Virtue Quest

I was talking with a friend this weekend, and she said that she was a little confused when she first visited my blog because it wasn’t clear what kind of virtue I was talking about. So I took another look at the page, and I realize that the words “classical” and “cardinal” are entirely missing from the page.

I’ll rectify that soon, but in the meantime I realized that it never hurts to take another look at the big picture.

The classical virtues

The main reason I’m writing this blog is as a kind of public self-improvement exercise. I’ve found that the classical philosophy of virtue describes my strengths, my faults, and my potential. It also gives a very practical structure to work on overcoming my weaknesses and to work toward my potential.

These virtues are traditionally grouped under the four “cardinal” virtues and the three “theological” virtues: (more…)

First off, I just want to say, “Thank you!” to readers Jeana and bob, who in the past week or so have helped me fulfill one of my goals for this blog: to generate provocative and intriguing conversation. Thanks!

So, in continuing the question of whether there’s any such thing as “natural rights” – or, more generally, what Thomists call “natural law” – the next step is to consider … the Order of the Universe!

Actually, I’m serious. By “order,” I mean specifically teleological order. In non-techno-babble, that means, whether things are in and of themselves directed to an end beyond themselves. The classic example is the eye: the eye is ordered toward the sense of sight, and so an eye that does not see is a “bad” eye.

Order and morality

Now, someone might object that you can’t blame the eye for being blind. And that’s true. So it’s important to distinguish between what’s called “ontological evil” and “moral evil.” “Ontological evil,” or evil in “being,” is simply the lack of full existence or perfection in a thing. A diseased tree, or a collapsed bridge, or a blind eye is “bad” because it lacks the fullness of what it is to BE a tree, or a bridge, or an eye.

“Moral evil,” on the other hand, involves the freedom of the will. Without personal freedom, there can be no “bad” or “evil” except in the ontological sense. For something to be evil in a moral sense, it must be a bad choice

Now, according to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and those who follow their tradition, the mind has several major parts, two of which are the intellect and the will. The purpose of the intellect is to understand things abstractly. The purpose of the will is to choose freely. If the intellect has a problem – for example, my intellect has great difficulty grasping poetry and metaphor, but thrives on mathematics – then we recognize that as a problem in the mind. I tell people that I’m “bad” with poetry, and they know what I mean.

If the will has a problem, it affects a person’s ability to choose freely. Sometimes this is a mental illness; for example, a psychopath is not free to act empathetically, or even responsibly. But often, we limit our own freedom by our very choices themselves. If I choose to insult you, I am no longer free to be your friend.

The slavery of vice

Now, part of the nature of the will is to develop habits. Habits are to the will what memory is to the intellect: they keep us from having to re-invent the wheel every time we hit the road. So, a virtuous habit is one that protects, or even extends the freedom of the will. Vice, on the other hand, increasingly limits the will’s freedom.

But this freedom is not freedom to do anything at any time; it is freedom to fulfill the nature of the person. It is freedom to pursue the good.

The best image I’ve found is that of a piano keyboard. Anyone at any time is free to hit any key or combination of keys on the keyboard. (This is what Pinckaers calls “freedom of indifference.”) But only someone who has practiced a great deal is free to play Debussy, or to compose an original work of music.

Now, every moment of every day, our will faces at least 88 possible choices of what to do next. If we practice making those choices well, with an idea of harmony or rhythm or beauty in mind, then we will develop habits that allow us to make more interesting and more complex and more, well, good choices. The will really does become more free, more fulfilled in achieving its purpose.

But if we simply hammer away at life according to mood or blind emotion, like a piano student who refuses to adopt proper posture or fingering, then we limit our freedom and risk hurting both ourselves and the instrument – that is, everybody around us.

Natural morality

This view of the human person, one who has a purpose or an end in both being and acting, and whose purpose is to pursue greater and greater goods, is the foundation of any theory of natural rights, or natural law, or natural morality of any kind.

