: A gambler might sympathize with an injured football player by sharing in the player’s disappointment, frustration, and desire to return to the field, but only because he has wagered a large sum of money on the team. The gambler is concerned for the wellbeing of the player, but only as a means to getting

64 I am focused here on sympathy as an emotion; I follow Robert Solomon (2007, 63ff.) in this usage. Sympathy’s status as an emotion is not essential, however, as my point could be made with any emotion thought to be categorically virtuous like love, compassion, or gratitude.

92 money. What is missing is non-instrumental concern for the wellbeing of the person we sympathize with – a morally valuable concern. The point here is not that either definition of the term ‘sympathy’ is the correct one, only that if sympathy is to count as categorically virtuous, then it must include a morally important cares or concerns in its definition.

The same can be said for emotions that are taken to be categorically vicious; built into the very notion of these emotions is either morally bad concern or moral indifference. In the case of envy, for example, a selfish concern and indifference to others is built into the emotion.65 Insofar as envy is categorically vicious, part of what it means to envy is to wish for yourself something that someone else has (see Farrell 1980, 531).

For example it does not count as coveting your neighbor’s wife if you simply wish that you had an exact copy of his wife, you have to want you and not him to be with this particular woman. (More will be said in this vein in the discussion of anger). One might take there to be cases of non-vicious jealousy (as I will discuss below), but such uses of the term ‘jealousy’ do not build vicious concern into the emotion.

Envy does involve concern for whatever it is the person we envy has; this can explain why some cases of envy are less vicious than others. It is less vicious (or, if you’d prefer, more virtuous) for me to envy the Dalai Lama’s compassion than for me to envy my friend’s good looks because the former at least manifests a concern for a moral good, compassion. This envy is not virtuous, however, because it also manifests self-centered concern: I want to have the Dalai Lama’s compassion for myself, and I might even want the Dalai Lama to have less of it – particularly if what I want is to be more compassionate

65 I’m assuming here that envy is an emotion. It is an assumption shared by many, including Gabriele Taylor (1988) in her work on envy and jealousy. My claims here can be adapted to fit other emotions taken to be categorically vicious like greed or arrogance.

93 than him (and perhaps everyone else). These concerns, even though they involve a morally valuable quality, still manifest a selfish concern that makes them vicious. In this sense, the concern is built into the concept of the emotion.

Again, this type of vicious envy can be vicious without any associated behaviors.

I can be envious of my friend’s new sports car or jealous of a colleague’s professional fame without ever expressing such feelings in action. It is possible to imagine a stone

Weather Watcher being envious of another Weather Watcher’s more pleasant location even though it is not the kind of creature that can engage in overt actions. More realistically, someone with full-body paralysis can still envy the good fortune of others.

Insofar as they are vicious, a good person is not simply someone who avoids expressing such feelings; she is the sort of person who doesn’t have them at all.

Most emotions, however, do not have such moral considerations built into them and resist categorizations as always virtuous or always vicious. Growing up Catholic and

American, one will run into very different uses of the term ‘pride’ – at school one is told that it is good to take pride in your work, while at church one is told that pride is one of the deadly sins. Neither use of the term ‘pride’ is incorrect, but this difference can be understood in terms of what concerns are manifested. If someone’s pride in a well-written essay reflects her deep concern for good writing, it is not vicious. When a father’s pride in his child’s successes manifests his care for the child, it reflects well on him. It is in this sense that “taking pride in yourself” can be virtuous; it can manifest morally relevant self-respect (see Hill 1991 for more on the moral value of self-respect).

When pride is vicious, it manifests excessive concern for oneself or for trivial things. This can be a matter of emphasis: whereas pride in my well-written essay

94 manifests a non-vicious concern for quality, pride in my well-written essay manifests a concern for credit. I suspect this is what Spinoza has in mind when he describes

‘vainglory’: “… he who at last comes off conqueror boasts more because he has injured another person than because he profited himself. This glory of self-satisfaction, therefore is indeed vain, for it is really no glory.” (Ethics IV, prop.58). This person has vicious pride because their pride manifests not a concern to do well, but simply to do better than another person. Vicious pride is price that stems from a concern to puff up one’s own ego, a lack of concern for others, and from the desire to injure others. Since such concerns manifest morally bad concerns and so are vicious.

Again, the behaviors associated with vicious pride may be wrong, but the viciousness of pride does not require such actions. It is essentially about excessive self- concern, which may produce vicious behavior, but will not always. It is not boasting that is at the heart of vainglory or pride, but caring too much about yourself.66 When an emotion reflects well or poorly on a person’s moral character, it is because emotions are deeply connected to morally relevant cares and concerns. Emotions like anger, sadness, pride, and sympathy manifest what we really care about, what matters to us. Of course, this may be expressed in overt behavior, but need not be.

Emotional Failures

Our cares and concerns manifest in our emotional lives not only as emotions we do have, but also as emotions we fail to have. A lack of feeling can, and often does, manifest a lack of concern: If I don’t care about baseball, I am unlikely to have any feelings about how the World Series turned out. Not all failures to have emotions, however, manifest a lack of concern. A devout baseball fan might fail to have any feelings about the World

66 I will discuss this kind of vice in more detail in my discussion of modesty.

95 Series not because he doesn’t care, but because he is exhausted from a long week of work or because he has a bad case of the flu.

There are also temperamental differences from person to person. Jealousy, in contrast with the moralized notion discussed above, can often manifest care about a relationship. Someone might fail to be jealous of their partner’s attention to another person because they don’t care about the relationship. Another person, however, might fail to be jealous simply because they “aren’t the jealous type”. If one’s partner fails to be jealous because they don’t care, the failure counts against them as a partner (it would, for example, count as a reason to end the relationship). If they are simply not the jealous type, however, their lack of feeling does not count against them in this way.67

The same is true in moral cases; not every failure to have an emotion reflects poorly on my character. Not all failures to be relieved that that a friend is safe after a dangerous trip or failures to be upset when learning of an injustice reflect poorly on one’s moral character. To count as vicious, lacking an emotion must manifest a lack of morally relevant concern (or perhaps a positively bad moral concern). If I fail to be relieved upon learning that my mother is safe after a dangerous journey because I am sleep-deprived or heavily medicated, my lack of feeling does not manifest a lack of concern. The medication did not make me morally vicious and one should not list “emotional moral vice” among the side effects on the medication’s label. If I am not relieved because I don’t care about my mother’s safety, however, my lack of feeling manifests a defect of character, a morally relevant lack of concern.

67 Again, this is not to be confused with acting jealously. One might behave jealously without being jealous and be jealous without expressing it.

96 Again, this is true even when the relief is not or cannot be expressed. The relief may be about an event in the past about which there is nothing to be done. I might simply think to myself, “I’m glad the plane landed safely – what a scare!” Emotions and emotional failures can manifest a lack of concern even when they are unexpressed and do not produce any behaviors (or failures to behave). After all, even Weather Watchers or those who are paralyzed can feel or fail to feel relief for a variety of reasons.

Failures to have certain affective states like emotions are not categorically virtuous or vicious. Rather, it is the cares and concerns that such failures manifest that reflects on one’s moral character. For some surgeons, a lack of emotion may reflect that she takes the procedure seriously and manifest a deep concern for her patients while for others it may manifest that the procedure is of little importance. It is not the affective reaction or lack thereof itself that is virtuous or vicious, but the cares and concerns it manifests.

Emotion and Concern: A Contingent, Psychological Relation

I have argued that emotions are virtuous or vicious when manifesting important our cares and concerns. This type of care or concern is not itself an emotion. It is, for example, not episodic in the same way as emotions. Richard cares about the Red Sox even when he is reading a book about philosophy or sleeping. Tenzin cares about his mother even when he is not currently feeling warm feelings towards her, such as when distracted with his work or watching a movie.

In reality, emotions do, however, often manifest many different concerns at once.

Often these are a mix of moral and non-moral concerns: My relief upon hearing that my professor has returned safely from a long trip might manifest both my concern for her

97 wellbeing and my concern to hear the comments she has on my paper. This is not a problem for my account; my relief is morally virtuous to the degree that it manifests concern for her wellbeing and no more.

Though our emotions and cares are deeply related, this relationship is not a conceptual necessity.68 If the very concept of caring did entail certain emotions, then certain emotions would be conceptually required for moral concern. There are reasons to think that the link between emotions can care is not conceptual, but rather a contingent fact about human psychology.69

As Robert Solomon (2007, 203ff.) has emphasized, having an emotion (or at least many emotions) may well require that one care about something, even if it is not the morally relevant object of care. Someone who doesn’t care about anything at all may be incapable of feeling frustration, joy, or fear.70 But even if emotion entails some care, not all care entails emotion. Recall the student who cares about doing well in class and coldly forms a strong resolve to improve after failing an exam and the surgeon who because of her concern for her patients has extinguished her affective responses towards her work.

These are particular cases of having cares or concerns without an emotional manifestation. If one can have cares and concerns without emotional manifestations in particular cases, then it is at least conceptually possible in all cases. We can imagine a

68 I take myself to be in disagreement with, among others, Gabriele Taylor (1975) and N.J.H. Dent (1984) who both claim that certain emotions are conceptually and necessarily linked with our cares and concerns. 69 A follower of Quine might think that it is obviously not a conceptual truth that concern requires emotion because there are no conceptual truths at all. I will not appeal to this kind of argument in my discussion, but all arguments against conceptual truth in general will, of course, also apply to this particular claim of conceptual truth. I thank Richard Heck for pointing this out to me. 70 If surprise, detached amusement, or depression count as genuine emotions, perhaps such a person could experience some version of a limited range of emotions that includes these. These are, however, not clear cases of emotion and there are other problematic cases of care or concern in the absence of emotion.

98 being who cares about many things, but whose cares never manifest as emotion. Such a being is like the concerned but emotionless surgeon, but about everything.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider the kinds of ideal agents sometimes posited by

Kantian moral philosophers. Such agents are motivated only by respect for The Moral

Law and not by inclinations. The term ‘inclinations’ is, of course, a catchall that includes not only emotions, but anything that is not concern for one’s moral duty. This character is deployed in debates about what the morally praiseworthy motives for action are, but insofar as respect for moral duty is not an emotion, it paints a picture of emotionless moral concern. This sort of picture of concern may not actually exist and may not even be possible for normal humans. What is important, however, is that philosophers have taken such a character to be a conceptually coherent ideal.71

A more empirical case for the possibility of concern and care without emotion can be found in a study by Sprengelmeyer et al. (1999). The study describes a man, N.M., who suffered brain damage and became incapable of experiencing emotions like fear and anger. According to the study, N.M. enjoyed activities like

… hunting Jaguars at the upper course of the Orinoco river, or hunting deer in Siberia while hanging on a rope under a helicopter. In these kinds of situations, he said that he always experienced excitement but never fear. (1999, 2455)

His self-reports were also confirmed by his inability to recognize facial expressions expressing emotions like fear and anger. Despite his emotional deficit, N.M. was still able to care about many things, even those normally associated with fear and anger. In

Timothy Schroeder’s discussion of this case he notes,

71 I do not mean to be taking a side on the debate between motivational internalists and externalists. Perhaps moral judgments are themselves motivating, or perhaps not – what is important here is whether or not moral concern requires emotions as a matter of conceptual necessity.

99 N.M appears to care about whether he lives or dies, to care about whether or not he is cheated in business dealings, and so on, but his emotions do not respond as though he does care. (2004, 34)

The most natural description of N.M. seems to be that he is someone who cares about his safety and his business success, but does not manifest such cares emotionally. This suggests that there is not a conceptually necessary link between the two.

To deny that care and emotions are conceptually linked is not to say that the two are not related in deep and important ways. We are trying to understand what makes a morally good human being, and in human psychology in general, emotions and concerns are importantly connected. In everyday life, if we meet someone who never feels any emotions about a cause or person, it is a good bet that they do not care very much.

Special cases like N.M. aside, there is a general link between people who don’t feel certain emotions can people who lack certain types of cares and concerns.

This can be seen clearly in psychopaths. Blair et al. (2005) describe psychopathy as essentially about emotional impairment; what is central is an inability to feel a wide range of emotions, specifically other-regarding emotions like empathy, guilt, and remorse. Jon Ronson (2011) describes an interaction with a mass-murderer from Haiti who confided the following: “I don’t feel empathy … It’s not a feeling I have. It’s not an emotion I have. Feeling sorry for people? … I don’t feel sorry for people. No.” (2011,

134). Though they often attempt to mimic emotions and use the terms, they lack any first- personal experience of these emotions; Robert Hare (1993, 41) offers the example of a psychopath who claimed that he felt remorse only to later admit that he did not “feel bad inside” about his crimes.

Despite being characterized by an emotional defect, psychopathy is strongly associated with what is over-clinically termed ‘anti-social behavior” – not only criminal

100 behavior like bullying, stealing, and assault, but also using people for selfish ends like sex, money, or status. In the case of criminal offenses, convicted psychopaths are three times more likely to reoffend than non-psychopaths (Blair et al. 2005, 16). Of course, not all criminals or self-centered people are psychopaths; psychopathy requires that these behaviors be a result of a lack of emotions.

These behaviors are not directly relevant for my claims; but are important as evidence not just of an emotional deficit, but a lack of concern. Not only is the psychopath’s emotional deficit associated with vicious behavior, but also with a lack of concern for the wellbeing of others. Consider the following testimony from a psychopath convicted of kidnapping, rape, and extortion:

Do I care about other people? That’s a tough one. But yeah, I guess I really do … but I don’t let my feelings get in the way … I mean, I’m as warm and caring as the next guy, but let’s face it, everyone’s trying to screw you … Do I feel bad if I have hurt someone? Yeah, sometimes. But mostly it’s like … uh … [laughs] … how did you feel the last time you squashed a bug?” (quoted in Hare 1993, 33).

Though it is not a conceptually necessary connection, the lack of certain emotions that characterize psychopaths are strongly associated with the characterization made by Hare that “Psychopaths view people as little more than objects to be used for their own gratification.” (1993, 44). That is, certain emotional patterns are, in general, strongly linked with a lack of moral concern in human beings.

Two Cold Characters: Psychopathy and Autism

Many accounts would count psychopaths as vicious because they lack certain emotions that are central to humanity. This is a feature of a variety of theories: The Chinese philosopher Mengzi describes the “four sprouts” which include a capacity for feelings like pity, compassion, and shame. Without these sprouts, he claims, one would fail to be human (see Mengzi 2A6). Similarly, David Hume (especially Treatise III.3) talks about

101 certain passions being natural for us and also central to moral virtue. This idea also appears in neo-Aristotelians like Hursthouse (1999), who claims that emotions are an essential part of our natural and distinctly human function. On these views psychopaths are vicious because they are missing essential human emotions.

The mere fact that something is natural for humans or essential to being human is not enough to make it a virtue. It is, after all, also human nature to be selfish and prejudice against outsiders, but this does not make the emotions associated with greed or sexism virtuous – If human nature has made me sexist and greedy, then human nature has made me vicious. This can be seen clearly when it comes to epistemic virtue and vice: it is human nature to succumb to the gambler’s fallacy and even though it may be a result of my brain functioning well, it does not make me a better epistemic agent to do so.

Consider the case of autism.72 Like psychopathy, autism is also characterized by, among other things, an emotional defect. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual includes

“lack of social or emotional reciprocity” as a symptom of autism (DSM-IV, 299.80).

This type of emotional failure can, on the surface, seem a lot like those of psychopaths.

Consider Temple Grandin, an autistic person described by Oliver Sacks in his book An

Anthropologist on Mars. She described a roommate in college who was infatuated with their science teacher; “She was overwhelmed with emotion. I thought, he’s nice, I can see why she likes him. But there was no more than that.” Her own explanation was simply:

“The emotion circuit’s not hooked up—that’s what’s wrong.” (1995, 286). Stephanie

72 The term ‘autism’ is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of factors aside from the emotional element I will focus on (including, for example, repetitive behaviors and verbal communication impairment). I will focus on cases of what is called “High-Functioning Autism” including Asperger’s Syndrome. Though those with “Low-Functioning Autism” can pose special challenges for moral theory in general, much of what I say will also apply to them.

102 Mayberry, diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, describes herself as similarly baffled by emotion:

A lady at work tried to teach me how to “read” facial expressions. She went into this long explanation, telling me that I should pay attention to what emotions I am feeling and what I think that person is feeling or may feel at that time. I was polite. I listened and said “okay” a bunch of times. But it made no sense. I am not an emotional person and I don’t understand emotions in other people. (2012, 433)

The first-person accounts of autism often feature comparisons with non-human agents like robots and aliens – Mayberry’s account is entitled “Alien: A Story of Asperger’s

Syndrome” and Temple Grandin, describes her favorite character from the TV show Star

Trek, an emotionless robot named Data. According to Sacks, “A surprising number of people with autism identify with Data, or with his predecessor, Mr. Spock” (1995, 275).

Under the influence of certain theories, all this talk about aliens and robots can make those with autism seem, at least in the emotional realm, pretty vicious. After all, don’t they lack the “fellow feeling” so important to Hume or at least a few of the “Four

Sprouts” that are essential to humanity for Mengzi? They also seem to fail at part of normal human functioning, making them vicious for those like Aristotle and Rosalind

Hursthouse.

For all the apparent similarities, psychopaths are morally vicious and people with autism are not. This is because the psychopath’s emotional defect manifests a lack of concern for others, while that of autistic people does not. Those with autism may have difficulty understanding whether or not they have hurt someone, but they often care deeply about not hurting others. Consider Stephanie Mayberry’s description of her struggle with honesty:

Many Aspies [people with Asperger’s Syndrome] tend to be very honest. You might think that that is a really good thing, but it has gotten me into trouble more than once. It has also caused me to hurt people’s feelings, which is something I never, ever want to do. (2012, 432)

103

Stephanie is clearly concern not to hurt other people’s feelings, but simply has trouble knowing when that will happen. Part of the issue is a non-moral, social vice – one simply finds it difficult to tell when one has hurt another. This happens to non-autistics when they interact with a culture far removed from their own; they do something like stretch out their legs, buy a nice green hat for their newly married friend, or comfort a friend with a pat on the head.73 Though these actions might hurt the feelings of others, one might fail to have any emotional response not because one doesn’t care, but because one doesn’t understand.

Autistic people, because of their different experiences, often have empathetic blind spots. The blindness, however, works both ways. Temple Grandin describes a kind of sensory empathy that many non-autistics lack:

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don’t have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can’t stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there’s too much stimulation. I’m frustrated with the inability of normal people to have sensory empathy. They can’t seem to acknowledge these different realities because they’re so far away from their own experiences. (Valentine and Hamilton, 2006)

What comes through in this passage is that Temple cares about the suffering of others and values empathy for their suffering. She is concerned with how few people are able to engage in sensory empathy. She even feels frustration about the situation – we can leave it open just how emotional this frustration is (perhaps it is simply a cold, intellectual judgment and a frustrated desire, or perhaps it is something more).

Though both psychopaths and autistic people generally lack certain emotions that are paradigmatically human, there is a world of difference. Temple is so unlike the

73 In much of Southeast Asia, pointing your feel at something or someone important is offensive, as is touching someone’s head (especially when that person is more important than you). In China, buying a married man a green hat implies that you are sleeping with his wife.

104 psychopath whose emotional reaction to murder is likened to crushing a bug; in fact, she has devoted her life to reducing animal suffering in slaughterhouses. Morally, the two are worlds apart because what is important for moral virtue is not having the right emotions or having the emotions that most humans have, but having the right cares and concerns.

Accounts that ground virtue in what is human miss this important distinction – psychopaths are vicious not because they are inhuman, because they lack emotions that most of us experience, but because they are inhumane, they lack concern for others. The failure to feel itself is not morally vicious, only failing to feel because one fails to care.

Whatever defects Temple Grandin has, they do not include a lack of moral concern. In his reflections, Oliver Sacks echoes this when he reflects that “Temple is an intensely moral creature” (1995, 296). His diction is telling in two ways: ‘creature’ suggests

Temple lacks something that is found in most humans, but ‘moral’ suggests that despite this, she cares deeply about morally important things.

The Cognitive Aspect: Virtuous Irrational Emotions

So far I have argued that the virtuousness or viciousness of our emotional patterns is rooted in the cares and concerns that such patterns manifest. One consequence of this is that the virtuousness of emotions is independent of whether or not their cognitive element is correct or warranted. This is in contrast to a cluster of views; perhaps most famously the Stoic view. Recall that for Stoics, all emotions entail judgments. Contrary to the common stereotype, however, Stoics do not advise eliminating all passions: For example, they acknowledge joy, cheerfulness, and confidence as at least important for virtue (Long

1996, 198). They do advise eliminating irrational emotions, that is, emotions whose judgments misrepresent the world (see Epictetus’ Discourses III.2.4, DeBrander 2004,

105 202-3, and Long 1996, 209). Many ethicists have made a similar claim in this context about the emotions: if they are irrational, then they are vicious. Ronald de Sousa, for example, claims that our most general emotional responsibility is to “feel things as they really are” (1990, 315). Rosalind Hursthouse identifies virtue with a harmony between one’s emotions and reason (1999, 116). In what follows, I will reject this view. An emotion’s cognitive aspect being warranted or rational is neither necessary nor sufficient for an emotional state to count as virtuous.74

It is obvious that the cognitive aspect being erroneous (whether rationally or irrationally) does not make an emotion vicious and need not prevent it from being virtuous. Ptolemy may have been overjoyed with his geocentric model of planetary motion and the mere fact that his joy involves a misrepresentation of reality does not seem reflect poorly on his moral character. Or consider someone who feels distress and agitation when they see a child in the distance fall into a well. If such distress is in fact a manifestation of her concern for the safety of others, then it reflects well on her character even if it was really only a log that fell into the well. The fact that the part of her emotion that represents the world did so incorrectly does not change how the emotion reveals her moral character.

Errors are one thing, but what about irrationality? There are many cases where irrational emotions seem not only non-vicious, but positively virtuous. Consider the case of prejudice and the associated emotions. Ronald de Sousa locates the viciousness of such emotions in the failure to accurately represent reality; for him, a prejudice emotion is vicious because it “… refuses to take into account of the reality that underlies the putative

74 Solomon (2007) also rejects this view, though his view seems to be that irrational emotions are good because of their desirability, thus he highlights how irrational love can bring “rewards” and be “uplifting and inspiring” (188).

106 general facts.” (1990, 316). But, as Tamar Szabó Gendler (2011) points out, there is often a tension between epistemic rationality and morally vicious beliefs. Suppose you have very good evidence, from experience, statistics, and testimony, that support the following claims: If you see a black man inside an exclusive country club, he is most likely there to take your drink order or if you see a man in his twenties from the Middle

East on your flight, he is more likely to be a terrorist. Even with good background evidence to support such claims, it is still vicious to assume that a particular black man is there to take your order or feel that an Iranian traveler is dangerous. As Gendler (2011,

57) puts it, in many situations we can either be rational or equitable in our beliefs, but not both. This is, to be sure, a complex issue, but I simply want to suggest that there can be a similar tension in the cognitive aspects of our emotions. Being racially equitable in our fear may require ignoring evidence about which races commit more crimes – sometimes the virtuous emotion will, to borrow de Sousa’s terms, refuse to take into account putative general facts.

Julia Driver offers other, more controversial, examples of epistemically irrational virtues: trust and blind charity. If these are in fact virtues, then the emotions associated with them will be irrational in that they misrepresent the world. Consider blind charity.

The person with blind charity sees the good in others while ignoring the bad. More than that, such a person feels certain feelings towards others based on this charitable view: a warm fondness and admiration, for example. Driver’s paradigm case of this virtue is Jane

Bennet from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, who, according to her sister Elizabeth is able “… to take the good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad” (quoted in Driver 2001, 28). Insofar as we can make sense of blind

107 charity as a virtue, it cannot be because it responds to evidence or represents the world correctly.75

Another virtue of this kind suggested by Driver is trust (2001, 30-1). It is not all trust that is insensitive to evidence. Often we trust someone based on evidence such as their track record and the testimony of others; for example, when one hires a security guard based on her job history and references. Other cases of trust, however, are not sensitive to evidence and can even run counter to the evidence. To borrow Driver’s example, Brenda might trust her friend’s claim that she did not commit a crime, despite police evidence to the contrary. We might find ourselves speaking highly of Brenda’s devotion to her friend even though it is not epistemically rational. If one’s emotions reflect this trust, by failing to blame the friend or by admiring her strength, they will fail to be sensitive to evidence.76

Though I agree with Driver that trust can be virtuous even when insensitive to evidence, it is not for the same reason. For Driver, such trust can be virtuous because it can produce good consequences. But I take it to be virtuous when it manifests a deep commitment to another person. Brenda treats evidence about her friend differently from an ideally rational agent in several ways – she will require a greater quantity and higher quality of evidence of her friend’s guilt before she changes her mind and she may change her mind more slowly than an ideally rational person would. These reflect well on her

75 A more recent statement of this virtue is made by the Indigo Girls’ “Free in You” when they sing: “And I don't know / How you show / Such gentle disregard / For the ugly in me / That I see / That for so long / I took so hard / And I truly believe / That you see the best in me”. (Thanks to Jay Garfield for suggesting this to me). 76 There is an interesting contrast with the discussion of trust in Baier (1994, 10-12); though she is skeptical of “promiscuous trustworthiness” as a virtue, she does characterize trust as a kind of risk. Compare with Cynthia Townley (2011) who claims that trust can be an epistemic virtue that takes priority over the goal of attaining truth. Also relevant is Karen Jones’ (1996, 13ff.) account of trust as a way of seeing someone and’s distinction between trust and reliance.

