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The Value of the Virtues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2014

BRIAN MCELWEE
BRIAN MCELWEE*
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, [email protected]
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Abstract

I argue that debates about virtue are best settled by clearly distinguishing two questions:

  1. (a) What sort of character trait is there reason to cultivate?

  2. (b) What sort of character trait is there reason (morally) to admire?

With this distinction in mind, I focus on recent accounts of what consequentialists ought to say about virtue, arguing that:

  1. (1) The instrumentalist view of virtue accepted by many prominent consequentialists should not be accepted as the default view for consequentialists to hold.

  2. (2) The main rival view, the appropriate response account, not only avoids the major objection facing the instrumental view, but gives the correct diagnosis of where it goes wrong.

  3. (3) Two objections that seem to face the appropriate response account can in fact be convincingly met in ways which leave it looking stronger.

  4. (4) The appropriate response account is also to be preferred to a disjunctive view or a mixed view.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 61 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Driver, J., ‘The Virtues and Human Nature’, How Should One Live?, ed. Crisp, R. (Oxford, 1996), pp. 111–30Google Scholar; Driver, J., Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crisp, R., ‘Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue’, Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992), pp. 139–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Bentham, J., An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. Harrison, W. (Oxford, 1789/1948), p. 246Google Scholar.

3 Endorsement of this general pattern of evaluation has come to be known as Global Consequentialism. See Pettit, P. and Smith, M., ‘Global Consequentialism’, Morality, Rules and Consequences, ed. Hooker, B., Mason, E. and Miller, D. E. (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 121–33Google Scholar; S. Kagan, ‘Evaluative Focal Points’, Morality, Rules and Consequences, pp. 134–55.

4 Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, ed. Crisp, R. (Oxford, 1861/1998)Google Scholar.

5 Kant, I., Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge, 1785/1997), p. 8Google Scholar.

6 Mill, J. S., Collected Works, ed. Robson, J. (Toronto, 1961–91), vol. 10, p. 337Google Scholar.

7 Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 5, para. 14.

8 Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 3.

9 Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 5, para. 14.

10 In this article, I do not attempt to delineate specifically moral admiration. I may have reason to admire a person for her beauty, but intuitively the sort of admiration that is appropriate is not the same as that which is appropriate towards someone for her generosity of spirit or her courage in speaking up against injustice. Beauty is not itself, of course, a character trait. But it may be that character traits can sometimes merit a similar sort of non-moral admiration to that merited by beauty. And so it is more promising to characterize the concept of a virtue as a morally admirable trait, rather than more broadly as a trait which is admirable in any way. I plan to return to these themes in future work.

11 This point is at the heart of the extensive recent literature on the ‘wrong kind of reasons’. See Rabinowicz, W. and Rønnow-Rasmussen, T., ‘The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value’, Ethics 114 (2004), pp. 391–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and for further relevant literature, the bibliography in D. Jacobson, ‘Fitting Attitude Theories of Value’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitting-attitude-theories/> (2011).

12 Hurka, T., Virtue, Vice and Value (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hurka's development of this type of view is inspired by G. E. Moore and Hastings Rashdall. See Moore, G. E.Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903/1993)Google Scholar and Rashdall, H., The Theory of Good and Evil (Oxford, 1907)Google Scholar. See also Adams, R. M., A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a non-consequentialist, and less systematic, version of the appropriate response view.

13 Hurka, Virtue, p. 8.

14 Hurka, Virtue, p. 17.

15 As Hurka develops the view in Virtue, Vice and Value, he supposes that there are three ‘base’ values: pleasure, achievement and knowledge. Virtue is an appropriate response to these goods, or to virtue and vice themselves, as higher-order intrinsic goods.

16 See Feldman, F., Utilitarianism, Hedonism and Desert (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rashdall, Theory; Kagan, S., The Geometry of Desert (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Other interesting questions which I do not address in detail in this article include: (a) How good is virtue compared to happiness? How are we to weigh these against each other in practical decisions? (b) How good is appropriate response in action (striving to promote the good) relative to appropriate emotional response (desiring the good, taking pleasure in the good)?

(c) Does understanding virtue as appropriate response to value call for any significant revision of the standard list of virtues and vices? As Hurka says, ‘Our everyday moral thinking focuses less on the general nature of virtue and vice than on particular traits such as benevolence, courage and malice. An acceptable account of virtue must cohere with this thinking, capturing at least many commonsense virtues and vices and explaining both what they have in common that makes them virtues and vices and what distinguishes them from each other’ (Hurka, Virtue, p. 92). Hurka discusses in chapter 4 of Virtue, Vice and Value how many traits commonly regarded as virtues are indeed well understood as specific ways of loving the good. And in the next section of the article, I consider two apparently clear cases of virtuous traits, honesty and patience, which may not at first sight seem to fit the account.