Some thinkers have tried to do away with “human nature” without losing universal morality, but I haven’t found any of them (that I’ve read) to be convincing.

Others have noted that it’s incredibly difficult to pin down exactly what’s involved in “human nature” and have accepted that rejecting nature also means rejecting any universal morality. But then why do even they act as if moral questions remained vital? Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment is a brilliant exploration of the problems with this way of thinking.

So that’s largely why I’m convinced that there really is such a thing as human nature, and that the nature of the will is to choose freely, and that virtue is the true path to freedom and fulfillment and happiness.

But I’ve been talking too much. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Here’s a punchy quote from After Virtue that, I think, summarizes the heart of his argument:

I remarked in Chapter 13 that when teleology [I'll explain this below the quote - RK], whether Aristotelian or Christian, is abandoned, there is always a tendency to substitute for it some version of Stoicism. The virtues are now not to be practiced for the sake of some good other, or more, than the practice of the virtues itself. Virtue is, indeed has to be, its own end, its own reward and its own motive. It is central to this Stoic tendency to believe that there is a single standard of virtue and that moral achievement lies simply in total compliance with it.

Okay, first off, let me translate teleology. That’s philosophical techno-babble for an inherent purpose or direction in things themselves. So, a common example is an eye: the eye is for seeing, so sight is the purpose or end of the eye. An eye is directed toward sight, so sight becomes a standard of goodness internal to the eye itself. The major debate is whether the human person has such an end, and what that implies. Aristotle’s idea was that the purpose of human life is to contemplate abstract truth. Christianity’s idea is usually called “heaven” but is often put in similar terms as Aristotle: to gaze on the face of God.

The Stoics, and their Enlightenment inheritors, disconnected the idea of moral action from any goodness for the moral person. It’s not seen as virtuous to do the right thing if you’re getting anything out of it for yourself.

Major guilt trip

This, more than anything the nuns did to me as a kid, is the source of my own guilt today. I almost feel in my gut that I have to act against my own nature and gifts and joys, that I have to be unhappy, in order to really be good. Sort of like saying that the eye has to avoid seeing and work real hard at hearing in order to be good. Pretty dumb, huh?

But that’s what happens when morality gets divorced from the actual person who is acting morally, and from the situation in which he or she is acting. Morality is reduced to a set of rules, which more and more become arbitrary and unrealistic. No wonder our culture has such an abhorrence of rules and restrictions: we know deep down that there’s something wrong with a demand for obedience for obedience’s sake.

On the other hand, if we recognize that we don’t have to reinvent morality from scratch every second of every day, and that rules are meant to remind us of our nature rather than force us to work against it, then morality becomes much less of a burden. I can relax a little, because I only have to ask, “Does this action fit with my own nature and abilities in this situation?” I don’t have to agonize over whether it’s “right” or not, whether it’s the “best possible action” or anything like that. I’m here. Something needs doing. If I can do it, great! If not, well, not much I can do about it and feeling guilty isn’t going to help matters any.

Aristotle says that the point of his book on ethics is to lay the groundwork for politics. He, like most of the Greeks from what I can tell, had a very State-centered view of the world.

But I think there are a couple important points here.

First, personal ethics really does have public implications. How I act in private cannot be separated from how I act in public and how the rest of society acts.

Second, Aristotle’s insight isn’t quite so anti-individual as it seems; after all, he sees that the human person is a social creature, that no man is an island, that it is not good to be alone. So, looking for the good life, he necessarily has to look at the life of the community.

Government and society

The poster I’m using to illustrate this post comes from a Conservative Party campaign in Great Britain. It’s a kind of retraction of a saying of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister in the 1980′s. She once said, “There is no such thing as society.”

This poster turns that statement on its head by pointing out a distinction that we tend to blur in the 21st century – at least, in the English-speaking world. I can’t count the number of times when, in conversation, I’ve mentioned that “society” or “the whole community” has responsibility for some aspect of life – health care, to take a current example.