108 because they show that she cares deeply about her friends and is unwilling to accept the worst about them. This care may in fact bring bad consequences; Brenda may stick with a bad friend longer than an ideally rational person would, but insofar as they manifest a concern for others, such feelings of trust reflect well on Brenda.

Any theory that requires virtuous emotions to be rational, that is to represent the world in a way that is responsive to evidence, will be unable to account for what seems virtuous about these cases. Rather than dismissing them as vicious because of their irrationality, my account offers a way to explain why they can sometimes be morally virtuous: the emotions associated with Jane’s blind charity might manifest concern for others in the same way that a mother’s care for her child can manifest overly optimistic about the child’s goodness. Or they might manifest a concern for others in the way that we often project our own cares onto others in the same way that an overly-excited sports fan can assume that everyone else cares as much as him about the World Series. These explanation account for why certain variations in the source of irrationality affect our assessments of moral character: When Brenda’s trust is a result of her deep concern for her friend and their relationship, it reflects well on her because it manifests an important concern. If her irrational trust is only because she wishes to rebel against her button-down and rule-obsessed father, it does not reflect well on her.

This trust is similar to a virtue from the Christian tradition – faith. Aquinas defines the virtue as "a habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent." (Summa, Part II Q.4).77 This can manifest in a non-religious context too; we can have faith in our friends, the judicial system, or the

77 Or as Mark Twain is said to have put it: When you believe what you know ain’t so. (I again thank Jay Garfield for this gem!).

109 kindness of strangers. These epistemically insensitive emotions are similar to the

“optimism of the will and a pessimism of the intellect” that many have taken to be virtuous (attributed variously to Antonio Gramsci and Romain Rolland). We can make a similar case for the emotions – they can manifest morally important cares even in the face of countervailing evidence.

The emotions that are associated with these cognitive attitudes reflect morally good concerns even when they do not represent the world correctly and do not respond to evidence in an ideally rational way. These states are virtuous or vicious independently of their behavioral manifestations; virtuous trust or faith do not requires expressions or avowals. Racial fear need not show its face in overt action in order to make one a worse person. These states may appear in behavior, but even when they don’t they reflect poorly on one’s moral character. Jane Bennet and Brenda’s attitudes are virtuous even if they never have the chance to be expressed in overt behavior. Similarly with vicious cognitive attitudes; we expect moral exemplars like the Dalai Lama or Desmond Tutu not simply to avoid expressing racial prejudice and disgust, but to fail to experience them at all.

Virtuous Irrationalities

My account can help us to see why we often take small irrationalities to reflect well one someone’s character. When a partner feels slightly more worried or jealous than the evidence warrants, it can be a sign that they care for us: Suppose you tell a loved one that you will be taking a trip far away but it is safe and there is no reason to worry. If the reply is a calm and unfazed, “Okay, I’m not worried” you might find yourself thinking “You’re

110 not even a little bit worried?!” This is because being worried despite the evidence would express concern for your safety.78

This also happens in cases of over-extending an emotion to improper objects. I had a friend who once confided to me that she couldn’t help feeling a little bit sorry for a spoon separated from its set or the slightly damaged doll that nobody wanted to buy.

Such emotions are, of course, irrational, because spoons and dolls cannot feel hurt or left out. And yet, there seems to be something good about these emotions. Such emotions are virtuous when they manifest a more general concern for those who are left out or not cared for. When a person’s concerns misfire by being extended beyond their relevant objects, it still shows that the person has such concerns, which reflects well on their character. It also can show that such concerns are easily and readily manifested, even if this results in manifesting as irrational emotion.

There are also, of course, cases where such emotions do not manifest a more general concern. In these cases they do not reflect well on one’s moral character: If a

Nazi feels sorry for an orphaned spoon but not an orphaned Jewish girl, his emotions do not manifest the more general care that is morally important. But when we take such trivial irrationalities to reflect well on a person, we take it to be an overextension of a morally important concern.

In practice this can be difficult to distinguish. Many hoarders, for example, experience emotions towards personified objects. For example, consider one hoarder’s description of her experience throwing away an empty yogurt container:

I remember feeling bad about not choosing “this” particular container as one that would remain at home with the others, and so I was feeling responsible for rejecting it and placing it into the recycling bin to begin its long journey to eventual destruction. I felt

78 I thank Nomy Arpaly for this example.

111 responsible for giving it as “comfortable” a ride as possible, seeing as how I was rejecting it, and the thought of it having to endure a humid, long journey made me very anxious. This was followed quickly by the thought of how silly this thinking was, and that I needed to resist following though on what I wanted to do to make me feel less anxious. (quoted in Frost and Steketee 2010, 273)

It is unclear to what extent these emotions are merely compulsive tics and to what extent they manifest her moral concern. Though one gets the feeling that her emotions are similar to an itch, a simple and blind urge, the language she uses, talk of responsibility and comfort, makes it seem too complex and too moralized to be completely independent of her cares. It is most likely a mix of the two. Her disorder is tic-like in the sense that it compels her to have some strong emotion about something, but is still directed to some extent by her cares and concerns. Her emotions are like a bright light that is filtered through the prism of her cares and concerns. That is why she has these particular feelings about the yogurt canister.

Even if her emotions do manifest a concern, the immediate concern it manifests is not morally good. The concern for the “comfort” and “wellbeing” of a yogurt container itself is not morally virtuous – caring about plastic bottles, even when personified, is not a morally important care. Her emotions can, however, also manifest a more general concern that is morally relevant. In this case, the irrational emotions seem to say something about her more general cares and concerns: She is concerned with providing comfort, acceptance, and taking responsibility – all morally important notions. Of course, the hoarder’s overall life quality might be better if she lacked such emotions and she would be morally better to focus her concern only on the appropriate objects. But if her emotions are the irrational over-extension of morally good concerns, then such manifestations count in favor of her moral character (though perhaps only to a very small degree).

112 This explains why she seems to be a better person (albeit only slightly better) than another compulsive hoarder who feels anxiety when he fails to torture, abandon, and hurt yogurt containers. Insofar the hoarder’s emotions, at least partially, manifest more general concerns that are morally important, such irrational emotions can be (at least slightly) virtuous or vicious.

Insofar as her emotions are slightly virtuous, it is not because the associated behaviors are morally good. There is, after all, nothing morally good about helping a yogurt container; the action itself is morally neutral. It can, however, be morally virtuous if it manifests a more general morally good concern. It is also important to note that her attitude can be virtuous even if she never expresses them and does not act on them in an overt way. Most people who feel bad about a damaged doll or an abandoned spoon because of more general moral concern never act on such feelings and may never express them to anyone.

So far I have offered an account of how having or failing to have various cognitive and affective states associated with emotions can be morally virtuous or vicious. These states have a deep, though contingent and psychological, connection with our cares and concerns. Such states themselves can manifest moral concern without expression in overt behavior. Those who are unable to engage in certain overt behaviors, either because of a physical or situational limitation, can still have moral concerns and experience such emotions as a result.

In discussing how emotional states can be virtuous or vicious, I have not offered an account of how emotional the virtuous person is. My account entails that, while having certain emotions can manifest important concerns and so be virtuous, failing to have such

113 emotions does not always mean that one lacks such concerns and so is not always vicious. This allows for an emotional range in morally virtuous people. To illustrate how the account applies to specific emotions, I will discuss how this account can explain when anger and fear can be morally virtuous or vicious and why.

114 CHAPTER IV : ANGER AND FEAR

It's the people we love the most who can make us feel the gladdest...and the maddest! […] It's a different kind of anger from the kind we may feel toward strangers because it is so deeply intertwined with caring and attachment.

- Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers

One could be forgiven for taking anger and fear to be categorically negative emotions.

When we think of moral exemplars like Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, it is tempting to picture a gentle and calm temperament that seems at odds with being angry or afraid.

Discussions about the morality of anger and fear tend to be polarized, with philosophers either arguing that virtue requires such emotions (though in a restricted way – think of

Aristotle’s right time, right place, right way) or that such emotions are incompatible with virtue.

I will reject both of these views and instead claim that emotions like fear and anger can be virtuous, though they are not necessary for being a good person. They can be virtuous or vicious by manifesting one’s moral concerns. As Fred Rogers pointed out, anger can sometimes be deeply connected with our cares – we are sometimes angry with those close to us because we care about them and it matters to us how their lives go. The same is true of fear. We are typically afraid of harm to something that matters to us – our lives, our cultures, or our loved ones. Not only can these emotions manifest care, they can manifest moral care and so display good moral character.

115 These emotions can manifest care despite typically being involuntary; we do not typically choose to be angry or afraid. I will argue that these emotions can be virtuous or vicious in this way independently of any expression in overt behavioral action and even when they are irrational or unwarranted.

VIRTUOUS AND VICIOUS ANGER

In a footnote to his paper, “Involuntary Sins”, Robert Adams points out an interesting difference between two translations of Matthew 5:22. The New International

Version reads, “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment” while the same passage in the King James Version reads, “But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” (emphasis added).79 As Adams points out, there is an important difference between the two passages—is all anger bad or merely unwarranted anger bad?

Stoic and Buddhist philosophers argue that one should never be angry, while

Aristotle (see NE IV.5) and Hume claim that we should, at times, become angry.

Common sense, at least in America, tends towards the latter; many imagine the virtuous person as someone who does get angry, but only at the right time and towards the right things. Hume offers a similar view, though his tone is almost apologetic, describing it as an “indulgence” to human nature:

79 The orignal texts themselves also vary in this way. For those interested, the Greek reads: Ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑµῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ ὀργιζόµενος τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ εἰκῆ ἔνοχος ἔσται τῇ κρίσει· ὃς δ᾿ ἂν εἴπῃ τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ ρακά, ἔνοχος ἔσται τῷ συνεδρίῳ· ὃς δ᾿ ἂν εἴπῃ µωρέ, ἔνοχος ἔσται εἰς τὴν γέενναν τοῦ πυρός. The term εἰκῆ, meaning “without a cause” or “without purpose”, is absent in early versions and thought to be a later addition. For my purposes it doesn’t matter which is authentic; my point is simply that many people felt it important to avoid prohibiting all anger.

116

We are not, however, to imagine, that all the angry passions are vicious, tho’ they are disagreeable. There is a certain indulgence due to human nature in this respect. Anger and hatred are passions inherent in our very frame and constitution. The want of them, on some occasions, may even be a proof of weakness and imbecility. (Treatise III.3.3)

For this common-sense view there are occasions when it is virtuous to feel angry. Many philosophers have, however, denied this. Consider Seneca’s view:

Let us be free from this evil, let us clear our minds of it, and extirpate root and branch a passion which grows again wherever the smallest particle of it finds a resting-place. Let us not moderate anger, but get rid of it altogether: what can moderation have to do with an evil habit? (De Ira III.42)

Both positions, however, are in need of support—what, after all, is so bad about anger?

And what might be so good about the “right” kind?

Whether or not anger can count as virtuous depends largely on what kind of states count as anger. Many different states are covered and translated by the English term

‘anger’ – I will argue that some states covered by it, such as righteous indignation, can be virtuous while others like those discussed in Buddhist sources can be categorically vicious. What is relevant for understanding the difference, I will argue, is the cares and concerns that such states manifest. After discussing some of the features of anger in general, I will examine arguments from Buddhist and Stoic sources that criticize anger on various grounds: that it is unpleasant, not beneficial, and irrational. These arguments strongly suggest that if anger is to count as virtuous, it should not be on the grounds that it is pleasant, beneficial, or rational.

Finally I will offer my own account for how anger can be virtuous that does not depend on any of these features. I start from the observation that anger can, and often does, manifest our cares and concerns. When such cares are about morally important goods, the anger reflects well on one’s moral character. In defending this account, I will

117 reject the view of anger as essentially an external force, alien to our deepest cares.

Though it is involuntary, it is can be a product of our own moral concern. I will also reject the view that all anger is always the result of selfish cares and a desire to harm others, in particular focusing on cases of righteous indignation. It will allow that some particular kinds of anger, such as those discussed by Stoics and Buddhists, can also be vicious by manifesting morally bad concerns.

I will also argue that these states are virtuous or vicious independently of behavioral manifestation. Of course, acting angrily can be good or bad, but the state itself can be virtuous or vicious even when unexpressed in covert behavior.

I. ANGER AND ITS COUSINS

Most all of us experience anger as we go through life. A friend is two hours late for a lunch, we see injustice on the news, the post office clerk is rude, a family member is betrayed by her husband – the list goes on and on. Situations like these will produce many emotions, but anger is likely to be one of them. Emotions, as Carol Tavris reminds us, are like grapes—they come in bunches. The emotional phenomenon I am interested in is best described by the term ‘anger’, but is associated with a wide range of emotions – rage, wrath, indignation, outrage, bitterness, frustration, and simply “being mad” about something.

These concepts are not rigidly delineated and any attempt to draw sharp boundaries is stipulative at best. For this reason psychologists, notably Paul Ekman, prefer to talk of ‘emotion families’ (see Ekman and Friesen 1975 and Ekman 1992,

118 172).80 Nevertheless, it is worth discussing some of the central features of anger before considering its relevance to our moral character.

It is important to distinguish between being angry and behaving angrily. These can often come apart; for example, one might scream and shout at a child when doing so would prevent him from burning his hand or running into speeding traffic. Someone can behave in this way, acting as an angry person does, but without having the inner experience of anger.81 My discussion will focus on whether being angry can be virtuous or vicious independently of one’s behavior.

Anger, like all emotions, is not something we do, but something that happens to us; it is involuntary. We may do things to encourage or discourage it from happening or we may do things to prevent or encourage its expression, but anger itself is involuntary.

This is uncontroversial in most discussions of anger – see Robert Adams (1985), Ekman

(1992, 189), Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000, esp. 13 and 241), and Robert Roberts (2003, 16) among many others.82

I will take anger to be transitive, that is, it is directed towards some object. When we are angry we are angry at or about something. Though we may experience what could be called objectless anger (“I just feel mad today”), I will focus on anger is directed at someone or something.83 Many philosophers, for example Ben-Ze’ev (2000) and Roberts

80 See also Allan Gibbard’s discussion of the abufuw of the Akan of Ghana (1990, 142ff.) and Roberts (2003, 204ff.) on song of the Ifaluk and liget of the Ilongot. Though these emotions can differ from anger in particular ways, they share common features that make it natural to discuss them together. 81 Instances like this are cases of what is known in Sanskrit as upāya or “skillful means”. One might use such an account to square Jesus’ display of anger in the temple (described in Matthew 21:12-27) with his comments on anger quoted above. 82 An exception is Robert Solomon (2007, 191ff.), who is strongly influenced by existentialists like Sartre. 83 Some kinds of irritability or irascibility take objects but float quickly from object to object (“Turn that down! Why is it so dark in here?! My head hurts! …”). These states can rightfully be called anger and I can allow that they are sometimes virtuous: Imagine someone whose righteous indignation floats from injustice

119 (2003), have followed Aristotle (Rhetoric 1378a31ff.) in taking persons to be the only object of anger. I find this condition much too narrow. For example, we can feel anger towards groups like the IRS, the Nepalese Constituent Assembly, or the American

Philosophical Association.

We also feel it towards physical objects: the pens that won’t write, the computers that delete our work, and the curry that made us sick. We may even feel it towards non- physical objects, as when an accountant is angry at the numbers for “just not adding up” or when a philosopher is angry at her argument for not being valid. These may well be cases of irrational anger, but I will take them to be anger nonetheless.

We sometimes talk of anger as an immediate, episodic state and other times as a broader, long-term attitude. We talk of momentary “flashes” of anger and of more subdued anger that “simmers” for months or years. Episodic anger involves physiological aspects like increased heart rate, sweating, and muscle tension, while the long-term variety does not – If I say that I have been angry with a friend since college, I do not mean that I have experienced an increased heart rate for the past decade.84 Because of its measurable physiological aspects, most empirical research tends to focus on the episodic type of anger (this focus can be found in the work of Paul Ekman, Antonio Damasio,

Maya Tamir, among many others).85 Philosophical accounts, like those of Michael

Stocker (1996, 23) and Robert Solomon (2007, 16ff.) often include the long-term variety

to injustice (“The glass ceiling must come down! Racial discrimination is a plague on our country! Third- world debt must be addressed!”). I will not, however, primarily be concerned with this kind of anger. 84 Gert (1998) likens the long-term anger to playing chess by mail. If we are playing chess in this way I may be “playing chess” for days, even while I am doing other things. Aristotle seems to have the more episodic type in mind when he says (NE IV.5, 1126a14ff.) that the best thing about irascible people is that though they get angry quickly, it quickly passes. 85 I am speaking in broad strokes here. The Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda, for example, is open to long- term emotions, saying of them, “Whether to view them as consequences or as parts of the emotions is largely a matter of taste.” (2007, 189).

120 as well. Some theorists, for example Robinson (2004, 39), may insist that the long-term kind of anger is merely an attitude and not properly called an emotion while others, like

Robert Solomon will tell us that “Anger often goes on for days or weeks or years” (2007,

17). Because my own account of how anger can be virtuous or vicious will apply to both sorts of anger, I will not make a rigid distinction between them nor will I take a side in debates about which, if any, is the “core” of anger. Needless to say, anyone who feels strongly that long-term anger is not true anger may safely apply my claims only to the episodic variety.

Whether long-term or episodic, anger typically involves some sort of agitation.

This is most obvious in the episodic type of anger when we feel an increased heart rate and muscle tension. It is also a feature of long-term anger. I am likely to feel deep relief and peace of mind when my decade-long anger at a friend comes to an end; I may feel more relaxed, sleep easier, and feel as though a weight has been lifted. The Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva, in his Bodhicaryāvatāra or “The Way of the Bodhisattva”

(hereafter BCA), seems to have the long-term variety in mind when he likens anger to a thorn or dart stuck in the heart – painful and difficult to remove (BCA VI.3).86 These symptoms suggest a long-term agitation that is not unlike the general agitation that comes with working a stressful job for years on end. Though it involves agitation, as I will argue below, this does not mean that anger is necessarily unpleasant.

Anger also involves desire, though the nature of scope of this desire is disputed.

It’s hard to imagine being angry when a friend is late for lunch without having some

86 Though this claim is really about ‘aversion’ or ‘hatred’ (Tibetan: zhe sdang), it is often also translated as ‘anger’. The distinction between anger and hatred will be relevant later, but for now these unpleasant features also apply to the sort of long-term anger I wish to include. My reading of this verse here follows the very thorough treatment found in Gomez (1999, 275ff.).

121 desire to eat and get on with your day. It’s hard to imagine being angry with a rude postal worker without some desire to be treated with respect. I will argue that disputes about whether or not there can be virtuous anger are very often rooted in what sort of desires are thought to be essential to anger.

Finally, anger, like other emotions, has what I will call a cognitive aspect. By

‘cognitive aspect’ I mean that it includes something that can make it warranted or justified – put most generally, anger represents the world in a certain way. This feature is not essential for my account, but is an important feature of many arguments that criticize anger on the grounds that it is unwarranted.

II. WHY THINK ANGER IS VICIOUS?

The Buddhist and Stoic traditions provide many arguments for the viciousness of anger.

In this section I will discuss two common types of argument: those that claim anger is bad for us or others and those that claim it is irrational. These are by no means the only arguments offered. I discuss them here because, though I will raise some worries about them, I will accept the general thrust of these arguments: My account of how anger can be virtuous will not require that anger be either beneficial or rational. After presenting my account, I will examine arguments that are inconsistent with my account, in particular anger’s relation to our moral concern.

122 In the interest of philosophical diversity I will focus primarily on Buddhist rather than Stoic sources (though Stoics will by no means be ignored).87 The term usually translated as ‘anger’ is from the Sanskrit term pratigha (Tibetan: khong khro). The particulars of this state will be relevant later, but for now the following will be enough:

Pratigha is part of a class of mental states that are to be avoided (Sanskrit: kleśa) because they foster a false view of the world and lead to suffering (both for oneself and for others).88 There are many strands of why anger is bad in this view – Śāntideva, in his

Bodhicaryāvatāra, describes anger as vicious because of its bad effects on conduct (IV.1,

35-7), on social relations (IV.4-5), for ourselves (IV.3 and 7), and because it is unwarranted (IV.22-31, 41-5). Many of these rely on Buddhist metaphysical views about personal identity: Such states are thought to engender mental habits in us, such as thinking of ourselves as having persisting and unchanging selves, that incorrectly represent the world and as a result lead to suffering. I can allow that anger is bad for many of these reasons, but this does not settle the question of whether or not is it always vicious.

Though the Buddhist tradition makes important connections between ethics and metaphysics, I will focus on arguments that rely less heavily on metaphysical claims that are, for most Western philosophers, quite radical. Those who study the Buddhist tradition are apt to accuse me of throwing out the baby with the bathwater – the non-self metaphysics of Buddhism is, after all, one of the key insights of the tradition. This is certainly true, but at the same time, there are other insights in Buddhist ethics that do not

87 I will not discuss arguments that depend on Buddhist soteriology, such as the suggestion that avoiding anger will bring benefits in future lives (see BCA VI.6). 88 A common Tibetan definition for these states that they cause one to have a non-peaceful mind (in Tibetan: sems kyi rgyu'am byed pa ma zhi ba).

123 rely on particular metaphysical views and it is these insights that can be illuminating to those who do not accept a Buddhist worldview more generally.89

Anger as Bad for Us

One common strand in both Buddhism and Stoicism is the claim that the experience of anger is unpleasant and therefore undesirable. This kind of reasoning can be found both in Śāntideva (BCA VI.5 and 24) and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (XI.18). There is something to this; who, after all, wants to be that person stewing in their own anger after a traffic jam or bad customer service?

There is, however, reason to worry about the soundness of the claim that anger is always unpleasant for everyone. Carol Tavris (1989, 71) notes that not all people report anger as being categorically unpleasant. After all, what counts as pleasant or unpleasant is largely a matter of taste. A Midwesterner might think that the pain and sweating caused by eating spicy food simply must be unpleasant, while someone from Sichuan may find the same experience quite enjoyable. One may well enjoy the thrill of anger; Tavris quotes one respondent in a study on anger, “It wakes me up and makes me feel very much alive”. In a study on Intermittent Explosive Disorder, characterized by extreme and disproportionate anger, of the twenty-four subjects interviewed, eighteen reported relief with their aggressive acts and eleven reported feeling pleasure (McElroy et al. 1998).

Special cases aside, it seems safe to say that anger is unpleasant for most of us most of the time and so anger in general is bad in this respect. This does not, however,

89 I will also not rely on other notions, like the Two Truths (Tibetan: bden pa gnyis), Emptiness (Tibetan: stong pa nyid), and Karma, that are also taken to be central to Buddhist systems of thought (for those not familiar with Buddhism, the pluralization of ‘system’ is no accident!). My goal here is not exegesis of a particular Buddhist account, but to incorporate insights from Buddhism into an account of moral virtue and vice. This has the unfortunate result that I will neglect important figures like Āryadeva, who ties ethics to metaphysics more explicitly, and focus on Śāntideva, who offers arguments more easily detached from metaphysics.

124 show anger to be morally vicious. Feeling guilty when one has broken a promise or disappointed when a friend misses a promotion is virtuous even though such feelings are unpleasant to experience. Being unpleasant may make an emotion undesirable, but it does not make it morally vicious.

One need not take anger to be unpleasant, however, to claim that it is bad for us.

Many things—heroin, donuts, unprotected sex, and hitting the snooze button to name just a few—can be bad for us despite being pleasant. Perhaps, as Śāntideva suggests, anger is vicious because it is bad either for the one who gets angry (BCA VI.7-8) or the object of anger (VI.11).90

It is not obvious whether all anger is in fact bad for us or for others. There is interesting disagreement about whether or not some “healthy” anger can be good for us

James Averill (1982, 236) found that though many find anger to be unpleasant, a majority of both those who were angry (62%) and those who were the targets of anger (70%) rated episodes of anger as beneficial. Similar results have been reported by Tavris (1989),

DeAngeles (2003), and Tamir (2009).

It is important here to keep in mind that a state can be bad in many ways without be vicious. My account of how anger can be morally virtuous will not rest on how good or bad it is for either ourselves or for others. Having a large vocabulary or strong immune system may be good for us, but that does not make these traits moral virtues. Conversely, moral virtues like honesty, courage, or generosity seem no less virtuous when they turn out to be bad for us. Whether or not some anger can be pleasant or good for us does not

90 There is a small caveat in Śāntideva’s view as he does acknowledge that the anger of others can be beneficial as an opportunity to practice patience (BCA VI.111). This seems to suggest that anger can sometimes be beneficial, however this seems to be practical advice about how to deal with anger when confronted with it. There is no contradiction in offering this advice while at the same time thinking it would be better for everyone if there were no anger at all.

125 settle whether or not it can be morally virtuous. As I argued in the previous chapter, I will not take the question of whether or not anger can be virtuous to be settled by its effect on others. I will offer an account of how anger can be virtuous whether or not it is bad for us.

Anger as Irrational

Much of the discussion of anger centers on whether or not anger is warranted; for example, Charles Goodman (2009) takes this to be the central issue regarding anger. On most accounts, anger involves an attribution of responsibility to the object and so represents the object as having agency. This is present even in non-philosophical accounts; Tavris (1989, 19) calls episodes of anger “social events” that “assume meaning”. This is part of what makes anger the sort of thing that can be warranted or unwarranted. This is the key difference between being angry with a treacherous friend and a malfunctioning pen – a friend is an agent while a pen is not, so anger at the former is warranted in a way that anger at the latter is not.