18 Todd Calder calls this the Implausible Instability argument. Calder, T., ‘Against Consequentialist Theories of Virtue and Vice’, Utilitas 19 (2007), pp. 201–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Driver, ‘Virtues’, p. 120.

20 For convincing arguments that Driver's own treatment of such cases in terms is unsatisfactory, see Skorupski, J., ‘Externalism and Self-Governance’, Utilitas 16 (2004), pp. 12–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Calder, ‘Against Consequentialist Theories’.

21 I here pass over the interesting question of what precise combination of sentiments we would have reason to feel towards those who, from the virtuous motive of aiming to secure the good of the children's lives being extended, deliberately cultivated the vicious trait within themselves.

22 Driver, ‘Virtues’, pp. 117–18.

23 Skorupski, ‘Externalism’, p. 20.

24 Adams, Theory, p. 28.

25 See, for example, Railton, P., ‘Alienation, Consequentialism and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 13 (1984), pp. 134–71Google Scholar.

26 As Sidgwick observes, ‘it seems that most persons are only capable of strong affections towards a few human beings in certain close relations, especially the domestic: and that if these were suppressed, what they would feel towards their fellow-creatures generally would be, as Aristotle says, “but a watery kindness” and a very feeble counterpoise to self-love: so that such specialised affections as the present organisation of society normally produces afford the best means of developing in most persons a more extended benevolence, to the degree to which they are capable of feeling it’ (Sidgwick, H., The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (London, 1907), p. 434)Google Scholar.

27 Adams, R. M., Finite and Infinite Goods (New York, 1999), p. 300Google Scholar. ‘There are so many goods in the world that I could promote, and so many needs in the world that I could try to meet. There is a danger that I will be either fragmented, going too many different ways; or crushed, seeing my obligations as unlimited; or immobilized by the clamor of competing claims. An idea of what is my task in the universe, and what things are my things to care for, may impel me and free me to devote my attention to those things’ (Adams, Finite, p. 292).

28 To the extent that making the dispositions of others a focus of my attentions and efforts is a good bet in promoting the good, doing so may be a virtue, but not one that readily falls under the heading of honesty. Honesty may just be the name of one virtue relating to truth-telling, promise-keeping and so on − that which is primarily concerned with one's own dispositions. Compare the virtue of prudence. It is concerned with looking after oneself, giving sufficient weight to one's future well-being as compared to one's short-term well-being. This is a virtue which makes ineliminable reference to oneself. But acclaiming it as a virtue does not in itself commit us to the idea that it is more virtuous to give greater attention to one's own future good than to the future good of others.

29 A wholly different type of reply to the agent-relativity challenge is to develop an agent-relative conception of value, which can readily be squared with an agent-relative conception of virtue. This possibility is explored, though never explicitly defended, in Hurka, Virtue, ch. 7. For a response to the agent-relativity challenge similar to mine, see Adams, Theory, pp. 26–31. See also B. Bradley, ‘Review of Robert Merrihew Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, <https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25302-a-theory-of-virtue-excellence-in-being-for-the-good/> (2007), for further discussion.

30 Russell, L., ‘What Even Consequentialists Should Say About the Virtues’, Utilitas 19 (2007), pp. 466–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Note that there is a closely related, but tidier view that we might call the dual source view. On Russell's disjunctive view, a trait may be both a virtue and vice, if it is intrinsically good but instrumentally bad, or if it is instrumentally good but intrinsically bad. We could instead develop a view which agrees with the disjunctive account that both intrinsic and instrumental goodness of a trait can be relevant to its status as a virtue, but just makes one overall assessment of whether it is a virtue or vice, combining its intrinsic and instrumental value. This version would allow, more intuitively than Russell's version, that the categories are mutually exclusive. But this view would likewise fall foul of the same objection, getting the wrong answer in the Mutors case and others like it. And, even more than Russell's version, it blurs the importantly distinct questions of whether a trait is a virtue, in the sense of being a trait we have reason to admire, and of what overall reason there is for cultivating the trait.

32 Driver, Uneasy Virtue, p. 70, quoted by Calder, ‘Against Consequentialist Theories’, p. 216.

33 I am grateful to audiences at the Universities of Cardiff and St Andrews for their feedback, to Sarah Broadie, Matthew Clayton and Tim Fowler for especially helpful discussion, and to a referee for Utilitas for extremely useful comments on an earlier draft.