My interlocutors often would jump in with either, “No! The government should stay out of health care!” or “Yes! That’s exactly why we need a single-payer program!”

But government is not the same thing as the community.

Instead, it seems to me that people assume government will take responsibility for the problems and duties of the community. I’m not convinced that’s the case.

Neither right nor left

Here’s the thing: the so-called political right has a point in saying that a big government or “nanny state” tends to encourage irresponsible behavior by citizens by absolving them of personal responsibility for themselves and for one another.

And the so-called political left has a point in saying that government is the only entity which really comprehends the entire populace, and so can serve those who fall through the gaps in other social structures.

But while both of these “sides” see a real problem, neither seems to know where the solution lies. The right tends to want government to serve the “private sector”, meaning business; and the left tends to want the private sector to become a branch of government. But neither focus on the truly personal.

Personal virtue

It seems to me that any system, whether in government or business or anything else, is doomed to failure if it bases itself on a fantasy rather than on a reality. And one fantasy is that a system, in and of itself, will make the world better – no matter what quality of people are in the system.

But the fact is, human nature tends to find loopholes and gaps and ways to “work” any and every system it encounters. The answer is not a new system. The answer is to encourage each and every person to strive for excellence, for goodness, for virtue. The answer is to focus on the person.

Matthew Archibold, whom I only know from his blogging, wrote a post entitled “Atheists love you. They just don’t know why.” Therein he describes the impossibility of deriving a transcendent ethic from a materialist worldview. Here’s a snippet:

I have to wonder from what philosophical grounding does Dawkins’ altruism emanate? Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God? From what philosophical groundwork is he basing his good works on? Dawkins, it would seem to me, hasn’t defined his terms and is only borrowing our definition of “good.” Because without our definitions he’d have to ask the question, “What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.

Atheists and agnostics and skeptics – oh my!

Let me say up front that I (partly) agree with Archibold’s conclusion. But I think his reasoning is too muddy to pass muster, and therefore is not very useful.

Aristotle defines good as “that at which all things aim” or, essentially, the object of desire. This is not the hedonist manifesto it first appears to be; rather, it is saying that our desire is like a sense calibrated to detect goodness in the way that our eyes are calibrated to detect light.

In other words, according to Aristotle, goodness is a real thing out in the world that we can experience directly and point to.

Now, Aristotle certainly thought that gods, and a Prime Mover above the gods, existed. So he was no atheist in that respect. But his notion of God (with a capital G) was so distant as to be unrecognizable as the Christian Trinity. One could perhaps argue that it was closer to the Muslim Allah, but the Muslims never really took to Aristotle’s notions of God, so that’s debatable. And the Hindu Brahman is even more transcendent – and impersonal, to boot – than Aristotle’s ideas.

And yet, all these traditions have a notion of “good” that is pretty much the same thing. Aristotle’s definition makes sense, even if people would tweak it in one way or another.

So I would say that Dawkins isn’t borrowing the concept of “good” from religion generally or from Christianity specifically. Nor the concept of giving aid, nor the notion of virtue. After all, it’s not hard to find examples of altruistic atheists from various points in history.

What is good without God?

But I said above that I basically agreed with his conclusion, that morality and virtue is impossible without God. Here’s why.

As soon as we encounter something, say, a bowl of oatmeal, one of the things that happens is desire (or the flip side of the coin, aversion). It’s an instantaneous judgment once we recognize it as oatmeal: we want it or we don’t. Can’t help it. It’s part of being human.

We also desire abstract things, immaterial things, like justice or wisdom. As soon as we form the concept in our minds, we label it as “good” or “bad”.

Now, at this point, a strictly materialist universe is out the window as far as I see. Where, in a strictly materialist universe, does the experience of anything “immaterial” come from? How can there be abstraction if there is nothing abstract in reality?

But beyond that, I’m also strongly of the school that nothing comes from nothing. So, wherever this world came from, however it was formed, it had to come from some principle at least as capable of abstraction and desire as we are. Which, more or less, is what Aristotle meant by God (with a capital G).