The non-metaphysical form of this argument is that anger is unwarranted because people who cause harm always do so out of ignorance. This appears not only in Śāntideva

(BCA IV.35-8), but also in Epictetus, who suggests that those who harm us are like the blind, unable to tell right from wrong, and Seneca, who compares them to someone who has wandered into your field because they were lost (also infamously in Plato).91

Buddhists, who deny that persons have identities that persist through time, also forward a metaphysical version of the argument: Anger needs persons with a static identity through time to be warranted, and since such persons do not exist, all anger is

91 I am reading these figures as making philosophical claims. One may also read such claims simply as advice, suggesting a useful way of looking at things that can help to eliminate unwanted or unpleasant anger.

126 vicious because it is unwarranted.92 Śāntideva compares our anger directed at people who harm us to anger at bile and other bodily fluids that make us ill (BCA VI.22).

Prajnākarmati, in an Indian commentary on Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, says of harms caused by other people, “The suffering they inflict on others is preconditioned. Hence, they deserve sympathy and not anger” (1990, 193). A later Tibetan commentary by Gyel-

Tsap (rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen 2008, 187ff.) calls such anger irrational (Tibetan: mi rigs pa). These suggest that it is a rational failure to be angry with a person because to be warranted, the object of anger must have certain properties that living beings simply lack.

These arguments touch on a sea of complex issues: In the non-metaphycial case, the possibility of ill will and in the metaphysical case issues of agency, determinism, and personal identity.93 I will not attempt to navigate these issues here because, as I have argued in the previous chapter, warrant is insufficient for determining moral virtue and vice. Trust, equitable beliefs, blind charity, and regret can all reflect well on our moral character even when irrational. Anger, like other emotions that represent the world, may turn out to be virtuous or vicious even when unwarranted.

III. VIRTUOUS ANGER

Anger and Concern

Some types of anger, both as an immediate reaction and as a more general attitude, can be deeply connected with our cares and concerns. It is this connection that allows anger to

92 Similar skeptical challenges have been raised outside of the Buddhist context by John Doris (2009), though his focuses on a more particular conception of agency centered on rational reflection. 93 In Bommarito (2011), however, I argue that one can read Śāntideva’s arguments in a practical sense regardless of one’s position on the philosophical problems of free will and determinism.

127 reflect on our character regardless of whether or not it is pleasant, beneficial, or rational.

In what follows, I will argue that anger can manifest morally important concerns that are genuinely our own, using the example of righteous indignation. In the following section, I will respond to two challenges to this view: that anger in always an external force external to our cares and concerns and that it essentially involves concerns that are morally bad. I will not argue that there cannot be types of anger that are categorically vicious, only that some anger can be morally virtuous.

Anger is very often closely connected with our cares and concerns. Richard is angry that the Red Sox have lost the World Series because he cares about the team doing well. Julia is angry that she must work on Christmas because she cares about celebrating the holiday with her family. By contrast, someone who doesn’t care about American sports or Christian holidays is unlikely to be angry in similar situations because these things just don’t matter to her. This does not mean that caring about something always involves getting angry; a very calm person may care very deeply about politics but never get angry about it. Getting angry, however, does seem to require that one care about something.94

Concern, however, is not just a precondition for emotions like anger – anger manifests our own concerns. This is clear in cases where people flaunt their anger: Some prescriptive grammarians emphasize their anger over semicolon misuse because it shows not only an awareness and sensitivity to the rules of English grammar, but also that they are the kind of person who cares about such rules. One can see this in simple causal

94 Many philosophers and psychologists have taken anger to involve our cares or concerns. This idea can be found in Roberts (2003, 141ff.) and Frijda (2007, 123ff. and 1987, 355ff.) along with the philosophical literature focusing on the reactive attitudes beginning with Peter Strawson (1962) and continued by Allan Gibbard (1990) and R. Jay Wallace (1994).

128 terms; the grammarian’s concern for grammar rules and Julia’s concern over spending

Christmas with her family are the cause of their anger.

The nature of this caring can be difficult, if not impossible, to know. Suppose that

Simon is angry because he failed to land a promotion at his company. He may be angry for a variety of reasons: because he cares about making more money, because he cares about impressing his emotionally-distant father, because he cares about how others in the company see him, because he cares about his career proceeding in the way it is

“supposed” to proceed, because he cares about having a greater influence in the direction of the company, or any combination of these. Simon, like the rest of us, has many different cares and concerns many of which play a role in his emotional life. My claim that anger is related to our cares is not meant to suggest that there is a simple or easy answer to how to tell which cares are relevant to a person’s anger in real life.

This is also not to say that more intense anger means a greater degree of concern.

Of two students who receive a failing grade on an exam, we cannot know that one cares more about his grades simply because he is angrier. Many factors can affect the intensity of anger: One student might be less angry because he expected to fail, while the other thought he would pass with flying colors. One might be angrier because he is exhausted and over-caffeinated or because his parents are currently getting a divorce. More anger can be the result of more concern, but it is not always.

The cares and concerns that anger involves can often be moral in nature. Our anger at the carelessness of a drunk driver can manifest a concern for safety (often both of others on the road and the drunk driver). Anger at government censorship can manifest

129 a concern for free speech. Anger at political corruption and prejudiced laws can manifest a concern for fairness and racial equality.

Anger is by no means the only way such concern can manifest, but when it does manifest moral concern it reflects well one’s moral character. Earlier I mentioned a stereotypical view of moral exemplars like Mother Teresa as calm and free from anger.

This seems true with regards to anger born of selfish and trivial concerns, but not of anger that manifests moral concern. Consider Mother Teresa’s own report about feelings of anger and frustration:

Am I ever angry or frustrated? I only feel angry sometimes when I see waste, when things that we waste are what people need, things that would save them from dying. Frustrated? No, never. (Teresa 1996, 385)

The anger Mother Teresa admits to experiencing does not make her a morally worse person because it is quite different from the anger we experience when waiting in a traffic jam or when someone insults us. This anger is rooted not in selfish concerns but in care for the wellbeing of others – this is why such anger not only fails to detract from her moral character, but reflects well on it.

In the following section I will examine a particular kind of virtuous anger, righteous indignation. Righteous indignation, I’ll argue, is a kind of anger that manifests morally good cares and concerns and so reflects well on one’s moral character and that it can do so independently of overt behavior.

Selfish Anger and Righteous Indignation

If anger seems to be vicious in general, it is because it is very often self-centered. If you try to recall the last time you were angry, it was likely the result of either a personal insult or of not getting what you wanted when you wanted it. It is revealing that these are the primary methods that psychologists use when they want to reliably induce anger for study

130 (see Tavris 1989, 165). Many theorists claim that all anger is ego-centric in some way, that it requires a perceived harm to you and yours. Ben-Ze’ev (2000, 381) describes it as a response to a perceived harm to you or what you care about and Śāntideva (see BCA

VI.62-3) takes anger to be based on self-grasping. Much anger is self-regarding in that it grows out of our concern for our own reputations and the satisfaction of our own desires.

When a colleague makes me look foolish at a conference, I get angry because it conflicts with a particular image I have of myself as intelligent, an image I like quite a bit. There is something selfish about the focus on my own reputation and Śāntideva and Gabriele

Taylor (1975, 80) rightly locate the viciousness of many cases of anger there.

The type of anger discussed by Śāntideva, pratigha (Tibetan: khong khro) can be categorically vicious in just this way. Pratigha is anger rooted in self-concern and insofar as we take selfish concerns to be morally bad, pratigha is vicious by manifesting such concerns. But, as I will argue, though pratigha is one type of anger, not all anger is pratigha.

Some anger is vicious because it manifests a self-centered orientation, but this does not make all anger vicious. As Taylor herself points out (1975, 397), self- importance and contempt for others can result in a failure to become angry. An arrogant teacher might not get angry with his students because he doesn’t put any weight on the opinions of “stupid kids”. A particularly self-centered person can fail to get angry at personal slights because he rarely places weight on anything others say at all. Anger can manifest self-centered concerns, but so can its absence.

More importantly, anger is also not always self-regarding. We can be angry because of harms suffered by others not related to us. Contrary to Aristotle’s account

131 (Rhetoric 1380b25), we can be angry with those who are far away or dead. When my father reads about a gang rape in Delhi, he becomes very angry, even though he has never been to India and has no personal connection to the victim. Reading accounts of

American slavery can make one’s blood boil, despite the fact that all involved are long dead. This is close to what Peter Strawson calls ‘indignation’ – a “vicarious attitude” where “one’s own interest and dignity are not involved” (1962, 84).

I will use ‘indignation’ in a slightly different sense from Strawson. While it is more independent from our own interests than anger rooted in frustration or pride, it is not completely independent of our own interest and dignity. I will use the term to refer to anger that stems from a concern for rights, justice, or fairness. This does not mean that indignation cannot involve one’s own interests or dignity. Though John Rawls famously pointed out that justice involves bracketing our personal interests in many ways, this does not mean, that it is completely independent of one’s own interests. Other philosophers, notably Taylor (1975, 90), have also thought that indignation can be felt on one’s own behalf. After all, my concern that everyone be treated fairly entails a concern that I myself am also treated fairly. I am, after all, a person too.95

It may be objected here that I am begging the question by defining indignation as a type of anger. Taking indignation to be a type of anger is not, however, such a controversial assumption: it fits well not only with colloquial English usage, but with empirical research on emotions as well. After all, indignation shares many of the features

I used to earlier to characterize anger: It is in an involuntary mental state, it is directed at

95 For more on this see Thomas Hill’s “Servility and Self-respect” (1991) where he highlights the moral importance of a concern for one’s own rights. The Buddhist version of this point would be to note that a concern for the suffering of all sentient beings entails a concern for what would conventionally be called “my” suffering since “I” am also a sentient being.

132 an object, it involves concern (in this case for justice), and it has a cognitive element (one must represent an injustice to feel indignation). Like anger, indignation is can be an immediate, episodic reaction or a long-term attitude. I can be indignant about how unfairly this meeting right now is being run or indignant for years at how my grandfather mistreated my brother. The bodily reactions of the episodic kind are quite similar to anger

(increased heart rate, sweating, etc) and the bodily stress of the long-term variety is also similar (compare the relief felt after the end of each). Indignation seems to be a type of anger in everyday speech – the sentence “He’s not angry, he’s indignant” sounds a lot like “He doesn’t believe it, he knows it” or “It’s not a car, it’s a Lamborghini”.96

Philosophers, like Robert Roberts (2003, 215), Robert Solomon (2007, 40), and Jesse

Prinz (2004, 53), all accept indignation as a type of anger, as do researchers like Paul

Ekman, who calls indignation “self-righteous anger” (2008, 116) and “anger about the mistreatment of someone” (1997, 191). Though these theorists all differ from my particular use, they all accept indignation as a specific type of anger.

Indignation, then, is anger that manifests a concern for rights or justice.97 Anger that manifests a concern for rights is not always morally virtuous and need not be moral at all. A member of the aristocracy in a feudal country, for example, may feel indignation because her legal right to take the property of her subjects has been denied. Or suppose I am a member of a club with inegalitarian rules that favor me, say I get an extra portion at dinner. When I am denied a second helping of steak, I may become indignant because the

96 If you don’t trust my intuitions about English usage, consider Jane Austen’s use of the terms in Pride and Prejudice, which implies that indignation is a type of anger: “When she remembered the style of his address, she was still full of indignation; but when she considered how unjustly she had condemned and upbraided him, her anger was turned against herself; and his disappointed feelings became the object of compassion.” Austen (1813/1996, 192 emphasis added). 97 Notice that pratigha is very different from indignation, though both are types of anger.

133 rights bestowed on me by the rules of the club have been denied, though I have no moral right to more food than anyone else.

Righteous indignation, then, is not a redundant phrase – to count as righteous, indignation must be anger that manifest concern for moral rights. Such indignation manifests concerns for the wellbeing of others and for fairness and so reflects well on one’s moral character. To feel righteous indignation over human trafficking is virtuous because it manifests concern for the rights and wellbeing of others, a morally important concern.

Those who condemn all anger can have a difficult time explaining why righteous indignation is vicious. Consider Plutarch’s attempt in his “On the Avoidance of Anger”:

… anyone who is commonly susceptible to anger because of genuine righteous indignation must rid himself of the excessive, unmitigated part of his anger, along with his overconfidence in the people he comes across. (2008, 65)

Someone who experiences such indignation must get rid of not the emotion itself, but the excessive part and his overconfidence, neither of which seem essential to the emotion.

When confronted with reliable evidence of great evils, intense indignation reveals that one cares about moral goodness. Consider the story of Elie Wiesel, reported by Martha

Nussbaum:

Wiesel was a child in one of the Nazi death camps. On the day the Allied forces arrived, the first member of the liberating army he saw was a very large black officer. Walking into the camp and seeing what was there to be seen this man began to curse, shouting at the top of his voice. As the child Wiesel watched, he went on shouting and cursing for a very long time. And the child Wiesel thought, watching him, now humanity has come back. Now, with that anger, humanity has come back. (1994, 403)

Nussbaum concludes, “In circumstances where evil prevails, anger is an assertion of concern for human wellbeing and human dignity.” The officer’s indignation at the horrors he discovered manifests morally important concerns for human life and dignity and so reflects well on his moral character. Plutarch’s suggestions do not seem to apply in

134 the face of such blatant evil. The soldier seems neither to be overconfident not does his anger seem excessive.

Wiesel’s anger is good in part because it let Elie know that humanity had returned. But his anger would be virtuous even if he were unable to express it, perhaps because there was still danger of being shot by enemy soldiers. Someone who sees photos of the horrors of the holocaust today can feel the same righteous indignation without expressing it – such feelings still manifest morally important concerns and reflect well on one’s moral character.

It is hard to find pure cases of righteous indignation in real life. Non-moral anger and righteous indignation often mix and can be hard to distinguish.98 Consider an example from everyday life. I am waiting in line at a crowded grocery store and someone intentionally cuts in front of me. I feel what could rightly be described as indignation – I am angry because someone knowingly did something unfair and did not respect my rights. My indignation manifests a concern for fairness, a morally important concern, albeit on a small scale. That is not, however, all that it manifests. It also manifests everyday non-moral anger. It manifests personal, non-moral concerns too: the frustration that I am disadvantaged and inconvenienced; now I will get home later and, even worse, I have been personally insulted!

Contrast this case with how I am apt to feel if this person intentionally cut in front of the person in the line next to me. I would still be indignant, but nowhere near as much as if it were to happen to me. So it looks like when someone does cut in front of me, this

98 It may be objected here that the mere fact that anger and indignation are conceptually distinct undermines the claim that indignation is a type of anger. This, however, overlooks that fact that all subclasses are conceptually distinct from their parent class. The concept of a pug is distinct from the concept of a dog, but this does not mean that a pug is not a kind of dog.

135 small amount of anger is genuine indignation that manifests morally relevant concerns.

The rest is simply run-of-the-mill anger that does not manifest morally important concerns and so is not morally virtuous.99 Self-regarding anger and righteous indignation often mix and when they do, it is only virtuous to the extent that one has genuine righteous indignation.

It may be objected here that perhaps the affective aspect of indignation makes such morally good concerns less effective in some ways: less pleasant or less able to be directed in useful ways. To what extent the affective aspect is pleasant or useful is an empirical question and liable to vary greatly between individuals. Some people may be held back by their feelings of indignation while others may be empowered and motivated by it (more on this later). For now, recall that whether or not it is useful, pleasant, or beneficial, righteous indignation can manifest morally good concerns and so reflect well on one’s moral character. Anger can be bad in this way, by influencing behavior but it can be virtuous without any associated behaviors – someone who is completely paralyzed can feel righteous indignation without overt behavior at all.

Perhaps, however, indignation involves some danger to moral concern itself.

Righteous indignation, even if virtuous, can still be morally dangerous. Indignation can change how we relate to the object; when I have righteous indignation at a CEO who embezzled the retirement money of his employees, I am in danger of coming to see him only as a perpetrator of injustice. I run the risk of no longer relating to him as a full- blooded human. Barbra Clayton (2006, 148), interpreting Śāntideva, calls anger a “root- cutting fault” for this reason; in changing how we relate to the object of our indignation, it jeopardizes the very source of our compassion. Martha Nussbaum (1994, 424) offers a

99 This example is inspired by Śāntideva, BCA VI.62-3.

136 similar criticism of indignation: It expresses and reinforces contempt for the object and a blindness to our own faults. This change in relation to the object can, and for many of us often does, accompany righteous indignation, but it is not an essential part if it.

It is important here to distinguish moral theory from practical advice. Buddhists and Stoics are often in the business of offering practical advice. When Seneca writes, “it is easier to banish dangerous passions than to rule them” (De Ira, I.7) he is giving good advice – we should be careful of anger because it has the power to carry us away. But being dangerous is not the same as being vicious. Spending time with friends that are a bad influence on me may be dangerous, it may be easier for me to avoid them altogether, but that does not mean spending time with them is in itself vicious.

Indignation does not necessarily bring contempt with it and the criticism partially rests on assumptions about how many emotions we can hold in our hearts at once. A virtuous person may feel indignation when confronted with injustice, but that will not be the only emotion she feels. When a parent must punish a child or when we must rebuke a friend, most sensitive people feel anger over the transgression, regret of not having done more to prevent it, sadness at the pain the punishment or rebuke will cause, and hopeful that such a situation will not occur again. A virtuous person may well feel both indignation and compassion; Christians advocate something similar with the familiar

“hate the sin, love the sinner” advice. One does not rule the other out, rather both express important concerns.

137 IV. VIRTUOUS ANGER: TWO CHALLENGES

So far, I have argued that some types of anger can count as virtuous by manifesting one’s moral cares and concerns. In this section I will respond to two objections to this account.

This first is that all anger, by its very nature, entails desires or concerns that are morally bad, particularly the desire for revenge and selfish concerns. The second is that anger, by its very nature, is a pathological force that is external to our cares and concerns and so cannot be a manifestation of them. I will argue that though anger can often have these features, this is not true of all anger.

Anger and the Desire to Harm

A common assumption about anger is that it entails not only the representation of a wrong and the attribution of responsibility to the object of anger, but also a desire to harm or exact revenge. This aspect is built into many accounts of anger. Aristotle’s anger

(Greek: orgē) involves a desire for revenge. The Buddhist notion (Sanskrit: pratigha,

Tibetan: khong khro) is also often defined in a way that includes a desire to harm the object of our anger; Jamgön Kongtrül’s (Tibetan: ‘Jam mgon kong sprul) definition, for example, includes having a “hostile or cruel frame of mind”.100 This is also found in more modern definitions of anger; Oakley includes “… the desire to retaliate against the offender.” (1992, 15) as does Ben-Ze’ev:

The urge to attack is essential to anger, even if it is expressed in a nonstandard aggressive act. In anger we want to personally punish the other person who is seen as deserving of punishment. (2000, 384)

100 This is my translation of the phrase dmigs te kun nas mnar sems pa; his full definition reads “gnod byed sems can dang gnod pa sdug bsngal dang gnod pa'i rkyen dug mtshon sogs la dmigs te kun nas mnar sems pa”.

138 On these accounts, my anger essentially involves a desire that I exact revenge, punishment, or harm. Other accounts, such as Roberts (2003, 204), I can simply desire that the offender be punished, perhaps by others.101 What these accounts agree on, however, is that anger entails a desire to harm the object of our anger.

If this is indeed the case, there seems to be a simple argument to show that this kind of anger is vicious:

P1) Anger entails a desire to harm the perceived offender. P2) Any emotion that involves a desire to harm another is (at least partially) vicious. ----- C) All anger is (at least partially) vicious.

The truth of the second premise hinges on a dispute about retributive justice: Is the desire to harm another always vicious or is it (at least sometimes) acceptable? It might seem plausible to some that the desire to harm a pedophile or a mass murderer can reflect well on one’s moral character. I will not, however, defend this claim.102 Instead, I will deny the first premise by suggesting that not all anger requires a desire to harm someone.

It is important to note that this argument does not need to rely on harmful behavior. One might take the desire to harm itself to be vicious; someone who never harms others but spends all day stewing in their desire to murder seems morally worse even though they do not actually harm others.

Not all accounts of anger see a desire to harm as a necessary condition – it is, for example, absent in the account offered by Nico Frijda (1987, 217ff.). This is consistent with everyday experience. Consider some common cases of anger that seem to lack a desire to harm or punish anyone. Alex gets angry with her father for constantly

101 Though strictly speaking, Roberts characterizes this desire as the result of anger. He does, however, seem to take it to be strongly linked with anger. 102 Aquinas, for example, accepts that anger involves a desire for revenge but claims that revenge may be desired “both well and ill” (Summa Q.158).

139 interrupting her while she is speaking. Tina is angry with her husband for driving too fast and not carefully enough. Seth is angry with his childhood friend Julie for staying with her abusive boyfriend. We naturally apply to term anger to these cases, but they do not involve a desire to harm, punish, or exact revenge. This does not mean there is no desire present, it is just not a desire for harm or revenge. Alex does not desire to hurt or punish her father, she just wants him to shut up and let her talk already. Tina does not want to harm her husband, in fact her anger stems from a desire for his safety. Seth does not want revenge, he is angry with Julie for refusing to remove herself from harm.

Aside from the everyday examples I’ve offered, there is some empirical evidence that the desire to harm or get revenge is not a necessary component of all anger: A study of American men and women by James Averill found that when subjects reported feeling angry, many (82%) reported an impulse to verbal aggression, while far fewer (40%) reported an impulse to physical aggression. In fact, a desire to harm another was “… less common than the desire to talk things over, either with the instigator (in 59% of the episodes) or with a neutral third party (in 52% of the episodes).” (1983, 1148). A stubborn theorist will, of course, insist that the subjects are simply incorrect about whether or not they are really angry, about what their own impulses are, or both. These data, however, do suggest that a desire to harm others is not generally taken to be a necessary condition of anger.

This is not to say that anger never manifests a desire to harm others, only that it need not. Much of the anger we experience in everyday life does not involve a desire for harm or retribution, only that things turn out the way we expected or wished. An angry manager might simply desire that his employees arrive to work on time for once, an

140 angry sports fan may simply want the Tigers to get to the playoffs, and an angry computer user may simply want his new software to work the way it is supposed to work.

Anger involves a variety of desires, many of which do not involve the desire to harm others.

Anger as a Pathological Intruder

Central to the account I am offering is the idea that anger can manifest our deeply held moral cares and concerns. This picture of anger is in contrast with those who see it as essentially pathological. On this view, anger is more like cancer or a brain tumor; it is an external intruder that no more manifests our cares and concern than a seizure or the flu does.

This is often cast in terms of control; many Buddhist texts, for example

Visuddhimagga (IX.15) and the Kodhana Sutta (AN VII.60), refer to falling “prey to anger” and being “ruled by anger”. This view characterizes anger as an external force that takes over our minds and clouds our reason. The Dhammapada, one of the most famous

Buddhist texts, claims:

Whoever controls his anger, Is like a true charioteer. In command of the rolling chariot And not just holding the reins. (17.2, Ananda Maitreya trans.)

Here anger is cast as an external force that robs us of our control. This view is not unique to Buddhism; Plutach in his “On the Avoidance of Anger” offers the image of a child struggling to carve with a knife when his father takes it and easily completes the task.

Like the child, says Plutarch, anger leaves us unable to be in control, unable to achieve our ends (2008, 55). Seneca offers a similar charge against anger: “Reason herself, who holds the reins, is only strong while she remains apart from the passions” (De Ira I.7).

141 Anger is vicious because it is an irrational (or at least non-rational) force that robs us of our self-control, making us unable to accomplish our goals. Control here need not refer only to our overt actions, but also to control over our mental lives as well. It is not clear, however, that anger is never useful for achieving our ends or that it must rob us of our control.

This is not quite fair to anger as some ends are better achieved through being angry such as fending off an aggressive bully or making it through the last mile of a marathon.103 Malcolm X saw political ends like justice and equality as being, at least in many cases, aided by anger:

When I was in Africa, I noticed some of the Africans got their freedom faster than others. Some areas of the African continent became independent faster than other areas. I noticed that in areas where independence had been gotten, someone got angry. And in the areas independence had not been achieved yet, no one was angry … Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change." (1965, 107)

According to Malcolm X’s observations in Africa, goals like freedom and political change are better achieved though anger. If this strikes you as too anecdotal, research

Maya Tamir (Tamir et al. 2008 and Tamir 2009) suggests that angry subjects performed better on “confrontational tasks” such as a computer game where the object is to defeat enemies.

Being an obstacle to achieving our ends is one way anger might be bad, but it is not always an obstacle in this way. It is also not clear that anger always robs us of our control; consider Martin Luther’s description of his experience of anger:

103 William Hazlitt, in his “On the Pleasure of Hating”, makes a similar case for hate: “… without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn into a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men.” (1826/2004, 105).

142 I never work better than when I am inspired by anger; when I am angry, I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart. (1566/2004, 206).104

Luther does not talk of falling prey to anger, but rather being inspired by it. He is not ruled by anger, but aided by it – he is more in control, less distracted and less tempted. If he were describing the effects of a drug, it would be used as a study aid by over- ambitious undergraduates and not those seeking to “tune out” and lose control.

Even if anger, in general, lessens our self-control and frustrates our goals, this does not mean it cannot manifest our deepest cares and concerns. There are two claims I wish to deny: The first is that mental states that reduce our behavioral control can never manifest our cares and are always best described as external intruders. The second is that mental states that are themselves involuntary cannot manifest our cares and concerns.

Simply put: not everything that reduces or limits our control is an unwelcome intruder unrelated to what we care about.

Harry Frankfurt (1988, 86) famously described of what he termed ‘volitional necessity’ – when a person is unable to act contrary to her deepest convictions. Frankfurt cites Martin Luther’s famous declaration “Here I stand; I can do no other”. In this situation, Luther has less control, he cannot help but be compelled to act the way he does, but his lack of control is not a result of an external intruder but of his deepest convictions.

Similarly, I might have less control over my behavior because I am compelled by compassion to help someone who has slipped on the ice in a parking lot. Even though it lessens my control, my compassion is not simply pathological; it is a result of a concern for others that is my own.

104 This is from his Table Talk No.318.

143 One can be in a similar situation with regards to our emotions: Upon seeing an unjust law enacted or hearing of a person being tortured one might feel righteous indignation out of emotional necessity. Someone may find herself saying, like Luther did,

“Here I feel; I can feel no other.” Such a feeling may force itself upon us and still manifest our deepest cares and concerns.

To think of anger as an external intruder and “cool” reasoning as truly our own is a deeply misleading picture of human psychology. Consider Gita, a woman married to a man with a long-term pattern of abusive behavior.105 Deep down Gita wants badly to run away, not only for her own sake, but for the benefit of her young children. But sadly, for years she has calmly reasoned that she should stay with her violent husband.

One might think that if Gita leaves her husband in a moment of anger that it is her anger and not her calm reasoning that give her more control, that allows her to do what she truly wants to do. But whether or not you think that Gita’s anger gave her more control, her anger manifests what she really cares about – her wellbeing and the wellbeing of her children – in a way that her calm reasoning did not. It is her calm and emotionless rationalizations that seem pathological and removed from what she cares about and her anger that manifests her deepest concerns. Regardless of what Gita actually does, her anger manifests her deepest concerns – her anger would manifest her deepest concerns even if she were on her deathbed reflecting on her relationship with a long-dead husband.

In real life anger is not always pathological and disconnected from our concerns.

The anger of Mother Teresa, Gita, and Malcolm X’s African freedom fighters is quite different from the genuinely pathological anger of someone with Intermittent Explosive

105 Here I am adapting an example from Nomy Arpaly (2004, 44) for my own purposes.

144 Disorder resulting from a lesion on their prefrontal cortex. Anger that is the result of a psychological disorder is pathological and does not reflect on one’s moral character because it is independent of the person’s moral concern. Not all anger is like this and when it manifests morally good cares and concerns it reflects well on one’s moral character.

It is worth noting that though anger can sometimes be a manifestation of care, this does not vindicate the dubious claims of abusive husbands that their rage shows how much they care. Everyone knows that the clichéd I-hit-her-because-I-love-her excuse is complete nonsense because it is easy to see that what the abuser really cares about is control and entitlement over another person. Lundy Bancroft, a therapist specializing in domestic abuse, makes this very clear:

An abusive man often tries to convince his partner that his mistreatment of her is proof of how deeply he cares, but the reality is that abuse is the opposite of love. The more a man abuses you, the more he is demonstrating that he cares only about himself. He may feel a powerful desire to receive your love and caretaking, but he only wants to give love when it’s convenient … (2002, 60).

The abuser’s excuse is bullshit not because anger cannot manifest concern, but the kind of anger associated with abuse manifests an altogether different concern – for domination, control, and self-gratification.106

Anger in the Virtuous Person

There are, of course, many ways in which anger can be morally vicious: it can manifest contempt, a desire to harm others, excessive concern for oneself, and indifference to the wellbeing of others. Anger in the sense of pratigha is, by definition, rooted in excessive self-concern and so can be categorically vicious for this reason. Yet not all anger has these features and, in particular, righteous indignation can be virtuous by manifesting

106 See also Ben Ze’ev and Goussinsky (2008).

145 morally good cares and concerns and it need not rule out other morally valuable emotions. The sort of anger that can be morally virtuous, such as righteous indignation, is a very particular kind and quite rare.107

This concern can be manifested as anger even if anger is never expressed as overt behavior. Someone who feels pratigha, anger rooted in selfish concerns, is vicious even if he never expresses such anger in overt action. It is not enough for an ideally virtuous person to avoid acting on selfish anger, it is not the sort of emotion she will experience at all. Similarly, it reflects well on someone’s moral character to feel righteous indignation even if they cannot act on such feelings, say because they are paralyzed and unable to act at all.

There may, of course, still be a variety of non-moral reasons to avoid many types of anger. It seems no accident that Buddhism and Stoicism are both traditions that place a high value on tranquility and peace of mind. Being angry involves agitation and so is an enemy of tranquility; this seems to be behind at least some of Śāntideva’s advice:

So whether friend or foe, If you see someone do wrong, Think, “This is because of conditions” And you'll become happy. (BCA VI.33)

Here, the reason to avoid anger is not because it is immoral, but because it gets in the way of our happiness. Seneca seems to have a similar notion of ‘vice’ in mind when he calls anger vicious: “Virtue alone is lofty and sublime, nor is anything great which is not at the same time.” (De Ira, I.27). But tranquility is not the same as moral virtue. Recall

Mengzi’s gentleman who cannot stand to see animals butchered and so keeps his distance

107 It is for this reason that the Dalai Lama draws a distinction between anger and hatred; he says, “[Anger], as it is understood in English, can be positive in very special circumstances. These occur when anger is motivated by compassion or when it acts as an impetus or a catalyst for a positive action. In such rare circumstances anger can be positive, whereas hatred can never be positive.” (1999, 7)

146 from the kitchen (Mengzi 1A7); he manages to become more tranquil but not morally better.

In arguing that righteous indignation can be virtuous I do not mean to suggest that

I side with Aristotle (and perhaps Hume) in claiming that the virtuous person must feel righteous indignation. I have only argued that righteous indignation, when experienced, can be virtuous. I have not argued that all virtuous people will feel righteous indignation.

I have not argued this because I think it is false. Righteous indignation involves morally important cares and concerns, and so is virtuous. Having those cares and concerns, however, does not mean one will experience righteous indignation. Which emotions we experience is a complex matter involving brain chemistry, culture, and individual temperament. An Allied soldier who does not feel angry when he discovers a Nazi death camp may care about human suffering just as much as the one who gets intensely indignant. Perhaps this soldier is too stunned to feel anything at all, or perhaps his concern is expressed in sadness, despair, or cold scorn. Righteous indignation is virtuous, but it absence is not always vicious.

To ask “How indignant will a morally good person be?” is a bit like asking “How animated will a good conversationalist be?” or “How colorful will a good painting be?”

There is no correct answer to these questions because there are a plurality of ways to be good in this respect, many of which will depend on one’s culture and personality. Some paintings are good without any color at all, while other equally good paintings are are full of color. Some people are good conversationalists by being very animated and others are good conversationalists quietly engaging their partner. Though all morally virtuous people will have certain cares and concerns, in some this will manifest as indignation and

147 in others it will manifest in other ways. Virtuous people are not clones of one another and being a morally good person, like a good painting or a good conversationalist, admits of a variety of modes.

There are, however, some constraints on the duration and intensity when a virtuous person does experience righteous indignation. Many factors affect the intensity and duration of indignation and most of them are not morally relevant. The mere fact that

Zach’s righteous indignation is more intense or longer lasting than Tim’s does not mean that Zach is more virtuous; it only makes him more virtuous if the difference in intensity manifests a greater degree of concern. All types of anger can be more intense for a variety of reasons – because it occurs at the end of a frustrating day, during a heat wave, or when one is under-caffeinated. Increases in the duration or intensity of indignation only make one more virtuous if they manifest a greater degree of concern for morally important factors.

Thomas Hurka (2001, 83ff.) has argued that one’s attitude should be proportionate to the intrinsic goodness or badness of the object; one’s indignation should be in proportion to the severity of the injustice. Seneca offers a practical reason to avoid matching one’s anger to the degree of injustice: “If you want the wise man to be as angry as the atrocity of men's crimes requires, he must not merely be angry, but must go mad with rage.” (Seneca, De Ira II.9). If we proportion our indignation to the intrinsic badness of injustices, all of us living on this plant should be completely livid all of the time.

Practical considerations aside, there is something right about Hurka’s suggestion.

Particularly, there is something vicious about being overly indignant about comparatively small injustices. Many times this manifests that the anger is because the small injustice

148 was done to me or someone I am close with. This is not always the case: I once met a student who was intensely indignant about sports teams using Native American mascots.

She was not herself Native American, and was not particularly indignant about other, more serious, injustices Native Americans continue to suffer. Assuming that her indignation was a result of her concern for justice, the intensity of her indignation seems to be less virtuous because it suggests that she fails to sufficiently care about a wide range of serious injustices.

It is better, then, to say that it is our concern that should be proportionate to the degree of injustice, not the intensity of anger itself. After all, there are not only cultural difference regarding what counts as an “appropriate” degree of anger but factors that affect the intensity of anger that do not reveal anything about one’s moral character.

Nevertheless, it is fact of life that we humans have a limited emotional capacity – our emotions are not unlimited in their duration and intensity. As a result we are forced to

“pick our battles” as the saying goes, but feeling very intensely about an excessively narrow range of injustices usually manifests a lack of concern for the many important cases that fall outside that range. The virtuous person not only cares about morally important things, but about a significantly wide range of morally important things – this diversity of care and our emotional limitations constrain the intensity and duration of the emotional manifestations of these cares.

Anger covers a wide variety of emotional states some of which are virtuous and others vicious. What distinguishes them is the moral concern that is manifested: Pratigha manifests a morally bad selfish concern, while righteous indignation manifests morally good concern for others. To simply ask if anger is virtuous or vicious is to ask a question

149 that is too broad. Even though righteous indignation and Pratigha are both kinds of anger, they involve very different cares and concerns. Though these emotions are commonly associated with a variety of overt behaviors, the emotion itself is distinct from its expression in act and so can manifest such moral concern without being expressed in action.

VIRTUOUS FEAR

Fear in Moral Philosophy

Fear has not been treated well by modern moral philosophy. It is often assumed to be morally irrelevant and therefore not worthy of discussion. John Rawls in his Theory of

Justice, for example, explicitly claims that fear and anxiety are “not moral feelings”

(1971/1999, 421). When fear is discussed by moral philosophers, it is usually as an obstacle to (and sometimes necessary for) courage. Particularly for virtue ethicists, this is the moral relevance of fear: Aristotle (NE III.7), Philippa Foot (1977/2002, 8ff.),

Rosalind Hursthouse (1980/1981, 66ff.), André Compte-Sponville (1996, 48ff.), Julia

Driver (2001, 33ff.), Thomas Hurka (2001,103ff.), Robert Adams (2006, 180ff.), and

Julia Annas (2011, 98ff.) all discuss fear primarily (if not only) in the context of courage.

The few other times fear is discussed outside of this context, it is not seen in a particularly positive light. When Nietzsche called fear the “mother of morals” he did not mean it as a compliment.108 Kant was very clear that actions done from the motive of fear have no moral worth (see Groundwork 4:440, Metaphysics of Morals 5:129). This view

108 Beyond Good and Evil, 201 (1886/1989, 113).

150 has been accepted by Christine Korsgaard (1996, 13) and incorporated into the moral stages of Lawrence Kohlberg (1981) who makes fear of punishment the lowest stage in moral development.

This isn’t to say that nothing positive has been said about fear. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev

(2000, 488) notes that fear can be evolutionarily adaptive, helping us to better survive and reproduce. A study by Maya Tamir and Brett Ford (2009) found that participants preferred to feel fear when they thought it would be beneficial, such as when playing a game that required avoiding enemies. The fact that fear can be useful for survival or preferred in some situations does not, however, make it a moral virtue. Many moral vices can have evolutionary benefits: If it turned out (and it may well be the case!) that being dishonest or cruel was good for our survival and reproduction, it would not make them virtues. Having a strong immune system is evolutionarily adaptive, but it does not make one a morally better person.

Others have taken fear to be morally important for its role in preventing wrongdoing. In his Republic (465a), Plato calls fear and shame “guardians” that prevent wrongdoing.109 A similar account is offered by some Buddhist philosophers who also highlight the value of fear and shame (Pali: ottappa and hiri respectively) in preventing wrongdoing. In Lokapala Sutta, the Buddha says “… these two bright principles protect the world. What are the two? Shame and fear of wrongdoing.” (AN 2.9, see also

Visuddhimagga VIV.142).

The fact that a state prevents or reduces immoral actions, though perhaps morally relevant, is insufficient to make it virtuous. A state may be good in this way without

109 Elsewhere (Euthyphro 12b-c) Plato suggests that fear is the more fundamental of these because we can have fear with out shame but not shame without fear.

151 being virtuous: Someone’s squeamishness may well make him far less likely to murder because he finds the idea “gross”. Someone else’s snobbery might make her less likely to steal because she sees theft as a low-class activity. Even though these traits prevent their possessors from committing a range of moral wrongs, they do not change our estimation of their moral characters. There is nothing morally virtuous about being squeamish or snobby. We want to see how fear itself, independent of its effects on our actions, can be virtuous or vicious.

It will be helpful to look to the Buddhist tradition, where the discussion of fear is not unilaterally positive or negative. In the dedication of his Bodhicaryāvatāra (BCA

X.21), Śāntideva expresses the wish that all beings be free from fear. In fact, one of the stated benefits of the spirit of enlightenment (bodhicitta) is that it overcomes great fears

(BCA I.13). Fear, particularly the fear of death, is often associated with attachment to oneself and the world, the root cause of all suffering (see BCA VIII.17-19, 134 and

Dhammapada 16.4-5). Elsewhere, however, fear is talked about more positively: The

Dhammapada suggests that it is good to fear the right things:

Some are fearful where there is nothing to fear, And are fearless where there is much to fear. Holding such false views, They go to a sorrowful state. (22.12, Ananda Maitreya trans.)

In many passages a fear of the suffering involved with the ordinary way of seeing the world is seen as a good thing. Śāntideva frequently describes such fear in a positive way - see BCA V.20, 32, VI.71, VII.31 (see also Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga I.7 and 43).110

To take this diversity simply as an inconsistency in the tradition would be a mistake – fear is not entirely virtuous or vicious. What we need is a principled way to

110 See also Maria Heim (2012) who notes that apprehension, a type of fear, is taken to be a valuable moral experience in many Pāli Buddhist sources particularly in association with ottappa (a kind of moral fear or dread).

152 explain why some fears seem to be morally relevant and others do not. It is important to emphasize that my concern is not whether or not fear can be useful for producing moral behavior or whether or not expressions of fear can be virtuous or vicious, but how fear itself can be relevant to one’s moral character.

My suggestion will be the following: Our fears manifest our cares and concerns.

When such cares and concerns are morally good, fear is virtuous and when they are bad, the fear is vicious. Similarly with fearlessness; when a failure to fear manifests a lack of morally important concerns, it is vicious. This view has roots both in Buddhist and

Catholic thinkers. Augustine (Eighty-Three Different Questions, Q.33) and Aquinas

(Summa II, Q.19) both tell us that “fear is born of love” and that fear is evil if it embodies

“worldly” love. Similarly, the Tibetan philosopher Tsongkhapa, in his Lamrim Chenmo

(LRC) writes of his spiritual and ethical ideal, the bodhisattva, that they “…do not fear mad elephants and the like in the same way as they fear bad friends” (LRC II, 91).

Fearing a mad elephant involves concern for bodily safety, while fearing bad friends involves a concern for one’s spiritual progress. I will not claim that “worldly” or “bodily” concerns are vicious. The insight I wish to take from these accounts is that we evaluate fears by the cares and concerns they manifest.

Which Fear?

Too often discussions of fear center on fear resulting from an immediate physical threat – the fear you find on the battlefield or in the jungle. These are genuine cases of fear, but only a small part of the sort of fear I am interested in. Our fears include physical dangers like snakes, spiders, and heights, but in real life we also fear many things that are not direct and immediate bodily dangers. We are afraid of being alone, commitment,

153 responsibility, rejection, a republican senate, a communist revolution, or a room full of strangers. As with anger, my discussion will focus on emotions that have an object, ignoring moods like objectless terror, dread, and anxiety. I will, however, take these objects to be quite diverse in kind, including people, objects, events, ideas, situations, to name just a few.

Like anger, fear is associated with certain bodily changes like an increased pulse rate and blood pressure, increased perspiration, trembling, clenched teeth, and rapid respiration.111 These are not necessary conditions for fear, one can be afraid without many of them, but someone who experiences low blood pressure and relaxed muscles when confronted with a dangerous situation does not experience fear in the usual sense, if at all. Theorists often distinguish between episodic and more general fear; we say that someone is afraid of spiders even when they are not currently confronted with a spider at this moment. (Ben-Ze’ev 2000 calls these non-episodic fears ‘chronic’ while Robert

Roberts 2003 calls them ‘dispositional’). My claims about which fears are virtuous and vicious will apply to both types.

Fear is also associated, in normal humans, with a variety of behaviors. The most obvious one is a tendency to flee from the perceived danger. This, however, is not always the case – we often talk of people “frozen” or “paralyzed” with fear, unable to do anything. These behaviors are not conceptually necessary for fear: One can imagine stone

Weather Watchers being afraid of the coming hurricane even though they are unable to perform any overt actions at all. In humans it is natural to talk of a paralyzed person feeling afraid of a painful treatment even though they are unable to perform behavioral

111 Davis (1987) distinguishes several types of fear, distinguishing fear of events, actions, objects, and propositions. For my purposes these can be discussed together.

154 actions. In everyday life we can talk of unexpressed fear – an interviewee might tell his friend, “I was so afraid during that job interview, but I didn’t let it show at all.” Though fear is, in general, associated with certain behaviors, I will not rely on these in my account of its virtuousness or viciousness.

Most importantly for my discussion fear involves seeing the object as in some way bad or dangerous and a desire to avoid it. Someone with a fear of commitment sees such entanglements as bad, perhaps as a danger to her freedom and feels a desire to avoid them. This does not mean that one reflectively judges the object in this way; I can be afraid of flying even though I reflectively judge it to be a safe way to travel.

David Hume (Treatise II.3.9) and, more recently, Roberts (2003, 194ff.) claim that fear requires event to be “significantly” probable. Though my claims will not rule out this condition, I wish to discuss states that have objects other than events or states of affairs. Someone who is afraid of snakes is not simply afraid of the event of meeting snakes, but the very idea of a snake gives her chills. This probability condition also seems too strong – one can fear a very, very unlikely situation provided that the outcome is bad enough. Parents do not need to think their child being kidnapped to be “significantly” probable in order to fear it.112

We must be careful not to conflate fear with rational fear. If I am afraid of something I know to be very unlikely, such as being struck by lightning, my fear may be irrational, but it is still fear. Similarly, I will include in my use of the term ‘fear’ states directed at objects we know not to exist. This includes what Kendall Walton (1990, 1997) terms ‘pseduo-fear’ – the fear we experienced in the grip of works of fiction, like horror-

112 Fear can sometimes seem essentially future-directed, but that is not the case. It can be past-directed in cases of ignorance: If I learn that my brother’s flight has crashed and someone has died, I can fear that my brother was killed in yesterday’s crash.

155 films. It also includes cases outside of works of fiction, as when a recovering Christian says that he knows Satan is not real, but still fears him. If I knew on good evidence that all of the spiders on Earth where eradicated, I would still be afraid of spiders, despite my knowledge that they no longer exist. These cases of fear are irrational, but genuine fear nonetheless.

Virtuous and Vicious Fear

Fears are intimately connected with our cares and concerns. When someone is afraid that their brand new sports car will be stolen from the parking structure, it shows that they value the car and care about keeping it.113 When I feel fear walking down a dark Detroit alley late at night, it is because I care about my safety.

This is not unique to fear but is a feature of a family of emotions that includes worry, distress, dread, shame, and some types of nervousness. Many mothers worry about their children because they care about them. It is often good for a job candidate to appear slightly nervous during a job interview because if she does not, it suggests that she doesn’t care enough about getting the job. It is revealing that in English to be ‘concerned’ about something means both to care about it and to feel anxiety over it. Though all of these emotions can be virtuous or vicious in the same way – by manifesting important cares and concerns, I will focus on the case of fear.

These self-directed fears can manifest morally important concerns. Consider Ann, who has a history of shoplifting from malls. When she learns that an important lunch will happen at a café in the mall, she becomes afraid that she will succumb to the temptation to shoplift. If her fear shows a concern that she not violate the rights of others by stealing,

113 Tsongkhapa (LRC II, 122) notes that one of the benefits of not being attached to possessions is that one no longer fears losing them.

156 it is virtuous – it reflects well on her character. If her fear manifests a concern to avoid the hassle of being caught, however, it does not reflect well on her character because a concern to avoid hassles is not morally important.

It may be objected here that it is only Ann’s desire not to shoplift that is virtuous, not the feeling of fear. Wouldn’t Ann be just as virtuous if she simply had a strong desire not to shoplift without any fear? It is important to keep in mind that I am not claiming that failure to feel fear is always vicious: If Ann fails to feel fear about the possibility of shoplifting because of the new depression medication she is on or because of a lesion on her amygdala, it does not make her morally worse. (Recall N.M. from the previous chapter who could not experience fear, but was still able to care about things).

It is also important to note that this fear reflects well on her moral character even if it does not succeed in preventing her from shoplifting. After all, Ann seems to be more virtuous than another shoplifter who is afraid only of getting caught because she doesn’t care about the rights or property of others. Ann’s fear manifests a morally good concern even if it is not effective in changing her behavior. This does not mean that Ann is perfectly virtuous, certainly she would be more virtuous if she did not shoplift at all, but her fear reveals something about her moral concern that is itself virtuous.

In many cases, however, there is a connection between our fear and what we care about. This connection is not conceptual, but a contingent, psychological link. In many everyday cases a lack of fear suggests a lack of concern: Imagine a mother who desires that her soldier return from battle safely, but does so without any trace of fear or worry

(not just without expressing fear, but without feeling any fear at all). This does not necessarily mean that she does not care about her son, but given general facts about

157 human psychology it strongly suggests that she does not care much about his safety. If she does feel fear and is manifests a concern for her son’s safety, then it reflects well on her as a mother. Similarly, if Ann’s fear reflects a concern for moral good like rights and the wellbeing of others, then it reflects well on her moral character – it is one way that her concern for morality shows itself emotionally.

The concerns associated with fear are not always self-directed. I can fear for my friend’s safety when I know that he is traveling through a dangerous area of India. I can be afraid that a colleague’s writer’s block will continue and ruin his career prospects.

These fears manifest a concern for the safety of others and the success of their projects.

Insofar as these concerns are morally important, the fears that manifest them reflect well on my moral character.

One can also have more general fears that reflect morally important concerns. A fear that the civil war in Syria will drag on for years manifests a morally good concern for the wellbeing of others – particularly, a psychologically difficult concern for a distant, and generalized group.114 Someone can fear that a proposed discriminatory law will pass, even when she herself is not a member of the marginalized group. One can be afraid that the super-wealthy will use their resources to accumulate even more of the wealth. If such fears manifest a concern for equal rights or distributive justice, they reflect well one’s character.

It is again important to notice I can have these fears even when there is nothing I can do about the situation. I cannot do anything from Rhode Island to make my friend in

India safe. Such fear could even be directed towards the past – If I haven’t heard from

114 Though as solicitations from charities often show, it is much easier for most people to feel concern for a particular individual rather than an entire group.

158 him today, I can be afraid that he has been in a car accident on his trip last night. Even creatures like stone Weather Watchers could be afraid of one of a fellow Weather

Watcher being struck by lightning. Such fears do not involve any overt behavior, but still manifest important moral concern.

This does not mean that the virtuous person must feel these fears; she may care deeply about these issues but not feel fear because of damage to part of her brain, because she is on strong medication, or because such concerns manifest as different emotions. It does mean that when fear manifests morally important concerns, it is virtuous by instantiating her moral concern.

In order to reflect poorly on one’s moral character, a failure to feel fear much manifest a lack of an important moral concern. If someone is not afraid of their daughter’s dangerous travel or of a proposed discriminatory law, it is only vicious if it their lack of fear is a result of their lack of concern. It reflects poorly on their moral character if their lack of feeling reflects a lack of moral concern. If someone is not afraid of these things not because they don’t care, but because they are on anti-anxiety medication, such medication has not made them morally vicious.

Fear can also manifest morally bad concerns. A hitman’s fear that his target will escape to safety manifests a malicious concern to harm another person and so reflects poorly on his moral character. This highlights the difference between a state being virtuous and a state simply bringing good consequences. Suppose our hitman is very afraid that his target will not suffer a painful death. This fear could make it more likely that the intended victim will escape unharmed, say because this fear makes the hitman’s shot less accurate. Though his fear produces good consequences, it reduces the chances

159 that someone will be killed, it does seem to make the hitman a morally better person. The fear, though it has good effects, manifests the malicious concerns of the hitman and so though it is vicious even though it produces good effects.

Fear can also manifest morally relevant attitudes: When at the hospital to pick up a prescription, I notice a sign instructing anyone with flu symptoms to please take a complimentary surgical mask for the protection of others. After the stranger next to me takes a mask and puts it on, I feel slight fear – I am uneasy being near him and feel a desire to avoid walking next to him. I manifest a concern for my own health, but my view of the stranger changes. This fear reflects on my character very differently than fearing for the stranger’s health. The latter involves seeing him as a person worth of care and manifests concern for his wellbeing. If my fear of getting sick involves seeing him primarily as a risk to my own health, simply as a hazard to be avoided, then I fail to have the proper attitude of concern for him. There is nothing morally bad about being concerned for your own health, however, but such fears often involve an attitude lacking morally important concerns.