Note that I’m not saying anyone has to believe in God to be virtuous. Nor am I saying that any one religion is wrong (though I’m happy to discuss Christianity privately with anyone). Just saying that desire indicates to me that goodness is real, and that it has to come from somewhere, just like everything else.

I was reading an article called “The Difference between Needs and Wants” which to me seemed useful, but not quite on target.

The author cites Aristotle as equating “needs” with “real goods,” i.e., “the things that every human requires for the pursuit of happiness,” and equating “wants” with “apparent goods,” which sometimes are actually bad for people. He goes on to describe how focusing on needs rather than wants will lead to a fuller, happier life.

What’s good and what’s bad?

Don’t get me wrong: I think the article gives basically good advice. But I think he over-simplifies the whole nature of human desire and the objects of our desires. And that can give the wrong idea that “wants” are somehow not “real goods” for us.

One of the fundamentals of Aristotle’s view of nature is that everything that exists is good because existence itself is good. So, if anything exists at all, then it is at least in that minimal way good.

More than that, the idea of “bad” or “evil” is not equal to the idea of “good.” What I mean is that goodness is a real, positive thing that exists. “Badness” or “evil” is not something that is real in itself; it is the absence or the distortion of some real thing – some good thing.

A good example is blindness. Blindness is not a thing in itself; it is only the distortion or destruction of sight. Sight is real, and good. Blindness is nothing except the absence of sight.

Virtue and human desire

Now, desire (and its partner, aversion) is the means by which we sense good and the lack of good. Your eyes see a square of a dark-brown color, and your nose smells a unique combination of sweet and bitter, and your fingers feel a hard smooth texture. In your mind, you combine all these senses into an understanding of the thing itself: a chocolate bar.

But it is desire which judges that chocolate bar to be good or bad. Or rather, it is desire that identifies what is good in the chocolate bar, and what is lacking.

So, you may find yourself with conflicting desires: you know it tastes good, but you also know it will give you a sugar high and subsequent crash, or that it is fattening. In other words, you desire both the flavor of chocolate and the benefits of health.

Thankfully, desire is not the end of the story: our ability to reason enables us to sort out the various good things that we desire, and to make a decision. The trick is to let ourselves be informed by, but not driven by, our desires.

Needs and wants, real and apparent goods

So, everything that we desire is a “real” good, insofar as it exists and has some kind of goodness that we recognize. And everything we desire is an “apparent” good, because it is a good that appears to us. There are goods that we don’t easily recognize (e.g., the value of doing your taxes,) and there are goods whose limitations we overlook (e.g., having another drink with that cute somebody); but desire is always seeking something good.

Prudence means that we let reason sort through all those good things we desire, and search them to figure out if we’re overlooking some limitation or even falsehood about the good we desire. Prudence also applies labels like “need” to goods that we literally cannot live without. Prudence weighs the goods we’d have to give up (time, money, a good night’s sleep) against the good thing we want.

Then, through the virtue of prudence, we can make decisions that we can honestly say are good.

Aristotle’s idea of virtue is that it is the means to an end; virtue is the way to achieve a goal. In Greek-speak, this is called teleology, since telos is the Greek word for “end” or “goal”. Here’s how he puts it:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. (N. Ethics I.1)

If, then, there is some end [i.e., goal] of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this) … clearly this must be the good and the chief good. (N. Ethics I.2)

Now, the “chief good” of people is usually called “happiness” (which, in Greek, is eudaimonea, literalistically good-spiritedness, good-life). He points out that, while everyone seems to agree on the word, many different ideas of what the word means are floating around, ranging from physical pleasure to social honors to philosophical contemplation. It’s important to know what happiness is so that we can know how to use virtue to attain it, just as it’s important for a plumber to know how the pipes are supposed to work so that he knows what tools he needs to install or repair them.