Again, this fear can manifest my lack of concern for others even when it is not overtly expressed – suppose I feel such fear but outwardly stay in my seat in the waiting room and continue to flip through a magazine exactly as I would if I was not afraid. As long as my fear manifests a view of the other person simply as a rick to my own health and not as a person worthy of concern, my fear manifests a lack of moral concern and so is vicious despite being unexpressed in overt behavior.

In practice, of course, fears often manifest a variety of concerns. A leader might be concerned about the political situation in her country because she cares about keeping

160 her job, the safety of her family, how history will remember her, and promoting justice.

When I see the stranger cough and take a surgical mask, I may well feel fear for my own health and for his. Like many evaluations in life, it is possible to get partial credit. To the extent that one’s fear manifests morally good concerns, it is virtuous to that degree. To the extent that it manifests malicious concerns or a lack of morally good ones, it is vicious to that degree.

Again, this is true of irrational and unwarranted fears. If someone is afraid of widespread voter fraud because he cares deeply about justice despite little evidence that it has or will happen, his fears reflect well on him morally. Such fears may reflect poorly on him rationally, but they do not make his moral character worse. It’s hard to imagine God, when deciding whether to send him to heaven or hell, would count it against him that his fear did not rationally respond to evidence. His deep concern for justice, however, seems to count in his favor.

Frequency and Intensity

The duration and intensity of fear are only relevant to virtue and vice when they are related to the level of care. The intensity of fear is affected by a myriad of factors: expectations, proximity to the object, duration of contact, and context to name just a few.

None of these factors manifest a greater degree of concern.

This is not to say that intensity or duration is always independent of the degree of concern. Jan might worry more intensely or more frequently about her son’s safety than

Carol because she cares about her son more than Carol does. Deeper cares can manifest as more intense and frequent emotions. But this is not always the case; Jan might have

161 the emotions she does because she in fact lives in a more dangerous neighborhood or because Carol simply has a calmer temperament.

Consider cases of scrupulosity, a kind of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that centers on moral or religious matters. This often results in intense and frequent fears that one has done something evil or immoral. J.J. Keeler (2012, 85ff.) describes having a strong and inescapable fear that she has run over a pedestrian whenever she drove a car:

I was terrified I would hit someone. Sometimes, I’d hit a piece of cardboard, or a soda can, and I’d be certain that I’d just run over a human being … On occasion, I’d hit a bump in the road and my mind would tell me I ran over a black person and I would think, I’m not only a murder; I’m a racist too. (2012, 95)

It can be hard to say to what extent Keeler’s fear and anxiety is a result of moral concern and to what extent it is a result of psychological compulsion. She is concerned that she not harm pedestrians and not be racist. These are concerns and fears that most of us share.

Most of us, however, do not have a brain disorder that amplifies the intensity and frequency of these fears to an unbearable and disruptive degree.

Some descriptions of scrupulosity make it seemed far removed from one’s cares and concerns. Jennifer Traig, a Jewish person diagnosed with scrupulosity, makes light of the seeming similarity between the many particular rules of Jewish practice and

Obessive-Compulsive Disorder. She notes an important difference, however: “Orthodox

Jews are motivated by spiritual duty and rewarded by a sense of fulfillment; the scrupulous are motivated by circuitry and rewarded by chapped hands.” (2004, 34). She also notes that those suffering from scrupulosity tend to focus on one or two particular rules and ignore the rest; she writes of her own experience,

Compulsions tend to come before commandments. I could violate three or four commandments in one fell swoop. I was happy to lie to my dishonored parents while breaking the Sabbath, as long as it was in the service of getting my hands ritually clean. (2004, 35)

162 This paints her fixation as rooted less in her moral or religious cares and concerns than in a compulsive fixation on a particular rule. Fear like this may simply be compulsive ticks that happen to be dressed in moral clothes. Such fears, though intense and frequent, may manifest nothing more than the usual degree of concern filtered through the magnifying lens of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Some Problem Cases

Consider the following cases of fear:

Henry: Henry is a successful businessman who owns a large automobile company. He cares deeply about his family and their safety and for this reason is afraid of a “Jewish plot” to destroy his business and kill his children.

Giovanni: Giovanni cares for his mother very deeply and is quite concerned for her safety. Because of this, he fears that a young black man will assault her when she goes to her downtown church.

Henry and Giovanni both seem to experience fears that manifest morally good concerns – concerns for the safety of their families – but that do not seem to make them morally better. If the moral virtuousness of fear is simply a matter of the concerns it manifests, must such seemingly vicious fears count as virtuous?

The fears of those like Henry and Giovanni are unlikely to manifest solely a concern for the safety of family. If that were the case, it is unclear why the fear should be about a black assailant or a Jewish plot. If Henry’s fear really were only about his concern for his family he would be afraid of any designs to harm them. If Giovanni really cares only about his mother’s safety, then the ethnicity of the attacker should be of no consequence.

Such fears, while in part manifesting a concern for the safety of family, also manifest not only contempt for particular ethnic groups, but a view of such people as simply threats and not as fellow humans. These concerns reveal a morally objectionable

163 indifference to an entire group of people and a failure to see them as moral equals.

Insofar as such fears do manifest a concern for the wellbeing of others, they do reflect well on Henry and Giovanni. This does not mean that their fears are on balance virtuous, merely that there is something virtuous about them. Henry and Giovanni seem to be more virtuous than someone who experiences such fears solely out of racial contempt.

These concerns are not dependent upon associated behaviors. Our moral assessment of Henry and Giovanni’s fear would be the same even if both are paralyzed and unable to act on or express their fears. Even if their fear is completely internal and unexpressed, it can still manifest morally relevant concerns both good and bad. Of course, in the absence of paralysis we would expect their fears to produce some morally objectionable expressions in their behavior. Such expressions, however, are not necessary for their fears to manifest moral concerns and so are necessary to see them as virtuous or vicious.

Moral Fear

I began with the accusation that moral philosophers have ignore much of the moral importance of fear in part by addressing it primarily in the context of courage. I stand by this charge – fear is often an important part of our moral character in ways that have nothing to do with courage.

There is, however, something to be said about the moral value of courage. There is nothing morally good about overcoming fear. Bank robbers, shoplifters, and rapists may overcome fear but do not seem to be morally better for it. When overcoming fear reflects good moral character is when one overcomes morally irrelevant fears because of their moral concern. When a shy person overcomes his social fears in order to help a

164 friend get a job, he shows that he cares for his friend. When someone overcomes their fear of heights to safe a child in a burning building, it manifests their depth of concern for the wellbeing of others. As many philosophers have pointed out (see Comte-Sponville

1996, 44ff. and Hursthouse 1999, 96ff. among many others), what is important for moral virtue is why one overcomes fear.

But fear can, independently of overt action, be a mode of valuing, a manifestation of our deepest concerns. If, as Augustine suggested, “fear is born of love” then fear born of love of justice or the wellbeing of others, loves that are central to morality, reflect that one is someone who loves these things – a morally good person. Fears that reflect insufficient love for these things, or a love of evil reflect a vicious moral character – one that cares little about things of moral importance. To say that fear is born of love is not to say that where there is love, there will be fear. It is open for virtuous people to be fearless, but they are not fearless because they lack morally important concerns. One can, for example, act fearlessly while experiencing fear or act fearfully without experiencing fear. Fear itself, the inner affective experience, can manifest moral concerns (or a lack thereof) and so can count as virtuous or vicious independently intentions or overt behaviors.

165 CHAPTER V: VIRTUES OF ATTENTION

We typically think of morally good people as having a certain kind of mental life.

Included in this are certain habits of attention. A virtuous person, other things equal, will be more likely to notice benefits she receives and how her actions affect others and less likely to dwell on her own accomplishments.

Consider a now common scene in academic life: While discussing a recent paper with a student, you notice his gaze slowly lowers to something in his hands concealed just out of sight. By now you know that he is, of course, looking at his smartphone. Part of what is so infuriating about this scene is the student’s attention to his phone shows a lack of concern for you, his paper, and what you are saying – his lack of attention manifests a lack of concern.

In what follows I will argue that attention (and inattention) can be morally virtuous or vicious in the same way, by manifesting moral concern. In this way it can be virtuous or vicious even though it does not involve overt, behavioral action and often is not an action at all. In the following chapter I will give accounts of particular virtues that involve attention: gratitude, modesty, and mindfulness.

166 I. VIRTUOUS AND VICIOUS ATTENTION

Which Attention?

Attention is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon and it is not my aim to offer a comprehensive theory of attention. It will be important to distinguish attention from mere awareness. Suppose that one sunny day a philosopher, let’s call her Emma, is walking through campus and thinking very hard about the main argument of a paper she is writing. Completely focused on how her argument will go, she walks around a tree that was in her path. She was not ignorant of the tree; she did, after all, manage to avoid walking into it. At the same time, she did not pay attention to the tree – her attention was entirely focused on the argument she was working out.115 Emma's case is a simple one that illustrates the difference between what I will call awareness and attention. Emma was aware of the tree despite not paying any attention to it. One can be aware of something, can be able to respond to it, without it appearing in our conscious, reflective mind.

I will take ‘attention’ to refer to a focusing or directing of the conscious mind towards an object, a way our conscious mind is directed or captured.116 This idea has its origins in an oft-cited passage from the Principles of Psychology by William James on attention:

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. (1890/2007, 403)

James’ description simplifies things in many ways, but offers a good starting point. As

115 This example is an adapted from Arpaly and Schroeder (forthcoming). 116 Koch (2004, 163ff.) notes that most psychologists take attention and consciousness to be deeply linked. Not all accounts, however, link them so strongly; Jesse Prinz (2011, 90ff.), for example, takes attention to be a process that makes information available to working memory. I do not mean to suggest that this account of incorrect, but it is not the one I will employ in my discussion.

167 Wayne Wu (2011) points out, attention can be understood both as a state and a process; I will not appeal to this distinction in my discussion and my claims will apply to both states and processes. This is commonly noted in the cognitive science literature: James

Stazicker (2011) talks of ‘focusing’ or ‘concentrating’ our consciousness on an object and

Sebastian Watzl (2011) describes it as ‘structuring stream of consciousness’. Wayne Wu describes it as ‘phenomenal salience’ noting that when we attend to an object “the attended object is experienced as highlighted, accentuated, spotlighted, emphasized or more salient in contrast to unattended objects concurrently perceived” (2011, 94).117

Attention can involve bodily behavior, but it need not. If one thinks only of visual attention it can be tempting to see attention as bodily movement of our eyes. Cognitive scientists distinguish between overt attention, which involves bodily movement, and covert attention, which does not (see Wu 2001, 97). This is especially clear in other modalities; we do not need to move out bodies in order to attend to the phrasing of a melody or to the pain of a migraine.118 Though I will focus on covert attention, my account of how attention can be virtuous or vicious will apply to both types.

This attention is sometimes voluntary and sometimes involuntary; sometimes it is something we do, and other times something that happens to us. We can deliberately attend to the combination of flavors in a Scotch, what time it currently is, or the status of our email inbox. Our attention can also be involuntarily grabbed, regardless of our will:

By the sudden crack of thunder, the brightly colored billboard with a bikini-clad girl, or

117 Many object to the use of the spotlight metaphor when discussing attention. Like all metaphors, its accuracy depends largely on what the relevant similarities are supposed to be. Ned Bock (2010) highlights some of the weaknesses of the spotlight when applied to visual attention by noting that there can be multiple “fields” of visual attention with vague size and shape. The metaphor is not essential to the view of attention I am using here and may be discarded by those who find it confused and misleading. 118 Even visual attention can be covert; Jesse Prinz (2011, 114) points out that studies have shown that visual gaze and attention can come apart; one can gaze at one thing and attend to another.

168 the sound of a familiar song. In cognitive science these are known as top-down and bottom-up attention (see Prinz 2011, 94ff. and Koch 2004, 162). My account will explain how instances of attention of either type can count as virtuous or vicious: Voluntary, or top-down, fixation of attention is an example of covert, mental action; it is something we do, but not overt behavior. Bottom up fixation of attention is another example of an involuntary mental state that can be virtuous or vicious.

Attention, as I will use it, is primarily a way of directing our conscious minds towards some objects and away from others as when Emma attends to her argument but not to the tree in her path. This direction may be voluntary, as when I decide to attend to the weather out my window, or involuntary, as when a loud bang grabs my attention.

Ethics and Attention

Many accounts of the ethical importance of attention center on its role in moral development and in producing right action. This is central in the work of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, who claim that attention itself is sufficient for moral action and moral development.119 Part of what allows them to make these claims is their more robust definition of the term ‘attention’ – for them, attention is by definition loving and just.120

Attention in the sense of directed consciousness, however, is itself not sufficient for moral development or producing morally good behavior, but it often helps.121 Simply directing my conscious mind to suffering or generosity is unlikely to motivate me unless I already care about reducing suffering or being generous. Robert Hare, for instance,

119 For example, Weil writes, “If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” (1947/1999, 117). Murdoch echoes this claiming, “Where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking.” (1964/2001, 30 emphasis in original). 120 See Murdoch (1964/2001, 34) along with the exegesis in Swanton (forthcoming, 5). 121 As I will claim in my discussion of mindfulness, attention is not necessary for these things either.

169 explains that “… when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren’t horrified. They’re absorbed.”122 No amount of attending to a person in need will make the psychopath motivated to help; he simply doesn’t care about such things.

Someone who thinks “morality is for wimps” may frequently attend to acts of generosity and still feel only revulsion and contempt – prolonged attention may even reinforce these reactions.

In many cases, however, attention can be helpful in connecting general moral concern with action in a particular situation: Given that Mei cares about the homeless, noticing the homeless person on her corner allows her to do something to help him.123 In this case, attention links a general and somewhat abstract concern with a particular and localized course of action. (Of course, attention can also function this way if Mei was a killer preying on the homeless).

Though attention can be useful for moral development or producing right action, it is important to distinguish being useful from being virtuous. Though attention can be morally beneficial in a variety of ways, I wish to focus on how our patterns of attention are relevant to our moral character. I will reject views that claim attention itself is virtuous; such views, I will argue, fail to properly distinguish cognitive defects from moral vice. This does not mean that attention plays no role in being a morally good person; I’ll argue that attention can be virtuous or vicious by its connection to our cares and concerns. First, I will argue that attention often does manifest our cares and concerns, and then that attention is virtuous or vicious when it manifests moral concerns (or a lack thereof). Finally, I will offer detailed accounts of particular virtues of attention.

122 Quoted in Ronson (2011, 95). Emphasis in original. 123 This function of attention is described by Iris Murdoch (1964/2001) and Lawrence Blum (1994).

170

The Defective and The Vicious

Some argue that attention can itself be virtuous or vicious independently of any connection to moral concern or moral development. Lawrence Blum offers a clear statement of this view by contrasting John and Joan’s conscious perception of someone in discomfort:

John, let us say, often fails to take in people’s discomfort, whereas Joan is characteristically sensitive to such discomfort. It is thus in character for the discomfort [of another person] to be salient for Joan but not for John. That is to say, a morally significant aspect of situations facing John characteristically fails to be salient for him, and this is a defect in his character – not a very serious moral defect, but a defect nevertheless. John misses something of the moral reality confronting him. (1994, 33)

Blum clarifies in a footnote to this passage that “The failure of perception can be significant in its own right” (33fn.6). Robert Adams (2006, 104ff.) also argues for the existence of purely cognitive vices that are independent of desires (or in my terms concern). Blum’s use of the term ‘defect’ evokes naturalistic accounts, like those offered by Rosalind Hursthouse (1999, 192ff.) and Philippa Foot (2001). These accounts might account for the value of attention by appeal to its role in some distinctly human function, part of a good human life.124 These accounts share with Blum the idea that some failures of attention, as with John, overlook moral goods and make John defective (though perhaps in a minor way).

The use of ‘defect’ here is not simply a charming euphemism. It in fact masks an important distinction between simple mistakes or cognitive failures and moral viciousness. All moral vices may be defects, but not all defects are moral vices. Being clumsy, bad at mental math, or diabetic are all kinds of defects but none of them are

124 I say ‘might’ here because neither explicitly discusses the moral value of attention in much detail.

171 morally vicious. When it is disconnected from our cares and concerns, defective attention is not vicious but merely defective – it does not say anything about one’s moral character.

Consider Blum’s claim that John’s failure of perception is itself morally significant. Suppose that John is blind. Is his perceptual failure still morally significant?

John’s blindness is a defect; he does not perform his human function as well and he, in

Blum’s words, “misses something of the moral reality”. But John’s failure to perceive shows that he has a defect of the eyes not of the soul. It is not vicious because it is disconnected from his moral character.

Or consider cases of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). A central symptom of

ADD is an inability to focus and maintain attention. People who suffer from ADD have difficulty not only sustaining attention, but also filtering irrelevant information and directing attention (see Whiteman & Novotni 1995, 119ff. and Young & Bramham 2007,

59ff.). The exact cause is not known, but research suggests that it is a result of an imbalance of neurotransmitters, which help to transmit signals between cells (see Wender

2001, 35ff.). Those with ADD have an attentional defect; like blindness, their perception does not function correctly. And yet, having ADD does not seem make one a morally worse person. Why not?

The answer, I think, is that the kind of defective attention associated with ADD is disconnected from one’s cares and concerns. The inattention of someone with ADD does not manifest a lack of concern, but an inability to attend to what one takes to be important. This is a significant part of why the disorder is so intensely frustrating (see

Young & Bramham 2007, 179); they are unable to focus on the exam they care very much about passing, the presentation that matters for their business, or the conversation

172 that could save the marriage that is important to them. Suppose that John has diagnosed

ADD and, having run out of medication, has a hard time keeping his attention from wandering where it will. His failure to attend to the person in discomfort is not vicious because it does not mean he doesn’t care about the wellbeing of others; it means his brain has a wiring problem making him unable to attend to what he cares about (moral or otherwise).

A failure to notice the discomfort in a neighboring person on a train is vicious if the inattention is a result of not caring for others, not if it is a result of a splitting headache. Similarly, a psychopath whose attention is captured by a person writhing in pain on the sidewalk because of a morbid curiosity does not exhibit a slight moral virtue nor does the thief who notices such a person because he is constantly on the lookout for an easy target. Explaining virtuous and vicious attention by its connection to our moral cares and concerns, we can properly distinguish mere cognitive defects and bodily disabilities from moral vice. To do this, I will first argue that attention can be, and often is, connected with our cares and concerns.

Attention and Care

Attention is often intimately related to care, and even love. When we love someone, when we care deeply about them, our attention is drawn to them. This is present in philosophical discussion of love (see Swanton 2003, 34ff.) and Nel Nodding’s claims about the role of engrossment in caring for someone (1984/2003, esp. 24ff.). The clearest expression, however, is in a classic song:

My love must be a kind of blind love I can't see anyone but you Are the stars out tonight? I don't know if it's cloudy or bright I only have eyes for you, dear

173 I don't know if we're in a garden Or on a crowded avenue You are here and so am I Maybe millions of people go by But they all disappear from view And I only have eyes for you125

The singer “only has eyes” for his beloved, but this is not simply an ocular disorder; it is, after all, a love song. His attention is captured because of his feelings of her. This focused attention not only reveals his love, is also its experiential aspect. This is not only a feature of romantic caring: Caring parents tend to be attentive parents; they take photos and tell stories about their own children (and not the children living down the street). Caring advisors listen to (not just hear!) their students and notice if they are not around. A caring friend is, among other things, one for whom out of sight does not mean out of mind.

Unlike the kind of care associated with care-based theories of ethics, which is generally limited persons, attention manifests a much broader range of cares. A music lover will pay attention to what song is playing during a party and a linguist with a love of phonology will pay attention to people’s pronunciation of the word ‘caramel’. It’s no coincidence that our minds tend to wander during lectures on topics we don’t care about.

Even during these lectures that do not interest us, when the discussion shifts to something we do care about, it quickly captures our attention. This is a common phenomenon among students, noticed over a hundred years ago by William James:

Not far removed is the talent which mind-wandering school-boys display during the hours of instruction, of noticing every movement in which the teacher tells a story. I remember classes in which, instruction being uninteresting, and discipline relaxed, a buzzing murmur was always to be heard, which invariably stopped for as long a time as an anecdote lasted. (James 1892/1992, 215)

125 Composed by Harry Warren and lyricist Al Dubin, “I Only Have Eyes for You” was written for the 1934 film ‘Dames’. The version recorded by The Flamingos, however, is generally regarded as the definitive one.

174 Students care about anecdotes not boring old instruction, so they converse during the lecture until the good part draws their attention. Their involuntary habits of conscious attention are closely connected to what they care about.

There are empirical data to support the idea that our concerns affect our attention.

Mack and Rock (1998) tested attention by asking subjects to focus on a plus sign at the center of their visual field and flashed different images in the subject’s peripheral vision.

Some images captured the subject’s attention while others did not. They found that a subject’s own name grabs attention while other names do not and images of happy faces attract attention while neutral and upside-down faces do not. It is not only positive things that attract attention – The word ‘rape’ grabs attention in a way that the word ‘pear’ does not and Swastikas attract attention in ways that less meaningful symbols do not. This result has also been found to work with auditory attention (see Moray 1959) – when aurally distracted, it is much easier for subjects to hear their own name than other names.

Mack and Rock conclude that “meaningfulness plays an important role in the capture of attention” (156).

Of course, attention is not always connected with our concerns. Loud noises, bright colors, and strong smells can capture our attention regardless of what we care about. Someone on vacation in China who knows only a few Chinese characters will notice them frequently on signs not because of any concern for what the character means, but simply because they are recognizable. In rural Nepal, for example, some people cross dangerous rope bridges so often that they no longer give a second thought to the danger involved. This isn’t because they don’t care about danger, but because they are used to it.

175 Attention can also vary with our level of skill in various tasks. When we first learn to drive we must pay close attention to various aspects of the task (“More gas, less clutch, and check your blind spot!”). As we develop the relevant motor skills and mental habits, these things no longer demand our conscious attention even though we care just as much about them as when we first stared.

This may suggest that conscious attention is not very important: Suppose that Jay is driving on a busy highway while listening to NPR.126 A car cuts in front of him, and he immediately puts on the brake. Because of his driving skill and the speed of his reaction it does not seem that Jay attended to the car; he didn’t need to because his braking reflex is automatic. But now suppose he didn’t brake and instead rear-ended the car. It will not help him in court to say that he wasn’t paying attention—he was listening to NPR. The distinction between attention and awareness in this case may be legally unimportant.

However, not paying attention would reflect poorly on him as a driver. We do commonly think that drivers should pay attention to the road. It is, after all, sensible to have laws prohibiting taking on a cell phone while driving precisely because such drivers do not pay attention to the road.

The point here is that lack of attention does not always manifest a lack of care. In the driving case, the importance of attention also rests on outcomes – on causing fewer accidents. But when it comes to how much a driver cares about safety, a lack of attention may manifest a lack of concern for safety, but does not always – as when one is skilled enough to drive safely without conscious attention. If Jay is skilled enough at driving, a lack of conscious attention need not manifest a lack of care.

126 I thank Jay Garfield for this example.

176 Our attention can also be affected by previous cognitive states; James Baron

(2007, 168ff.) describes recent research on how our prior beliefs and judgments can affect our attention. One common case of this is what is called confirmation bias, a tendency to favor evidence that supports existing beliefs (see Nickerson 1998 for an overview). One way confirmation bias can operate is by over-attending to evidence that supports what we already believe. This can be independent of our desires: If I falsely believe that a medicine I’m taking causes increased irritability, I may notice my usual feelings of irritation more often even though I do not want to feel irritated. I pay attention to it not because I want it, but because I expect it.

My account of how attention can be virtuous or vicious will not require that attention always manifests what we care about, only that it can. In the same way that birdwatchers will notice the birds on a walk because they are about birds and structural engineers will notice the support beams in a building because they care about architectural design, a morally virtuous person will notice much about the world because they care about moral goods.

Virtuous and Vicious Attention

If attention can manifest our concerns, when those concerns are moral, attention is relevant to our moral character – to what we fundamentally care about. This sounds big but can show itself in small ways: Paying attention to the volume of your stereo is virtuous when it shows concern for not causing your neighbors discomfort and vicious when it shows a passive-aggressive concern for petty revenge. Such attention is good for the effect of keeping the volume low, but it is virtuous because it manifests that you care about the comfort of others. This can be virtuous even when you cannot control the

177 volume (say it is a neighbor’s party and you are worried about bothering the other neighbors) or it is already at a reasonable level. My attention to a loved one’s cough is virtuous when it shows a concern for their health, but not when it shows a concern that I not get sick. It is possible for attention to manifest both of these concerns; in these cases it is virtuous to the extent that it manifests moral concern.

It might seem that it is only the associated actions that are virtuous in these cases, not the attention itself. As I discussed earlier attention can be morally good in many ways such as by helping to produce moral behavior. Attention can be good in these ways and virtuous in the way I have described: Ben’s attention to where the shoes he is buying were manufactured is important not only because it helps him to avoid supporting unjust labor practices and also reflects well on his moral character by manifesting his morally important concern for justice. He is the kind of person who cares deeply about global justice and his attention exhibits this concern. His attention both allows him to act well and shows that justice matters to him.

The attention itself, however, can also reflect well on one’s character without issuing in overt behavior. Imagine a young boy from a well-off family whose very large house has a staff of mostly Mexican workers. They boy is not particular close with them, but cares about them as equals and so can’t help but notice every time his father treats them with contempt. Suppose that because of his position in the family and his father’s stubbornness, he is not in a position to do anything about the situation. Despite his lack of action, his attention shows moral concern and reflects well on him – He is a better person

178 than his brother who does not care about the workers and so takes their father’s poor treatment of them for granted.127

Cases of vicious attention are slightly easier to recognize. The bully (childhood or otherwise) notices weakness in others because he cares about exerting power over them.

The racist’s attention to the ethnicity of the name on an application because he cares about not having “one of them” working in his department.128 These are all ways in which malicious concerns manifest in conscious attention. These states can be bad because of their connection to morally wrong actions, but they can be vicious even if no such actions occur. If the bully never gets a chance to pick on the a weak child because the teachers are too watchful or if the racist is not on the hiring committee, such attention still manifests morally bad concerns and so are vicious.

Or consider the vicious attention attributed to the stereotypical mafia wife. The mafia wife pays a lot of attention to the expensive gifts given to her by her gangster husband, but ignores the source of such gifts. Her attention betrays a concern for nice things, but a lack of concern for the cruelty and misdeeds that make it possible. Such attention manifests moral indifference even if there is nothing she can do to change the situation. Most middle and upper class Americans (myself included!) exhibit, to some degree, the same attention pattern. We pay attention to the stylish new electronics or the great deal we got on a new pair of jeans, but pay little attention to the exploitation and

127 Someone inspired by Sartre might object here that this person is morally worse than his brother by having a greater degree of bad faith. Even if one takes bad faith to be a moral vice (I am not sure it is), it may be the brother who is so infected by bad faith that he has internalized his father’s values. 128 I do not mean to suggest here that all racism is overt in this way. In this example the racist may or may not be aware of his concern to avoid people of a certain race. Either way, I take its manifestation in attention to be vicious.

179 injustice that makes such things possible. To the extent that this reveals that we care more about electronic novelty than about justice and human rights, this attention is vicious.

If attention is virtuous or vicious only by manifesting care, then why care about attention? The answer, I think, is that we take virtuous people to have certain habits of attention and we take some, but not all, instances of attention to reflect on one’s moral character. A care-based account can explain these intuitions: I began with a scene starring a student who, when visiting your office hours, is attending primarily to his smartphone and not what you are saying to him. I suggested that his attention reflects poorly on him both as a student and as a social being because it manifests a lack of concern for you and for the topic of conversation. It reflects poorly on him because it manifests something about what matters to him, about his priorities.

Of course, there is something bad about the expressing a lack of concern in this situation; checking one’s phone while meeting a professor is bad behavior. But even if he did not express his lack of attention, his lack of attention manifests a lack of concern for what you are saying and makes him a worse student. Suppose there are other students present and he simply sits there thinking about what messages might have arrived in his inbox instead of listening to you. His attention still manifests a lack of concern for what you are saying and perhaps for the content of the class and, in this sense, reflects poorly on him as a student even if his attention is not expressed overtly.

Reality, as usual, is more complex. If the student is, say, reading celebrity gossip it does reflect poorly on him because it shows that he cares more about gossip than philosophy or a basic level of respect for you. But suppose you learned that the student’s mother is in the hospital for heart surgery and he is expecting word about her condition at

180 any minute. Or suppose you learned that the student has a severe case of undiagnosed

ADD. These facts are relevant to how we evaluate the student because they change the concerns that the attention manifests and this is what it relevant for our evaluation of persons.

Of course, attention can be an action – we can voluntarily decide to pay attention to the weather or what someone is saying. In these cases even though it is an action it need not be a behavioral one. One can, for example, pay attention to a someone at a party while acting as if you are ignoring them. A skilled slacker can act is if he is paying attention in class even though he is thinking about which bar his friends will go to later that night. My claim is not that attention is never an action, it often is, but even in these cases it can be a private, mental action rather than an overt, behavioral one.

I. MINDFULNESS AND CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

It can be tempting to see all attentive states that manifest moral concern as being virtuous independently of associated behaviors or intentions. However, sometimes even though the state itself does not require behavior manifestation, the relevant concern that makes it virtuous does. Behavior-dependence is not always located in the state itself, but can also appear in the morally relevant care or concern.

Though mindfulness is an attentive state that does not itself require intentions or overt behaviors, the cares and concerns that make it virtuous do seem to entail behavioral intentions. Mindfulness is generally virtuous by manifesting a concern for moral improvement, a concern that involves the intention to act in ways that bring about such

181 improvement. So mindfulness, despite being a state of attention, is not virtuous independently of intentions and behaviors; its virtuousness is essentially linked with moral development.

There are, however, similar attentive states that manifest a concern to be morally good rather than to become morally good. This moral conscientiousness involves attending to one’s mental life because one take moral failings seriously. This kind of conscious moral audit, I will argue, can manifest morally relevant concerns independently of behaviors or intentions.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is most strongly associated with Buddhism, but is not exclusive to it. Stoics like Epictetus advocated practices involving a similar kind of attention (Greek: Prosochē) directed towards the judgments we make about ourselves, the world around us, and the source of such judgments (see Enchiridion 38 and 41). But such attentive practices are not nearly as foundational in Stoicism as they are in Buddhism and Buddhism offers more theoretical discussion of mindfulness and its importance. So let’s use the Buddhist notion as a starting point.

The English term ‘mindfulness’ often translates two technical concepts in

Buddhism. One involves fixing the attention on a particular object but also includes remembering an object, while the other involves maintaining and guarding this state.129 In some traditions refraining from judgment or categorization of experience is taken to be important for mindfulness, but there is disagreement about this and I will not take this to

129 These are known in Sanskrit as smṛti and samprajanya and in Tibetan as dran pa and shes bzhin.

182 be part of mindfulness.130 Mindfulness, then, involves fixing attention on an object and maintaining that attention (I leave the precise duration of this maintenance open; it is likely to be determined by a variety of situational factors).

In Buddhism the objects of mindfulness are widely varied. One is instructed to be mindful of one’s body, actions, and mental states, but also of breathing, the inevitability of death and Buddhist teachings.131 Though my discussion will focus primarily on mindfulness of one’s own states, since mindfulness of overt behavioral action will, of course, depend on overt behavior.132

Mindfulness can involve directing and maintaining not just attention, but awareness more generally. Jay Garfield (2012, 6-7) points out that conscious reflection is not, and in fact cannot, be a necessary condition for mindfulness. Many discussions of mindfulness in cognitive science (Brown & Ryan 2003) and popularly as in Thích Nhãt

Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, take mindfulness to involve both conscious attention and non-reflective awareness. As my focus here is on conscious attention, my discussion will be about mindfulness involving conscious attention. By focusing on this type of mindfulness I do not mean to suggest that mindfulness involving non-conscious awareness is less valuable or important. I will focus on ways in which mindfulness involving conscious attention is morally virtuous.

Though I will focus on mindfulness that involves conscious attention, such mindfulness need not be voluntary. Such mindfulness can be voluntarily initiated, as

130 Non-judgment is often emphasized in Vipassana practice and some versions of Zen. Wallace (2006, 13 and 59) offers a brief overview of these differences. 131 Many of these are described in the foundational Mahāsatipatthāna Sutta (DN.22). 132 Though even in this case, the state itself could require behavior even if the behavior itself does not play a role in explaining why the state is virtuous. In the same way, moral action in humans requires oxygen, but oxygen plays not role in the explanation of why an action is morally good.

183 when you decide to pay close attention to your steps in a darkened stairway, but it need not be. You may find yourself paying close conscious attention to your steps without having deliberated or decided to do so. Even if you have consciously decided to pay close attention to your footsteps, this decision itself was probably not the result of a conscious, voluntary decision and was prompted by a non-reflective awareness of being in a situation that warrants attention. In Garfield’s (2012, esp. 19ff.) discussion of the spontaneity of mindfulness this is made clear; mindfulness as conscious attention rests on a foundation of non-conscious awareness. Though I focus on mindfulness involving conscious attention, my claims about this variety of mindfulness, however, will apply regardless of whether its was initiated voluntarily or not.

It is important to distinguish being mindful from trying to be mindful. While the former can be a spontaneous, reason-responsive state of attention, the latter is intentional behavior aimed at bringing about this state. Though there behaviors that can encourage mindfulness, the state itself is not the same as behaviors that encourage it.

To summarize, ‘mindfulness’ as I will use it refers to sustained conscious attention, paradigmatically directed towards one’s own actions and mental states. This is a state that can be activated either voluntarily or non-voluntarily. Though the state itself does not require behavior or intentions, the care and concern that make it virtuous do seem to entail behavioral intentions.

The Moral Importance of Mindfulness

Mindfulness is morally relevant in a variety of ways and there is an important difference between asking what mindfulness is good for and asking what it might say about one's moral character. What mindfulness is good for is likely to be behavior dependent - it is

184 good for taking steps towards moral improvement. This will be relevant to the cares and concerns that can make it virtuous and their dependence on behavior.

Mindfulness is generally taken to be morally important because of what it is good for: eliminating suffering and developing and supporting moral conduct. These are genuinely important sources of the value of mindfulness. Though being valuable in these ways does not settle the question of whether or not mindfulness can be morally virtuous, they are relevant for the moral concern that can make it virtuous. So it will be worth discussing these aspects of mindfulness.

Mindfulness, in the more general involving awareness, is essential for moral conduct. This point has been made my many theorists, historically Aristotle (NE 1142a) and Śāntideva (BCA V.1-4), and more recently McDowell (1979), Larmore (1987), Blum

(1994), and Annas (2011) among many others. We cannot act to benefit others or respect their rights without some awareness of these moral reasons, our situation, and what we are doing. Nomy Arpaly and Jay Garfield have both pointed out that this awareness need not be conscious or reflective: Arpaly (2002) highlights the possibility of responding to reasons even when reflectively denying them and Garfield (2012, 6) points out that one can be reflectively obsessed with the idea of morality while lacking a basic awareness of the moral reality (for example, politicians and televangelists involved in scandals). What is essential for moral conduct, for responding to moral reasons, is an awareness not conscious attention.

Conscious attention is not a necessary condition for moral conduct, but mindfulness that involves conscious attention can still be useful in this area. It can, for example, help combat a certain kind of suffering and allow one to experience more fully

185 their everyday lives. The Buddhist monk Thích Nhãt Hanh (1975, 4) gives the example of washing dishes. When washing dishes is our minds linger on the huge pile of dirty dishes yet to be washed, the chore becomes very painful. The same suffering can happen when writing a dissertation; if one focuses on all of the hundreds of pages yet to be written, the thought of writing at all can become a source of pain and anxiety. The art of painless dishwashing, then, is to focus completely on washing the dish in our hands. The art of painless dissertation writing is to focus completely on writing this sentence. This sustained attention to one’s current action helps to avoid the kind of anxiety that a wandering attention can foster.133

Conscious attention has also been taken to play an important role in developing moral conduct. This is not unique to moral conduct. Aristotle would explain that one gets good at the ukulele by sitting down and playing it (though Aristotle himself seems to have preferred the lyre – see NE 1103a32-b2). But practice is unlikely to do much good unless one pays attention to what one is doing and listens to the sounds that come out.

The same can be true of moral development. Julia Annas points out that moral development in real life is not simply “mindless absorption” (2011, 22); we often learn by paying close attention to role models and copying them. Even without a role model, attention to one’s own behavior can play an important role in moral development. A classic example of this is Benjamin Franklin’s plan for moral self-improvement. After listing what he took to be the most important virtues, Franklin went about trying to cultivate them and found it useful to focus his attention:

133 My analysis is a bit different from the one offered by Thích Nhãt Hanh, who uses the example to make the slightly more romantic point that if we are not mindful of washing the dishes “… we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink.” (1975, 4).

186 My Intention being to acquire the Habitude of all these Virtues, I judg'd it would be well not to distract my Attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time, and when I should be Master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on till I should have gone thro' the thirteen. (Franklin 1793/1982, 77 emphasis is mine).

Śāntideva makes a similar point:

Those who wish to protect their minds, Always diligently Protect your mindfulness.134 I fold my hands and beg you! (BCA V.23)

If I want to be healthier or be more polite, it can be important to pay attention to cultivating these traits; the same holds for developing moral traits.135

This is not to say that consciously-directed projects of self-improvement always succeed or result in moral development. A generous person who also happens to be a casual Ayn Rand follower might be morally better off skipping any consciously-directed project of moral improvement because he would make himself more selfish. Conscious projects of moral self-improvement can backfire in many ways and do not always succeed in actual moral improvement. Being mindful of my actions and habits can be helpful in developing moral conduct, and may in general succeed in this aim, but it is not always so.

Virtuous and Vicious Mindfulness

If mindfulness is important for its role in moral development, it seems to reflect well or poorly on one’s moral character when it manifests a concern for moral improvement.

Simply attending to our own actions and mental states often is not morally important. I might be attending to what I am doing because I want to quit biting my nails or get better

134 The text here actually refers to the two processes discussed above: fixing attention (Tibetan: dran pa) and maintaining it (Tibetan: shes gzhin), which Garfield (2012) translates as ‘attention’ and ‘introspective vigilance’ respectively. For the sake of simplicity I use the single term ‘mindfulness’ here. 135 This is similar to cases offer by Arpaly and Schroeder (2012, 230ff.) of when conscious deliberation is beneficial.

187 at playing the ukulele or because someone asked me if I am hungry. These cases of attention are, other things equal, neither virtuous nor vicious because they aren’t connected to any of my moral concerns.

In other cases, however, mindfulness can manifest moral concerns. Recall

Garfield’s point: Mindfulness is spontaneous, but it is not random (2012, 19ff.). It responds to reasons and is connected to our cares. This is not always moral; remembering a long-deceased friend, even spontaneously, can manifest how much they matter to you.

Re-reading your draft many times can manifest your concern to avoid typographical errors.

Even though mindfulness as an attentive state does not itself require overt action, the cares and concerns that make it morally virtuous do seem to depend upon behavioral action or at least the intention to act. If mindfulness is virtuous by manifesting a concern for moral self-improvement, this concern seems to both entail behavioral intentions and be valuable primarily as a result of the resulting behavioral action. The primary way in which concern for moral improvement is valuable is its relationship with actions and behaviors that result in actual moral improvement.136

Even in non-moral cases, concern to improve is generally valuable by its connection to associated behaviors and intentions. Consciously attending to each step of a math problem can show that I care about getting the right answer. But why think concern to get the right answer is important independently of its connection with more reliably getting the correct answer? Even if there is something good about simply wanting to give the correct answer, this state is intimately connected with overt behavior (writing the

136 I mean to refer to actual moral improvement, not merely what one believes to be moral improvement.

188 correct answer, checking each step) or, at the very least, the intention to perform such overt actions.

In the context of splitting a complex and expensive bill, careful attention to each step in a mathematical calculation can manifest a concern for justice, that each person pays their fair share and no more. Though this mindfulness is virtuous by manifesting a morally good concern, the concern itself seem to be good in large part because of its connection with the intention to behavior in just ways – it is non-accidentally connected with actually giving each person the financial burden they deserve.

Consider someone mindful of the source of the clothing they buy: It is not virtuous if it manifests a concern to avoiding knock-offs or cheaply made products, but is virtuous if it manifests a concern to avoid supporting repressive governments and unjust labor practices. These concerns, however, are concerns about behavior action – one cares about not supporting unjust government and not buying products made through exploitation.

Even though mindfulness itself does not depend on any overt behaviors or intentions, the cares and concerns that make it virtuous are not independent of actions or intentions. Caring about moral development is not simply caring about a moral good, but involves the intention to undertake behaviors that aim at moral improvement. It is very odd to say of someone that he cares very deeply about improving himself, but does not have any intentions the act in ways that aim at such improvement.137

137 For example, in the catholic sacrament of confession one does not really confess without the intention to take steps to change.

189 Hiri: Moral Conscientiousness

There are, however, attentive states similar to mindfulness that manifest cares that do not depend on overt behaviors or intentions. Consider something like a conscious moral audit of one’s mental life. One can involuntarily notice malicious thoughts, pleasures, and emotions because one cares about not having them. In this kind of audit, one need not care about overcoming them (though one may well also care about this), but simply care about not having them at all. The concern is not one to become good, but to be good.

This idea is closely related to the Buddhist concept known in Pāli as hiri, which is often translated as ‘shame’ but, at least for my purposes, is better rendered as ‘moral conscientiousness’.138 The sense in which it can be virtuous independently of behaviors or intentions should be understood as a particular kind of hiri and is not meant to include all cases covered by the concept. For example, it is sometimes described as a kind of moral embarrassment that prevents one from wrongdoing. In this sense, it is similar to

Aristotle’s discussion of aidōs (also often translated as ‘shame’ or ‘modesty’), though he denies that this feeling can be virtuous (see NE 1128b10ff.). In this sense, hiri and aidōs are important primarily for preventing immoral behavior, and so is still behavior- dependent.139 But there are other aspects of these states that are virtuous independently of behaviors or intentions.

The Indian philosopher Buddhaghosa in his Visuddhimagga also characterizes hiri as anxiety or disgust at evil (XIV.142). This involves emotional reactions towards

138 For a more detailed discussion of hiri, see Heim (2012). Her discussion, however, relies more heavily on agency and self-determination than mine. 139 The term also has associations with disgust about one’s body that are not part of the kind of moral conscientiousness I am interested in (see Heim (2012, 243).

190 moral failings, and so can be virtuous in the same was as other emotions.140 But it also involves conscious attention – someone can notice the moral failings of their mental life because they take such failing seriously, they care about not having them. This is not the same as the concern to avoid them, which involves intentions and behaviors, but is a way attention to one’s own faults can manifest a concern for being morally good.

How would such attention manifest moral concern independently of overt behavior? In general, something like this: When you make this moral audit because you care about your mental life being moral, that is a morally good concern even if you can't do anything about it. You are, for example, morally better than someone who never audits because they don't care about having a moral mental life at all.

Let’s consider a particular case. Imagine two people who both have hopelessly entrenched feelings of racial disgust; they take such feelings to be unchangeable (perhaps a psychologist told them so) and so don't have any intentions to rid themselves of such feelings. (And for simplicity, suppose that they have been socialized so that they never express or act on such feelings). One of them cares deeply about not feeling this disgust and so notices these feelings when they arise. The other doesn't care much about them and so lets them arise and pass without notice. I think the former is more virtuous (or, more realistically, less vicious) than the latter because his conscious attention manifests a good moral attitude towards his feelings, despite lacking any intentional or behavioral component.

140 There is sometimes a distinction between states that involve disapproval from one’s own point of view (Tibetan: nga tsha shes pa) and from an outside point of view (Tibetan: khrel yod pa). There can be virtuous concern associated with both, but I will focus on the former since it reflects a person’s moral orientation in a more direct way.

191 This kind of moral conscientiousness, a spontaneous, conscious moral audit of one’s mental life can manifest that one takes mental and emotional virtue seriously. This concern is not directly connected with moral development and so does not entail intentions or overt behaviors. One can take moral failings seriously and manifest such concern in their conscious attention, even without behaviors or intentions associated with moral development.

Again, this kind of attention associated with virtuous mindfulness or conscientiousness is not, however, necessary for being a good person. Though attention and concern are strongly linked in most people, the connection is not necessary. Someone in a noisy and distracting café might not be able to attend to a letter they care very much about reading. Similarly, the concerns of those on a new medication or suffering from

Attention Deficit Disorder may not be manifested in their attention; those with ADD can care about performing well on a test, but be unable to focus their attention on the problem in front of them despite their concern. But ADD is not a moral vice and if failures of attention to not manifest a deficiency in moral concern, they are not vicious. For most of us, however, they will be deeply connected and so failures of attention will likely manifest a deficiency in moral care.

Scrupulosity: An Objection

If states of moral conscientiousness like hiri are virtuous independently of overt behavior or intentions, there can still be problems concerning constant or excessive moral conscientiousness. If moral conscientiousness is virtuous by manifesting moral concern, doesn’t this make a virtue our of being morally neurotic?

192 I don’t think it does, primarily because it is not the frequency or intensity of attention that determines how morally virtuous it is. This can be seen clearly in cases of scrupulosity, a species of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that focuses on moral and religious matters. As I discussed earlier, scrupulosity has emotional dimensions, but it is also relevant to conscious attention. Consider J.J. Keeler’s description how her scrupulosity affected her when driving:

Idling at stop signs and traffic lights was the worst. I was sure a pedestrian would walk in front of my car the second I resumed driving. This led me to study the road carefully in front of me, sometimes waiting at a stop sign for one or two minutes before I felt comfortable proceeding. Other times, I’d go through a traffic light and then pull over on the side of the road, turning my head back so I could study the ground I’d just driven over. I was always looking for a body. Checking didn’t quiet all the doubts. Instead, I’d worry that whoever I hit had simply disappeared from my sight. They had crawled into a field, fallen behind a tree, rolled into the gutter. This caused me to check even more, peering down water drains and searching nearby parking lots, looking for the bruised and bloodied. (Keeler 2012, 96)

She pays a lot of attention to her actions and their effects and does so because of morally good concerns; she cares so much about not injuring or killing a pedestrian that her attention is complete focused on making sure that she has not harmed anyone.141 She is not just mindful of her driving in a way that is morally virtuous. It can seem as though my account has made a virtuous of this mental disorder. Is she more morally virtuous than the rest of us? Would we be morally better if we started scouring parking lots in search of what that strange bump on the road might have been?

Keeler’s attention is virtuous; it does manifest a morally important concern for the safety of others. Her attention is not a kind of experiential tick; it is related to her cares.

What is tick-like, however, is being reminded of this concern over and over again. OCD acts like an annoying child with a one-track mind. Though her state of attention is

141 Keeler’s example involves attention to a behavioral action, but since my concern here is about the degree of attention it does not matter much; one can substitute a vicious state for the immoral action and find the same effect.

193 connected to her cares, the frequency of being in such states does not. More frequent and intense attention does not always manifest a greater degree of concern. It is likely that most drivers care about the safety of pedestrians as much as Keeler; the only difference is they do not have a disorder constantly screaming it in their ear.

There can also be something less-than-virtuous about the kind of concern associated with scrupulosity; they are often very narrow and specific. Jennifer Traig, whose scrupulosity took a more religious form, describes Judaism as having “… an embarrassment of riches for the compulsive practitioner” and goes on to explain:

As a result, most scrupulous Jews tend to overlook, even violate, the bulk of the laws while observing one or two with excruciating care … I was happy to lie to my dishonored parents while breaking the Sabbath, as long as it was in the service of getting my hands ritually clean. (Traig 2004, 35)

We expect a virtuous person to care about a sufficiently wide range of moral goods. A good person cares about not harming others in all kinds of ways, only one of which is by running them over. We have limited reserves of conscious attention. Paying attention to this sentence means you are not at the same time paying attention to what is happening outside your window. If one specific care, though morally good, takes up all one’s attention then other morally good concerns will go unattended.

A virtuous mental state can be behavior-dependent because the state itself requires behavior (such as a virtuous intention) or because the relevant moral concern entails behaviors or intentions (such as concern for moral development). The following sections discuss two virtues of attention, gratitude and modesty, that are not dependent upon intentions or behaviors in either way.

194 II. GRATITUDE

Sometimes virtuous attention is not directed towards our actions or mental states, but to benefits that we receive; this is the kind of attention associated with gratitude. Sadly, the philosophical literature has given too little attention to attention. Much of the literature, at least in Western philosophy, focuses on whether or not we can have an obligation to be grateful: Kant (1797/1996, 573), Rousseau (1755/1984, 64 & 126), Berger (1975), and

Card (1988) think that we can, while Comte-Sponville (1996, 138), Fitzgerald (1998),

Wellman (1999) disagree. This is an interesting dispute, but my concern here is the role that conscious attention plays in making gratitude virtuous. How being grateful can make one a morally better person.

Gratitude is a complex phenomena. It has an affective aspect, which allows it to be virtuous as an emotion (as described in chapter three). Gratitude also has an attentive aspect and I will argue that it is virtuous by manifesting morally important concern as conscious attention and can do so independently of expressions, intentions, or associated overt behavior.

Which Gratitude?

Gratitude is primarily a response to benefits. It is a response that involves evaluation, emotion, and as I will emphasize, attention. Being grateful involves positive attitudes and emotions. As Roberts notes (2004, 59ff.) gratitude can be both an episodic reaction and long-term trait; we might say that Manoj feels grateful to his mother right now as we are conversing or say that Manoj is grateful in general, even though he is asleep at the

195 moment. For now, I will focus on how the episodic reaction can be morally virtuous and later discuss how this allows for the trait to be a virtue.

Gratitude is a way of appreciating and valuing a benefit and the source and conditions of that benefit. Some, like Comte-Sponville (1996, 132ff.), take the appreciative aspect of gratitude to mean that it is always pleasurable. I will not rely on this in my account and I’m not sure it is true: Suppose it is important to me to make a journey on my own, without the help of others. If I run into a serious problem and someone helps me, I may feel grateful but find it displeasurable. Or imagine receiving a thoughtful gift from a romantic rival; you may feel grateful, but not find it particularly pleasurable.

Gratitude as an attitude towards a benefit is distinct from the outward expressions and actions of the attitude. It is possible to experience gratitude without expressing it and to express it without experiencing it: A student can be grateful to her professor for extending an impending deadline without ever expressing it and a recent graduate can write thank you cards until his hand cramps without feeling an ounce of gratitude at all.