Happiness: more than a feeling

Now, I usually think of happiness as a word to describe how I’m feeling at the moment, as in, “I’m happy to see my friends” or “I’m unhappy that my car has broken down.” But Aristotle is talking about something more permanent. Essentially, he says that happiness is being fully human, of fulfilling one’s nature as a person.

That means, of course, that we need to know what human nature is. It’s certainly a part of human nature to have emotions, and to have physical senses that can receive pleasure or pain, and even (going to the most basic level) just to be alive. But these are things that we share with other creatures in the world, such as plants or animals.

What sets human beings apart, for Aristotle, is that we can reason. More than just thinking logically, this includes the ability to make decisions. That is, it means we have free will. And that means that our happiness depends on our freely chosen actions.

Virtue and happiness for all

So it’s obvious that virtue is all about making good decisions, or, in other words, about choosing to act according to our nature rather than against it. This is why, for example, so many moralists have warned people against acting like animals: if we follow our emotions and ignore our intellect, we’re acting against our own nature, and won’t find happiness.

But there’s one other aspect of human nature that comes into play: our social nature. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” None of my actions, no matter how private, can be confined only to myself without affecting others. My simplest thoughts change my choice of words, my body language, my emotional reactions.

This means that the happiness I seek is not merely my own, but is the fulfillment of the human community as a whole. If anyone weeps, I must weep with him, and if any rejoices I share that joy.

I’m currently reading through Aristotle’s Nicomachian Ethics, which is one of the foundations of all Western ethical thought. And I came across the following (Book VII, Chapter 5):

For every excessive state whether of folly, of cowardice, of self-indulgence, or of bad temper, is either brutish or morbid

He goes on to explain that “brutish” means that a person is acting more like an animal (a “brute” beast) than like a human; he gives the example of a man who is afraid of a mouse. Stereotypical, perhaps, but then again…

Now, why fear of mice is particularly “brutish” is beyond me. I might speculate that “cheesy” would be more apt, since the object that has most reason to fear a mouse is a round of cheese. But that’s just me.

Anyway, Aristotle also says that “morbid” means that a person is acting contrary to their own life, giving the examples of people who tear their hair out in anger, or chew their nails in nervousness.

So, seems to me that he’s saying: excessive states, aka, vices, involve either acting like something that you’re not or acting directly against yourself. Or, to put it positively, virtue involves acting like yourself.

Virtue and Nature
This is the key to understanding virtue as a way of life: that we need a certain training to act like ourselves, to act according to our own nature. Acting naturally doesn’t come easy. Indeed, we consider “natural” to be a high complement: when an athlete runs well, when a politician speaks eloquently, when a co-worker accomplishes a task with ease – in cases like these, we often say, “They do it so naturally!” They are fulfilling the potential of their nature.

A more telling phrase is maybe, “second-nature”. Many people have described the virtues in just this way, as developing a way of acting that is almost instinctive. But unless this “second nature” is in harmony with the first nature, with what it is to be human, then it becomes a vice.

Angels and Animals
Now, I often find myself swinging to one of two extremes: I tend either to indulge my merely physical (bestial?) appetites for food or rest or pleasure; or I tend to ignore my body and focus on my mental activity, as if it were somehow purer or higher. It’s sort of the dumb jock vs. the clumsy nerd. Or, in more classical terms, the beast vs. the angel.

Well, I’m neither a beast nor an angel. I’m a human being, a strange and incomprehensible combination of mind and body, of soma and psyche. Which means that the nature I’m striving for will involve improving every part of me, everything that really belongs to being human. Nothing left out. But also, no unrealistic expectations.

I should not try to soar like a hawk; I will crash. I should not try to escape into some abstract or ethereal plane of spiritual purity; I neglect myself if I neglect my body. But I can, and should, use my mind to guide my body towards health and wholeness. I can, and should, explore the kinds of things that my mind and body do well together as a unit – in other words, the things that I do well, the whole me. That is the goal of practicing virtue.