Gratitude is often associated with outward acts of recompense, but it does not require them; we can, after all, feel gratitude to those who have died long ago or to anonymous benefactors. Though gratitude is often associated with a variety of intentions and behaviors, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for experiencing gratitude.

Theorists have disagreed about whether or not gratitude must be directed towards an agent who acted intentionally, whether being grateful always means being grateful to someone.142 A.D.M. Walker (1980, 45ff.) distinguishes ‘gratitude’ (directed to someone)

142 This assumption is found, for example, in Berger (1975) and accepted by Roberts (2004, 63). Robert Solomon requires that it be directed towards a “voluntary agent (human or superhuman)” (1976/1983, 316).

196 from ‘gratefulness’ (more general thankfulness) on just these grounds. I will not rely on this distinction in my discussion.143 Instead, I will think of gratitude as a response to a benefit and the causes and conditions that brought the benefit about. This better accommodates more complex forms of directed gratitude. On the ground, not all gratitude is of the simple “I’m grateful to John for helping me move last week” kind. Gratitude is often directed in diffuse ways, not at some lone benefactor. To see this, consider Daniel

Dennett’s reflections on how to direct his gratitude after surviving risky emergency heart surgery:

To whom, then, do I owe my gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, nurses, physical therapists, x-ray technicians, and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood. The people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheeled me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other and checked each other’s work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their job without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the CT scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who’s counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am also grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws. (2007, 114)

Dennett is grateful, but not to one particular benefactor. His gratitude is directed not only at particular individuals, but also the systems and institutions that created the conditions for those individuals to function in harmony. He directs his gratitude towards a large number of persons and to the situational factors that allowed them to act as they did.

143 Fitzgerald (1998) and, somewhat more reluctantly, Card (1988) both accept a broader view of gratitude that need not be directed at someone. It can seem somewhat arbitrary to say, for example, that I feel ‘gratefulness’ that the tornado missed my house, while my Christian neighbor feels ‘gratitude’ because she believes there is a God to thank.

197 I will take gratitude to paradigmatically involve responding to both a benefit and its source. Though I will claim that how gratitude is directed can be relevant to how virtuous it is, my account of the role attention plays in gratitude will also apply to states not directed to anyone. Those who think it a misuse of the term for someone to say they are grateful for being born in a first-world country or for not suffering from clinical depression can read my discussion as explaining how states like gratefulness (or perhaps thankfulness) and gratitude can be morally virtuous (and also how the latter can be more virtuous than the former).

Another feature worth noting about Dennett’s gratitude is that even when it is directed towards persons, many of these people did not have the intention to benefit him in particular, and may not have had an intention of benefiting anyone at all. Even if the inventors of the CT scanner or the editorial boards of various medical journals may simply have aimed at improving their CVs, Dennett can still feel gratitude for their role in saving his life. Many theories rule out this kind of gratitude by requiring that persons aim at providing the benefit to us.144 Peter Strawson seems to make this a condition not of gratitude itself, but of rational gratitude:

I shall reasonably feel a gratitude which I should not feel at all if the benefit was an incidental consequence, unintended or even regretted by him, of some plan of action with a different aim. (1962, 76)

As Patrick Fitzgerald (1998, 123ff.) has noted, Buddhist thought often takes gratitude towards those who intend to harm us and provided unintended or accidental benefits to be not only morally relevant, but genuine gratitude. Since I have argued that irrational states can still be virtuous, I can accept that such gratitude may be irrational, though I will not

144 This condition is endorsed by Heider (1958), Berger (1975), Simmons (1979, 171-2), and McConnell (1993, 44).

198 take a stand either way. I will, however, take them to count as cases of gratitude and will argue that they can be morally virtuous.

It is often taken for granted in discussions of gratitude that it is a response to a benefit (for example, see Smith 1790/1976, Berger 1975, Walker 1980, and Card 1988); that is how I have described it so far. It is more accurate, however, to describe it as a response to a perceived benefit.145 Suppose I have a birthday party and a guest brings me gift box that, because of the markings, I assume is something I want very much so I feel grateful. Now suppose that upon opening the box, I discover that it is empty; there is only a sarcastic card, the result of a practical joke. I may no longer feel grateful, but it would be wrong to say that I never really felt gratitude at all. My gratitude may have been hasty and mistaken, but it was gratitude nonetheless. In the same way, a junkie can be grateful to someone who has given him drugs even though the drugs are actually harmful and not beneficial to him; the fact that he perceives a benefit is enough for him to feel gratitude.

Gratitude involves seeing (or, as Roberts 2004 puts it, construing) something as a benefit.

Whether gratitude is warranted will turn on whether or not the object actually is a benefit.

If the addict feels grateful for the drug that destroys his life he feels genuine gratitude, though it is unwarranted.

The benefits we are grateful for are often assumed to be benefits we receive (see

Berger 1975 and Walker 1980, 43); on this view, I cannot be grateful for a benefit you received. There is something to this, but they benefits are better described, as Thomas

Hurka (2001, 203-4) does, as ‘agent-relative’. Feeling gratitude for a benefit does not require that the benefit be your own, merely a benefit to someone you closely identify with. A mother, for example, can be grateful to a teacher for extra help given to her child.

145 The psychological literature seems to be more careful about this – see McCullough et al. (2001).

199 A woman can be grateful that someone stopped to help her husband when his car was broken down. In these cases, the benefit is not received by the person who feels gratitude, but someone close to them.

Some theories (Walker 1980, 48) have claimed we cannot feel gratitude for benefits to which we have a right. I will not assume this and it seems to me to be too strong. Even if a child has a right to food and shelter from their parents, they can be grateful to their parents for such benefits. Suppose during particularly hard times both parents have to work several jobs to make sure their children have food and shelter; it is too narrow to say that the children cannot feel gratitude simply because they have a right to such benefits.

Gratitude, then, is a positive response to perceived benefits and the sources and conditions of those benefits. This response is associated with overt expressions and behaviors, but is distinct from them. It is an emotional response and so can be virtuous in the ways I have argued that emotions can be morally virtuous. My focus here, however, will be ways in which gratitude is a way of recognizing benefits and their sources, ways in which it involves a direction of conscious attention.

Gratitude and Attention

Gratitude paradigmatically involves conscious attention and, at least in some cases, requires it. Of course, attention to benefits and their source is not sufficient for gratitude.

A teenager under the influence of Nietzsche, for example, might attend to the benefits his parents have provided for him, but take it to be evidence of how disgustingly weak Mom and Dad are.

200 Attention is insufficient for gratitude, but does gratitude require attention? It can seem so. Being grateful is, after all, often contrasted with “taking things for granted” – with paying insufficient attention to benefits one receives.146 Though I will suggest that, for a variety of psychological reasons, gratitude very often requires attention, it is not a conceptual requirement. The idea of ‘subconscious gratitude’ does not seem to be self- contradictory in the same way as ‘subconscious deliberation’ or ‘subconscious reflection’.147 An unreflective teenager might discover, years later, that he subconsciously appreciated all that his single father did for him. “I didn’t think about it at the time” we can imagine him reflecting, “but in hindsight I see that I felt grateful for everything you did.” It is possible to experience gratitude on a visceral level, without consciously recognizing it or reflecting upon it.

If we suppose that this is a genuine case of gratitude, would the teenager have been morally better if he were more reflective? Unless his lack of reflection shows a deficiency in concern for the benefits he received, it can be hard to say why. Sometimes this is the case: Richard cares more about the Red Sox than I do. So the Red Sox are more likely to appear in his conscious mental life; he will find himself wondering whether or not they are playing a game today much more than I will. But this is not always true.

Someone with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder may care more about making it to a lecture on time than washing his hands, but hand washing appears in his consciousness far more frequently. When someone dies, the person that cared about him most and the person who remembers him most frequently might be the same person, but not always.

More frequent conscious attention does not always mean a greater degree of concern.

146 Walker (1981, 42) seems to take some kind of recognition to be necessary for gratitude. 147 See Christine Korsgaard (1996b, 100) for the link between deliberation and conscious reflection.

201 There are, however, cases where gratitude requires conscious reflection for psychological reasons. These cases paradigmatically involve two kinds of benefits: complex and long-term. It is a fact of psychology that if we receive a benefit consistently for a long enough duration, we get used to it. This doesn’t mean, however, that we stop caring about it or valuing it. Most middle-class Americans care about having electricity and clean water; after all, when these benefits are interrupted they are upset (earlier I discussed how pleasure and pain also have this feature). Instead, when we get used to a benefit we often stop responding to it as a benefit. When provided with consistent electricity and clean water for long enough, we come to respond to it on a visceral level not as a benefit but a simple fact of life. The sky is blue, dropped objects fall, and flipping the switch produces light. If I actively reflect on how I enjoy clean water and electricity once in a while, it can help me to respond to it as a benefit and not merely as a fact of life.

Reflective gratitude can be psychologically necessary to combat the effects of being acclimated to long-term benefits. Though I need not perform any overt behaviors in this way, I may try to adopt practices to combat the tendency to take such benefits for granted. This is often one effect of various religious traditions of giving up some benefit for a short time, such as the practice of Lent in Christianity. Though practices like this can help to encourage and reinforce reflection, they are distinct from the reflection itself.

These practices are not part of gratitude, but ways to develop it.

There are also some benefits to which we cannot respond subconsciously because of psychological limitations. Some benefits are so complex and subtle that they cannot be recognized without reflective thought. This is often true of situational benefits. Think of

202 how difficult it is to get most white American males to see the institutional benefits they enjoy. In a famous essay, Peggy McIntosh (1988) describes how she often encountered men willing to accept that women were often disadvantaged, but who denied that men experienced any advantages because of their gender. In dealing with this, she found that she herself had denied and ignored many advantages of being a white person in America.

She lists many privileges that are subtle and difficult for a white person to see without conscious reflection. She names many such benefits like being able to see a film with people of one’s own race represented, not being asked to speak for all members of one’s race, and being able to choose where to live without thinking of the risk of racial violence to name just a few on her list. Her reflections also provide evidence of the subtlety of these benefits; she writes, “I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down.” (1988, 190).148 Even for smart, thoughtful people, recognizing some benefits will require a good deal of reflection on history, the nature of justice, and the very structure of institutions.149

There are, of course, special issues with gratitude for unjust benefits. I do not think that it is always vicious to be grateful for unjust benefits; someone who gets a heart transplant because her surgeon father fudged some paperwork receives a benefit that is unjust, but her gratitude does not seem to be vicious. Of course, someone who feels only gratitude towards unjust benefits is vicious because someone who cares about justice will likely experience other reactions like anger or guilt. After all, a push for equality often begins with the recognition that the benefits that some groups enjoy are genuinely

148 She even describes such benefits as making up an “invisible knapsack” – invisible because the benefits are so difficult to see. 149 For many years I failed to recognize many of these benefits until having extended contact with political philosophers, particularly Dana Howard, Sean Aas, and Derek Bowman, who pointed out to me many of the institutional benefits I had long taken for granted.

203 beneficial; think of how many beneficiaries of social injustice deny that they enjoy any special benefits, saying “I got it all through my own hard work alone”.

Many of the benefits we enjoy are difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate without reflection. One may be unable to appreciate the benefit of citizenship in a country with a free press, for example, without reflection on the nature of government, what the press is, and how it works. Or recall Daniel Dennett’s gratitude for the benefits of peer- reviewed medical journals. This kind of gratitude is impossible without some knowledge of how journals work, what editorial boards do, and how medical science advances – knowledge that requires conscious attention to acquire. These factors did contribute to his successful surgery, but it did so in ways that are too subtle and impossible for us to see without conscious reflection. It is not the sort of benefit most of us can feel viscerally or subconsciously; it requires that we put in the cognitive effort because the subtlety and complexity of the benefits and the systems that produce them make them especially difficult to see.

Gratitude as a Virtue and as Vice

Gratitude is, of course, an emotional response and so can be virtuous or vicious in the same ways that other emotions are – by manifesting morally important cares and concerns. If someone feels grateful to live in a country with religious freedoms, they manifest a concern for something morally important. If a businessman is grateful that loopholes in the law allow him to exploit workers he manifests a lack of moral concern.

This gratitude reflects poorly even if those who feel gratitude never intend to exercise religious freedom or never actually exploit workers – the gratitude itself manifests moral concern and indifference. This distinct from the way that gratitude is often taken to be

204 morally important: Either for its role in a happy life (see Roberts 2004, 77) or, as in

Adam Smith’s account (1790/1976, esp.68ff.), its role in social stability and interpersonal relationships.

Conscious attention in particular plays an important role in the way in which gratitude is virtuous. Conscious attention can manifest cares and concerns, and when those cares are morally important the attention is virtuous. As I’ve claimed, for most of us many moral goods, particularly subtle, complex, and long-term goods, require conscious reflection to care about.

Even when the benefits and their source are not themselves moral goods, gratitude can manifest morally important concern. Ingratitude is vicious when it manifests a lack of concern for sources of value outside ourselves. It is part of a family of vicious states that stem from excessive self-concern; after all, a central issue of morality is managing self- concern and other-concern.150 It is similar to immodesty, which as I will argue, involves excessive attention to one’s own good qualities. Gratitude is virtuous because it shows that one cares about the external sources of one’s own benefit. We are not grateful to our own hard work, we are grateful to others who helped us along. This is why gratitude is in many cases more virtuous than merely being thankful: The thankful person is glad to have been helped; they care primarily about the benefit. The grateful person, however, also appreciates the helper; they also care about the source of the benefit.

Attention associated with gratitude can also manifest concern in other ways.

Consider the kind of gratitude often advocated by Buddhist philosophers: gratitude towards those who harm us. Śāntideva explicitly recommends this (BCA VI.107 and 111)

150 Bernard Williams calls this issue “fundamental to any morality or indeed sane life at all” (1981, 47).

205 as do later Tibetan thinkers like Gyalsé Thogmé who writes in his Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas (Tibetan: rgyal sras lag len so bdun ma):

While in the midst of a large group, If someone insults you and revealing your flaws, See them as a spiritual friend. To respectfully bow to them is the practice of Bodhisattvas.151

The same advice is found in Langri Tangpa’s Eight Verses for Training the Mind

(Tibetan: blo sbyong tshigs brgyad ma):

Even if you are harmed by someone Whom you have helped And have great hopes for, See them as a true spiritual guide.152

It is not hard to notice when someone is mistreating you or pointing out your faults in public. What is difficult is to notice that such situations are opportunities to practice virtue.153 Such reflective gratitude may be useful for developing certain responses to difficult situations but that is not the heart of what makes it virtuous; this is the justification of this type of gratitude offered by Fitzgerald (1998, 131ff.), one of the few analytic philosophers to consider it at all. But being useful is not the same as being virtuous and one may feel this type of gratitude but wish to develop very different responses. One might, for example, be grateful to those who insult because it provides an excuse to be violent in response.

151 This is verse fifteen; the translation is my own – the Tibetan reads: 'gro mang 'dus pa'i dbus su 'ga' zhig gis / mtshang nas brus shing tshig ngan smra na yang / de la dge ba'i bshes kyi 'du shes kyis / gus par 'dud pa rgyal sras lag len yin. 152 This is verse six. Again, the translation is mine; the Tibetan reads: gang la bdag gis phan btags pa’i / re ba che ba gang zhig gis / shin tu mi rigs gnod byed na’ang / bshes gnyen dam par blta bar shog. 153 The practice of seeing a harmer as an opportunity for practicing virtue is by no means unique to Buddhism. For example, in his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius offers similar advice: “When another’s fault offends you, turn to yourself and consider what similar shortcomings are found in you. Do you, too, find your good in riches, pleasure, reputation, or such like?” (X.30, Maxwell Staniforth, trans.) Socrates is also said to have chosen a disagreeable wife, Xanthippe, in order to develop tolerance.

206 In order for gratitude towards those that harm us to be virtuous, it must manifest morally good concern. This Buddhist cases does just that; one’s gratitude towards harmers manifests concern to care for others even when they exhibit ill will, to respond with compassion even when it is very difficult. One is not, for example, supposed to insult others just to get an opportunity to see them as a spiritual friend. These cares are morally good and so when they manifest as gratitude, they are virtuous. When a football player is grateful for an unusually difficult practice on a hot day because he sees it as a chance to improve his strength and endurance, it shows his devotion to winning. In the same way, when someone is grateful for encountering a difficult person because she sees it as a chance to improve her compassionate responsiveness, it shows her devotion to the moral good. This responsiveness need not be behavioral – maintaining or testing one’s compassion may be an internal matter, such as emotionally enduring a difficult situation.

Even when it does involve behaviors, the concern to be compassionate reflects well on someone even when they fail in this task.

Understanding gratitude as manifesting concern helps to explain when misdirected gratitude is vicious and when it is not. Sometimes misdirected gratitude manifests concern and sometimes it does not. If I ask my mother who picked her up at the airport and I mishear “Tom picked me up” as “Don picked up me” and I feel grateful to

Don, my gratitude is misdirected. It does not, however, manifest anything about my concerns. My misdirected gratitude is, we might say, “an honest mistake”.

But not all misdirected gratitude is the result of an honest mistake. Someone who never directs their gratitude to people of a certain race or sex manifests racist or sexist attitude in their gratitude. Once after several days of waiting for a visa at an Indian

207 embassy, the woman in the next line realized that she did not have the proper currency to pay her fee. My friend gave her the money so she would not have to wait in line for another day in the hot sun. Immediately after receiving the money from my friend, she turned her back and expressed thanks that the gods had helped her this day. Even in the context of a religious worldview, it manifests a lack of concern for the hardship and goodwill of my friend to direct gratitude only towards the gods (it is, after all, my friend who now had less money!).

Recall Walker’s distinction between gratitude (directed towards someone) and gratefulness (a general thankfulness not directed towards anyone). Like misplaced gratitude, general thankfulness is less virtuous than gratitude when it manifests a lack of concern for the benefactor. It is not less virtuous if I am merely thankful that my plants were watered while I was on vacation because I didn’t know that a friend came over to water them and simply thought it rained while I was away. But to simply feel thankful that an important group project was finished when I know that Jason stayed up all night to finish it manifests a lack of concern for Jason’s contribution. It shows that I don’t care about the efforts, hardships, and good will of others if a father is simply thankful that his son was saved when he knows that a team of firefighters risked their lives to save him.154

This misplaced gratitude reflects poorly on a person even if it is not outwardly expressed – someone who privately experiences gratitude only towards men but expresses gratitude to everyone is vicious because his inner experience of gratitude

154 Thankfulness can also manifest a self-centered attitude. Consider Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, who while out for a swim appreciates the beautiful reflection of the sunset on the ocean. Since the reflection points at him, he finds himself thinking, “This is a special homage the sun pays to me personally.” Mr. Palomar appreciates a benefit, but in a self-centered way (that is, until he realizes that everyone with eyes has the same experience).

208 manifests an important lack of moral concern. This is vicious even though it is not expressed in his overt behavior.

This account also explains how excessive gratitude can be vicious. Some, like

Fitzgerald (1998, 141), have claimed that excessive gratitude is not possible. Indeed, many cases of excessive gratitude do not seem vicious. It may, for example, simply reflect what one is used to: Someone from New York may feel strong gratitude when treated politely in South Carolina because they are used to rude treatment. Even in other cases it does not seem particularly vicious; feeling intense gratitude that your neighbor took your trash bin to the street seems slightly endearing rather than vicious.

Thomas Hill (1991, 5ff.), however, offers examples of servility that are in part characterized by excessive gratitude. A servile person, such as an overly deferent Uncle

Tom, feels intense gratitude for unjustly meager benefits, such as being permitted to end a full day of unpaid labor ten minutes early. Hill locates the moral defect of servility, in part, in a lack of concern for one’s own rights. This seems to me to be correct and, in my framework, can explain how excessive gratitude can be vicious. When a hitman is grateful that his victim is falling into the trap he has set, it is vicious because it manifests a lack of concern for a moral good, namely human life. Similarly, when excessive gratitude manifests a lack of concern for one’s own rights or moral dignity, it is vicious because it manifests a lack of concern for these moral goods.

So far I have claimed that gratitude as a mental reaction is strongly linked with conscious attention and that this attention is virtuous or vicious depending on the cares that it manifests. Gratitude as a trait, then, is a pattern of such episodes. Rosalind

Hursthouse (1999, 11) denies this, calling gratitude “awkward” because it is not a state of

209 character. Others, such as Roberts (2004, 60-1) respond by claiming that gratitude as a trait is simply a disposition to experience episodic gratitude. Roberts alludes to a better solution, however, when he describes gratitude as a “concern-based construal” (64).

A grateful person will have a disposition to experience gratitude but what explains this disposition is the persons cares and concerns. It is more central to gratitude as a virtue to feel grateful for having caring parents more than a bank error in your favor because the former is more important than the latter. The emotional reactions and attentive patterns of a grateful person manifest a deep concern for moral goods; it is this concern that explains the disposition. The ungrateful person, someone who takes important benefits for granted, does not have a moral vice simply by being absent minded but fails to attend to benefits and their sources because they do not care about such things.

Again, the inner experience of gratitude can manifest such cares without outward expression or even intentions. As of now, there is no cure for the type of full-body paralysis known as Locked-in Syndrome.155 Someone in a condition can know they will never be able to perform overt actions again, and arguably, unable to have intentions.

Yet, such a person can feel gratitude and such gratitude can manifest morally good cares and concerns. This gratitude makes them morally better without depending on overt actions.

The relevant cares themselves also do not depend on overt behavior or intentions.

Caring about the benefits one has received, the varied and complex sources of such benefits, or the sacrifices of others does not require behaviors or intentions. Of course, behaviors commonly accompany such concerns, but they are not necessary for them.

155 The technical name for this is cerebromedullospinal disconnection.

210 Even if Dennett were to die and become a disembodied soul, incapable of acting in the world or communicating with anyone, he could still have the same concerns that give rise to his gratitude to those who helped him. A stone Weather Watcher can be grateful for the shade of a tree and a paralyzed person can be grateful for the medical care and familial support he receives even though such concerns cannot be expressed in overt behavior.

III. MODESTY

In general, we take modesty to be an admirable quality in a person. One of the qualities that makes a Gandhi or a Mandela so great is the relationship they have with their own goodness; they refrain from tooting their own horns and instead seem to focus on their own limitations. When the Dalai Lama refers to himself as “just a simple monk” we call him modest and think it a good thing.156 Much of the contemporary discussion of modesty has centered on whether or not modest people can be accurate in their beliefs about their own qualities. For some, like Julia Driver, modesty essentially involves underestimating or being ignorant of one's own good qualities.157 On this view, the Dalai

Lama is modest because he is wrong; he is not just a simple monk, but an important spiritual and political figure for people around the world. Other philosophers, threatened

156 This is, of course, not modesty in the Victorian sexual sense (as found, for example, in Hume's Treatise III.2.12), but a certain orientation that many (if not all) virtuous people seem to have. Some draw a distinction between modesty and humility; for example, Nuyen (1998) and Ben-Ze'ev (1993) claim that humility involves underestimation, while modesty does not. I take the terms to be interchangeable but will use the term ‘modest’ in my discussion. 157 Driver has since softened her view from the claim that modesty entails ignorance, to merely claiming that modesty is compatible with ignorance (see Driver 1999). I will argue against the former claim, but leave it open that the latter claim is true.

211 by the idea that a virtue might require ignorance, have responded to Driver by offering alternative accounts that allow (or even require) the modest person to make accurate self- assessments.

I will argue that this entire dispute is misguided; modesty is about neither accuracy nor ignorance, but instead is rooted in certain patterns of attention. Being modest involves inattention to one’s own good qualities and attention to external sources of those qualities. Again, this attention is often not voluntary and is independent from associated behaviors (one can act modestly without being modest).

Criteria: What We Want in a Theory

Michael Slote (1983, 61) points out that modesty is a dependent virtue; being modest requires some other good quality for us to be modest about. Some, for example Maes

(2004, 489), assume that modesty is concerned only with one’s own good qualities. This need not be the case, however. Modesty is often about good qualities not of one's own, but only related to oneself in some way. A mother can be immodest when she boasts about her son's grades. A Detroiter can be immodest when talking about the performance of the Red Wings. A modern Greek can be immodest when bragging about the intellectual achievements of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. If the people in cases like these are in fact behaving immodestly, it seems that the quality one is modest about need not be one's own, but simply closely related to oneself (my child, my team, my people).158

Julia Driver (2001, 17ff) offers two features of modesty that any account should explain. They are:

158 Because there is no natural way to talk about the good qualities closely related to oneself, I will often refer to the relation modest people have to their own good qualities. Talk of “one’s own good qualities” in my discussion should be understood in this wider sense, referring to any good quality related to oneself.

212 The Existence of False Modesty: Some people are not modest but are simply playing the part. These people may be acting modestly, they might say the right words and assume the right postures, but they're faking it. The existence of these fakers rules out accounts of modesty that reduce it to a set of behaviors. Modesty cannot be just acting in a certain way, because there are people who do act that way, but are not modest.

Self-Attribution Strangeness: Roy Sorensen and Julia Driver both claim that the sentence “I am modest” is self-defeating; to say such a thing is to be immodest. Because of this feature, Sorensen (1988, 160) calls modesty an “ethical blindspot” and Driver (1989, 2001) calls it a “virtue of ignorance”. Either name suggests something about the trait – if you've got it, you won't know it (and if you seem to know about it, then you must not really have it). Whether or not self-attributing modesty is always self-undermining (I will claim that it is not), a good theory of modesty will explain why it seems strange most of the time.

To give an account of a virtue, however, one should not only explain the special features of the virtue, but also why it is a virtue in the first place. So, in addition to Driver’s conditions, a good theory will also provide a framework that helps us see what is good about modesty and what is bad about immodesty.

In what follows, I will argue that one can be modest whether or not one gets it right about the good qualities in question; what is essential to modesty is that we direct our attention in certain ways. By describing modesty in this way we can get what we want from a theory of modesty, incorporate the intuitions at the heart of the existing accounts while avoiding their failings, and see what is so good about being modest (as distinct from behaving modestly).

Modesty and Attention

Modesty is also a virtue of attention, though in a somewhat unique way. A common- sense way to understand what it is to be modest about something is to not make a big deal about it, downplay it, or ignore it. We ignore things by directing our attention away from

213 them. In this sense, modesty is often a virtue of inattention. We can be modest through inattention in two ways: Quality Inattention and Value Inattention.

Quality Inattention (“Oh, that?”): A person can be modest about a quality simply by directing their attention away from the quality itself. They can be modest by ignoring good qualities that are closely related to them. Consider Sean, who has several good qualities as a driver. He not only drives safely and has a good sense of direction, but also has a knack for knowing where there will be traffic and where the police will be.

Sean doesn't think about these things though; he does not pay conscious attention to his driving at all. He just does his best to get from one place to another without any reflection. He would never boast about his driving skills or even think of bringing up the issue of his driving skills, mostly because such things are just not on his mind.

It seems appropriate to say that Sean is modest about his driving skill. But nowhere in the story does it mention whether or not his assessment of his own driving skills is accurate. Perhaps, as in cases offered by Driver, Sean does not pay attention to his driving skills because he really is ignorant of them. But this need not be the case. It could just as easily be that Sean is aware of how skilled he is at driving in the way that

Emma is aware that there is a tree in her path. He might use his skills when the stakes are high: for example, when his pregnant sister needs to get to the hospital quickly. If this is the case, Sean knows how skilled he is at driving, but he just doesn't spend much time thinking about it. It is this inattention that is at the heart of his modesty, whether or not he is aware of his good quality.159

159 Jay Garfield points out that modesty is compatible with confidence: The cyclist Cadel Evans can be modest about his achievements even though he knows he has a good chance of winning a race.

214 Value Inattention (“It's no big deal”): A person can also be modest not by ignoring the quality itself, but by directing attention away from the value of that quality.

Consider Frank, a very skilled architect. Frank pays very close attention to his skill as an architect; it is this painstaking attention that has allowed him to develop into the great architect he is today. Frank takes his job very seriously and wants to do the best job he can, but he doesn't spend much time thinking about how his skills allow entire buildings to be created where there were none before. He does not dwell on the fact that his ideas provide hundreds of people with jobs, create the environments where hundreds more live and work, and shape the skyline of entire cities. His thoughts very rarely wander to how important his work is; such things simply do not occur to him and so he never mentions them. When he thinks about work, it is most often about the ideas he has for the current project.

Like Sean, it seems reasonable to call Frank modest. But unlike Sean, Frank does pay attention to the quality he is modest about. What Frank ignores is the value of that quality. Again we can describe Frank in a way that makes him seem modest with no reference to whether or not he is ignorant or accurate in his assessment of how valuable his skills are. The story doesn't say and the story doesn't have to say either. If we add to the story that Frank, deep down, is aware of exactly how important his work is, he still seems modest because of how he directs his attention. If we were to change the story to make Frank ignorant of just how important his skill is, he still seems modest. It is his inattention to the importance of his skills that makes Frank modest, not whether or not he gets it right.

215 Sometimes, however, a modest person does pay attention to the quality they are modest about and its value. Such a person is not modest through inattention, but by directing their attention towards certain factors. For example, David is a mechanical engineer and is very skilled at what he does. Like Frank, David has developed his skill by directing a good deal of his attention towards his abilities as an engineer. Unlike Frank,

David also directs his attention to the value of his skills. He considers the importance his work has on others, how his projects save lives and provide jobs for hundreds, if not thousands of people. Though he attends to his skills and their importance, David more often considers how fortunate he has been to have the opportunities that led him to where he is. “Sure I've walked a lot of roads,” he muses, “but nearly all of those roads were already paved when I got there.” He often reflects on how lucky he has been to have a supportive and stable family, to be born in a place with access to good education, and how patient and encouraging his teachers have been. This is characteristic of David's mental life; he often finds himself thinking about how much harder it would have been to succeed if he had been born deaf like his mother, or if his family had not been able to afford to send him to college.160

David seems modest not because of what he ignores, but because of what he does not ignore. Even though he attends to his good qualities and their value, he also attends to the role of forces of circumstance and luck in producing those qualities. This intuition is what leads many to claim that the modest person keeps perspective (see Flanagan 1990,

Nuyen 1998, and Raterman 2006); an essential part of keeping perspective is attending to

160 Julia Driver (2001, 22) discusses the role of recognizing luck in modesty, but concludes that it is irrelevant. The term ‘recognizing’ is ambiguous between a simple awareness and conscious attention to the role of luck. I agree with Driver that recognition of luck in the sense of simply being aware of its role is insufficient for modesty, but claim that it is relevant in the latter sense of conscious attention.

216 the external conditions that allowed for the quality one is modest about. As before, attending is not sufficient: An arrogant person can attend to circumstance when belittling its role, but one cannot keep perspective without it.

As in the other cases, it is not specified whether or not David is accurate in his judgment of his skill or its value. He might get it right about these things or he might not; he seems modest either way. He may even be wrong about which factors played a role in his success and how great their role was – it doesn't seem to matter much. If it turned out that David was wrong about the role his parents played in his success (suppose his wise psychotherapist discovers that they did not play much of a role at all), he would still count as modest. What matters is that he directs his attention towards these as relevant factors in producing his skills.

We are now in a position to see what is required for modesty and what is not.

Following Slote (1983, 61), it is necessary to have a good quality to be modest about.

Contrary to most contemporary views, it is not necessary to underestimate the good quality nor is it necessary to have an accurate assessment. Instead, what is necessary is to direct one’s conscious attention in certain ways—away from the trait or its value and towards the outside causes and conditions that played a role in it.

Attending in these ways, however, is not sufficient for modesty; it must happen for the right reasons. Those who are inattentive to their good qualities only because an attention disorder prevents them from attending to anything for very long or because they are the kind of pessimists who never attend to any good qualities at all are not modest.

When we take Sean, Frank, or David to be modest, we take their patterns of attention to be a result of their values or desires.

217 As Thomas Scanlon (1998, 39ff.) and Nomy Arpaly (2011, 77) note, there is often a close link between our desires and our attention. Someone who cares deeply about music is more apt to notice which song was playing in a car ride to the airport than someone who is indifferent to music. A person who cares about including everyone in a group is more likely to notice when someone is being left out. David counts as modest because his frequent attention to external factors in his success is a manifestation of his concern for the role of such factors. Unlike someone who attends to the same things only because of a nagging parent, David’s attention happens for the right reasons.

Inattentive modesty, like that of Sean or Frank, can also be a result of our values or desires; it can be the result of a lack of certain desires or values. Someone who does not care about sports will be unlikely to attend to the baseball game showing on a TV in a bar. A philosopher who cares little about fashion can wear a shirt inside out without noticing. Sean and Frank’s inattention to their own good qualities is not an instance of modesty if it is the result of a clinical attention disorder or a pessimistic temperament.

However, they are modest if their inattention is the result of a lack of certain bad desires or concerns, such as a desire to ogle their own self-image. Just as one’s inattention to the

TV in a bar can display one’s lack of concern for sports, Sean and Frank’s inattention is modest when it reveals that certain bad desires or values are absent.

Sean and Frank can lack a desire to puff up their own egos regardless of whether or not this puffed up image would be accurate; David can be concerned with the role of external factors whether or not he gets it right about how big a role they played in his success. I will later suggest that this connection between patterns of attention and values and concerns allows us to see what is morally good about modesty, but the general

218 account of modesty as a virtue of attention is not wedded to any particular account of the desires and values that make directed attention count as modest. As long as one accepts that our values and desires are often closely related to how we direct our attention, one can fill in one’s own preferred good and bad desires or values into the account. The specifics of these values and desires are irrelevant to the claim that modesty is a virtue of attention. We do not need to mention whether or not Sean, Frank, or David gets it right about how good they are or how much their skill matters in order to describe the desires, values, and patterns of attention that make them modest.

Considerations of attention are lurking in other accounts: Jason Brennan (2007,

120) describes his modest person as engaging in “selective focus.” He is right about that:

Sean, Frank, and David all engage in selective focus, though not, as Brennan suggests, by comparing themselves to an ideal and others to a lesser scale. There also seems to be, as

Hans Maes suggests, an asymmetry: Modest people attend to things regarding others that they do not attend to regarding themselves.

The attention-based account of modesty is closest to the accounts offered by

Michael Ridge and Ty Raterman. Ridge (2000, 277) suggests that modest people “de- emphasize” what they are modest about, while Raterman (2006, 228) describes the modest as “reluctant” to evaluate themselves in terms of their goodness. One way to de- emphasize or downplay something is to ignore it. Modesty need not demand a reluctance to evaluate, but simply a reluctance to attend to positive evaluations. Frank need not be reluctant to evaluate himself highly as architect – what is important is that he is reluctant to dwell on such positive self-evaluations. He may be aware of such evaluations and even

219 willing to make them, but he seems modest because he just does not pay much attention to them.

Criteria Revisited: Getting What We Want

Now we are in a position to see how an attention-based account of modesty can explain the important features of modesty discussed earlier. Modesty involves certain patterns of conscious attention, which are characterized by an inattentiveness to good qualities that reflect well on oneself, the value of such qualities, and one’s own role in bringing them about. This kind of inattention does not require a complete lack of attention; isolated instances of attention will not spoil one’s modesty. It does, however, require that one not dwell on these things. Modest patterns of attention also often involve a positive attentiveness to the role of external causes and conditions in producing the good qualities.

These patterns of attention must happen for the right reasons (though such reasons may well be unknown to the modest person). Though a specific account of what the right reasons are is not essential to an attention-based account, I have suggested that the modest person attends in this way because of a lack of selfish desires or values (such as the desire to massage one’s own ego) and a positive concern for goods unrelated to oneself. We can now reconsider the features of modesty to be explained and see how an attention-based account can explain them.

Since attention is not merely acting in a certain way, but an internal feature of our mental lives, the account allows for false modesty. Consider the difference between paying attention to a story your friend is telling you and acting as if you are paying attention. To be modest, David cannot simply act as if he is paying attention to the role fortune played in his success, he must really pay attention to it.

220 The same is true of inattention. There is a difference between ignoring someone at a party and acting as if you are ignoring them. You might be acting as if you are ignoring a former friend by not looking in their direction and not reacting to things they say, but internally your attention may be totally focused on the friend your are pretending to ignore. The same is true of modesty; those who only pretend to ignore certain good qualities are guilty of false modesty.

Consider a particular case of false modesty, a way of downplaying something outwardly, but not inwardly: the notion of sprezzatura (“nonchalance”) from

Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier. Castiglione describes it this way:

...to practice in everything a certain sprezzatura that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought. From this I believe grace is in large measure derived, because everyone knows the difficulty of those things that are rare and done well, and therefore facility in them excites the highest admiration ...161

Those who practice sprezzatura will act as if they have paid no attention to their good quality in order to show off. When someone tells them that they made a good shot, they reply, “What shot? Oh that? I wasn't even trying.” But internally, they do notice and do pay attention to their good quality and their own efforts in bringing it about. After all, as

Castiglione points out, there are designs for them to conceal. To ignore achievements in your own mind is to be modest; to act as if you are ignoring them is often done to gain admiration and is false modesty.

This is not to say that false modesty is always bad. It can be good by producing good consequences like allowing people to get along better and can even be virtuous if it manifests a concern for others. If an immodest engineer at least acts modestly, it can result in a more pleasant and productive workplace for everyone on the design team. If he

161 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier I.26.

221 does so because he cares about them, that itself can reflect well on his moral character.

False modesty can often be the result of genuinely good motives, such as the desire to spare another person’s feelings. Even making the effort to act as if one is modest can be a manifestation of concern for others and their feelings.

It can also play a role in moral development—an important way to acquire many valuable traits is to first act as if you have the trait. Acting as if you are brave can, over time, succeed in actually making you brave. Acting as if you are ignoring your former friend, by avoiding places where you would meet and shying away from conversations about them, can help you come to actually think of them less often. In the same way, acting as if you are not attending to your own good qualities, for example by avoiding the topic in conversation or steering clear of known flatterers, might also help you to actually pay less attention to them. This does not mean that false modesty is just as good as modesty, but it can still be beneficial. Like most knock-offs, it can be good, but is no substitute for the original.162

Recall that some philosophers claim that uttering the sentence “I am modest” is self-defeating (see Sorensen 1988, 120-1 and Driver 2001, 17-8). However, this is not true in all contexts.163 Consider Steven, who actually is quite modest. One day when out with friends, Steven's modest nature becomes the topic of conversation. Naturally, Steven is not interested in discussing the issue and denies that he has any outstanding virtue. But the more he denies it, the longer and more adamant his friends become that he really is one of the most modest people they know. They cite incident after incident to illustrate his modesty. Finally Steven reluctantly admits, “All right, all right – I'm modest. Can we

162 I thank Nomy Arpaly for helpful discussion of these issues. 163 Ty Raterman (2006, 232) makes a similar point; his example is of uttering the sentence in the context of a quiet conversation with a good friend.

222 please talk about something else?” In this context, Steven's utterance of “I'm modest” does not seem to detract from his modesty. In fact, it is an expression of his modesty.

An attention-based account can explain Driver and Sorensen's intuition about the strangeness of self-attributing modesty in general and how Steven's utterance does not undermine his modesty. In most contexts, saying “I am modest” involves directing attention towards a good quality, modesty itself. However, when Steven says it, he is directing attention away from his good quality; he reluctantly admits it so everyone can move on to the next topic of conversation. Insofar as modesty is a good quality, modesty entails meta-modesty. If Sean and Frank dwell on their own inattention to their good qualities, they are not being modest because they are dwelling on one of their good qualities—their modesty. It is also not clear that one can attend to one's inattention to an object without also attending to the object.

Thinking about how you never think about ice cream is thinking about ice cream.

Similarly, dwelling on how you never dwell on how great you are is dwelling on how great you are. An attention-based account explains why in general self-attributions of modesty are self-undermining; they often draw attention to a good quality, namely one’s own modesty. But it also explains how in some contexts, like that of Steven, uttering the phrase “I am modest” not only fails to be self-undermining, but can even be an expression of modesty.

Things get more complex for those, like David, who are modest by attending to the role external factors play in creating and sustaining his good qualities. David might pay attention to how much he attends to external factors when considering his good qualities. But if he is modest, he will also consider the role of external factors in directing

223 his attention in this way. It does not seem to spoil his modesty if David also reflects, “I guess am pretty modest, but it's all thanks to how my parents raised me and how many supportive friends I have that I am able to be so.” Here David manages to be modest about his own modesty by focusing on the role of situational factors in bringing it about.

Of course, this reflection need not be expressed to count as virtuous; it reflects well on him even if it is completely private and unexpressed.

Modesty as a Moral Virtue

Part of what is interesting about modesty is that its status as a virtue is contested. The goodness of modesty is not as obvious as the goodness of virtues such as courage or generosity. What is so bad about immodesty? What is so good about being modest? It is important to distinguish what is bad about being immodest from what is bad about behaving immodestly. Behaving immodestly is a social vice – those who constantly direct the focus to their own good qualities are unpleasant for others to be around (“But enough about me, what do you think about me?”). In this sense, those behaving immodestly are like children desperate for attention, whose constant tooting of their own horns bothers everyone else.

However, as the existence of false modesty shows, one can be immodest without behaving immodestly. What, then, is so bad about dwelling on your own good qualities, their importance, or your own role in bringing them about? Like immodest behavior, one thing that is bad about this kind of habit of attention is that it often has bad effects. Aside from a non-accidental connection to immodest behavior, an immodest person wears a kind of mental blinders, which push aside many things of value. It is a feature of conscious attention that in attending to something one ignores another: While you are

224 attending to this sentence, you are not attending to the weather outside your window or what time it is. Immodest people, by over-attending to their own goodness, do so at the expense of attending to good qualities in others, which can stand in the way of meaningful relationships. By constantly focusing on their own good qualities, the immodest person experiences the world through a self-centered lens, which is a bad way to experience life. Attending to the good qualities of others allows for the valuable and positive experience of sympathetic joy at the successes of others. It also allows one to recognize capable teachers and opportunities to learn from others.

This is not to say that appreciating your good qualities or even noticing them once in a while is vicious. In one sense, ‘inattention’ to something means that one completely ignores it; to say that I did not bring an umbrella because of my inattention to the weather means I didn’t notice the clouds at all. However, in another sense, ‘inattention’ means that one pays little attention to something; to say that a husband is inattentive to his wife does not require that he never direct his attention towards his wife, only that he does so infrequently. It is inattention in the latter sense that is related to modesty. A single swallow does not a summer make – it is not as if a single moment of attention to his own driving skill would spoil Sean’s modesty. Sean and Frank are modest because they do not dwell on their good qualities.164

Even if immodest patterns of attention do have these bad effects, that is not sufficient to make immodesty a moral vice. On can judge that being illiterate, depressed,

164 Of course, the line between mere occasional noticing and dwelling is fuzzy and it can be difficult to tell how much attention is too much. This vagueness does not mean that the distinction between dwelling and mere attending cannot play any explanatory role. There are definite cases of dwelling, as when someone spends night and day thinking about a mean remark or about a loved one. There are also definite cases of noticing without dwelling, as when we notice the dirty dishes in the sink but do not give them a second thought.

225 or scatter-brained are bad ways to experience life in that they limit a person’s relationship to things of value without taking such states to be moral vices. Someone who is illiterate is cut off from a good deal of value, but being illiterate does not make someone morally worse. A better suggestion is that modesty is a moral virtue when the associated pattern of attention is a manifestation of morally good desires or values.

Similarly, immodesty is a moral vice when it manifests morally bad values or desires, or at least a lack of morally good ones. Recall that the patterns of attention described count as modest only when they signal something about the person’s values or desires. It might be, as for Sean and Frank, a lack of certain bad desires such as the desire to make others look bad or the desire to narcissistically gaze at oneself. Or it might be, as for David, the presence of good desires such as a concern for others or the desire to be less self-involved.

As with other inner state, creatures such as Weather Watchers or people with full- body paralysis can have the patterns of attention I’ve described even though they cannot perform overt actions or form intentions. Insofar as attention is an inner state, one can be modest without expressing it in overt behaviors. Nor to the relevant cares and concerns require behaviors or intentions. Caring about the good qualities of others is often associated with the intention to promote them or express approval of them, but these intentions are not necessary. One can care about the good qualities of a long-disappeared civilization. A stone Weather Watcher can care about the beautiful markings on its neighboring Weather Watcher and a paralyzed person can still dwell on the good qualities of his doctor rather than his own courage.

226 It is important to note that, like many virtues, modesty is not of equal importance to everyone. Philippa Foot (1979, 8-14) suggests that virtues counter common temptations to vice; courage is a virtue because there is a human tendency to run from danger. When we talk of virtues in general, we make assumptions about human psychology in general. Modesty is a virtue because, in general, people have a tendency to dwell on their own successes and to overlook the role of external conditions in bringing them about. For most of us, it is easy to notice our own name when provided a list of grant recipients or for our gaze to linger on our own face when shown a group photo.

This tendency, however, is far from universal. There are people who find it difficult to notice their own good qualities, and these people may need to devote more of their attention to their own good qualities. Aristotle rightly points out that the process of acquiring virtue must be sensitive to the differing natural tendencies of each individual.165

Someone who has a tendency to dwell on their failures and bad qualities might do well to attend to their good qualities more than someone who finds it all too easy to dwell on their own success. If Kermit the Frog is miserable because he has a hard time noticing the good qualities he has, it is good for him to sing a song every day that draws his attention to the good things about being green. The virtues need not be a one-size-fits-all affair, and modesty is no exception. But given general human tendencies, modesty is still a virtue for most of us.

Rather than focus on the accuracy or ignorance of self-evaluations, as has been the trend in accounts of modesty, a deeper understanding of modesty can come from an attention-based theory. It allows us to account for not only the existence of false modesty

165 Nicomachean Ethics 1109b1-8.

227 and the strangeness of self-attribution, but also allows a better framework for explaining why we take modesty to be a moral virtue at all.

228 CONCLUSION

I’ve argued that understanding virtue as a disposition to behavioral action or intention is too limited. Many states that intuitively make one a morally better or worse person do not require behavioral action: involuntary mental states like pleasure and emotion can be virtuous or vicious independently of any actions associated with them. Similarly, voluntary mental action like directed attention can also be virtuous or vicious without any associated overt behaviors.

As of now, there is no cure for the full-body paralysis known as Locked-in

Syndrome. Someone with the misfortune to be in such a position will likely know this and so not only cannot engage in overt behavior, but also cannot intend such behaviors either since we cannot intend to do something that we know we cannot do. Virtues like honesty or generosity seem to require, at the very least, the intention to perform certain overt actions like telling the truth or giving gifts. These virtues may well be out of reach for someone with Locked-in Syndrome, but that is not true of all virtues. This person can not only care about a variety of moral goods like justice or the wellbeing of others, but can manifest such concerns in their mental lives – as pleasure, displeasure, emotion, and conscious attention. In this way virtues like gratitude, mudita, and righteous indignation are importantly different from virtues like honesty or generosity because the do not have intention as a necessary condition.

Of course, these states are commonly associated with overt behaviors and intentions in everyday life. I have argued that such states can be virtuous independently of this connection to behavior. Even if they are not necessary for being virtuous,

229 behavioral intentions may well sweeten these mental states. There may also be something morally good about the expression of such inner states, but that is distinct from the virtuousness of the state itself; even in a world where our concerns are radically disconnected from our actions, moral care and concern would still, as Kant said of the good will, “like a jewel, shine by itself” and such concern could still manifest as pleasure, emotion, or attention in such a world.

There are different modes of assessment in moral theory – aside from virtue and vice, we make judgments of permissibility, obligation, praiseworthiness, and blameworthiness. These latter judgments are judgments about actions; in arguing that inner states can be virtuous or vicious independently of overt action, I have shown that judgments of virtue and vice do not simply reduce to these act-centered judgments.

Evaluating persons is a distinct mode of evaluation that contains aspects that cannot be captured with concepts used to evaluate overt behavior. There is more to being a good person than performing right and praiseworthy actions and having morally good intentions. In contrast with what philosophers from G.E. Moore to Rawls and Nozick have claimed, not all evaluations of persons are derivative from evaluations of actions and intentions.

Explaining these various states count as virtuous or vicious by the cares and concerns they manifest not only explains how such different phenomena can count as virtuous or vicious, but allows us to distinguish cognitive and bodily defects from moral vice. This concern is what explains the various hedonic, affective, attentive, and even behavioral dispositions we think of virtuous people as having.

230 I have claimed that the heart of being a good person is caring about moral goods.

The heart of being a bad person is either malicious concerns or moral indifference. The latter type of viciousness is more common that the former; one need not be a Hitler or a

Pol Pot to fail to be a good person. Simple indifference is much more common, as in

Fitzgerald’s famous description of Tom and Daisy:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. (1926/2008, 170)

What makes Tom and Daisy bad is not merely the bad things they do, but the root of such things. Tom and Daisy are morally bad people not only because they do bad things, but because they don’t care about the wellbeing or rights of others.

An important feature of my account is that it allows for variation in virtuous people. If all I know about someone is that she is morally virtuous, how much do I know about her? The answer, I think it not very much. I do not, for example, know if she has cognitive or bodily impairment. I know that she cares about moral goods like rights and wellbeing, but I do not know how such cares manifest either culturally or individually.

Injustice may make her sad, angry, both, or neither. Virtuous people are not clones of one another. They will have different personalities and cultural outlooks. What they share as virtuous people is a deep concern for moral goods.

If, as I’ve argued, involuntary mental states can be vicious, one might wonder, “If they’re really involuntary, who cares? It’s not like I can do anything about it”. There are a few things to be said about this worry. One is that guidance is an important part of morality, but it not the only part. We use moral standards not only to advise and guide action, but also to evaluate. Remember that an account of vice need not be an account of

231 blameworthiness. Someone may not be responsible or blameworthy for being a racist or an “asshole” – but still be a worse person than they would be without such traits.

Such evaluations are also not as impractical as they may seem. Though we cannot voluntarily will our emotions, we can cultivate and discourage them. In this sense, our emotional lives are a bit like a garden. One cannot simply will into being a beautiful garden. One must start with the seeds and soil at hand, and contend with the oft-fickle weather. This does not mean that one has no effect on the beauty of one’s garden and it does not mean that there is nothing to be done to improve things.166

If we try to imagine evaluating people from God’s point of view, we would, I think, not look only at what they’ve done, but also at many aspects of their mental lives.

Most importantly, we would want to know if their heart was in the right place – if they cared about the right things. When sizing them up, what matters most is what mattered to them.

166 There are many psychological, philosophical, and religious practices that aim at cultivating a particular kind of emotional life. This sort of practical advice can be found in the Stoics (see Irvine 2009) and the Tibetan “Mind-Training” (Tibetan: blo sbyong) literature (see Gyalchok and Gyaltsen 2006).

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