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Moral Character and the Iteration Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Garrett Cullity
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Extract

Moral evaluation is concerned with the attribution (to its various objects – actions, character, attitudes, states of affairs, institutions) of values whose distinction into two broad groups has become familiar. On the one hand, there are the most general moral values of lightness, wrongness, goodness, badness, and what ought to be or to be done. On the other, there is a great diversity of more specific moral values which these objects can have: of being a theft, for instance, or a thief; of honesty, reliability or callousness. Within the recent body of work attempting to restore to the virtues a central place in ethical thinking, two claims stand out. One is that, of these two kinds of values, the specific ones are explanatorily prior to the general – that if an action is wrong, it is because it is wrong in one of those specific respects. A second claim, though, is now standardly made definitive of ‘Virtue ethics’: that amongst the specific values, the value of character is explanatorily prior to that of action – that if an action is callous, say, it is because it expresses callousness of character – and that in this sense, the moral value of action derives from that of character. This second claim has been widely attacked; in what follows, I present a reason for believing that, at least in the case of callousness, it is right.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , November 1995 , pp. 289 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 For Bernard Williams's distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ ethical concepts, see Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London, 1985, pp. 129–30, 140–1.Google Scholar

2 See e.g. Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good, London, 1970, p. 43Google Scholar; McDowell, John ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist, lxiii (1979), 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurley, S. L., ‘Objectivity and Disagreement’, Morality and Objectivity, ed. Honderich, Ted, London, 1985, pp. 54–97Google Scholar; Cullity, Garrett, ‘Aretaic Cognitivism’, American Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming.Google Scholar

3 See e.g. Baier, Kurt, ‘Radical Virtue Ethics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, xiii (1988), 127Google Scholar; Solomon, David, ‘Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, xiii (1988), 428–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conly, Sarah, ‘Flourishing and the Failure of the Ethics of Virtue’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, xiii (1988), 84–5Google Scholar; and Montague, Phillip, ‘Virtue Ethics: A Qualified Success Story’, American Philosophical Quarterly, xxix (1992), 53.Google Scholar For both claims, see Frankena, William K., Ethics, Englewood Cliffs, 1973, p. 63.Google Scholar A third ‘anti-Kantian’ claim sometimes identified as definitive of an ‘ethics of virtue’ is the denial ‘that it is a necessary condition of perfectly moral personhood that one be governed by a concept of duty’. See Baron, Marcia, ‘Varieties of Ethics of Virtue’, American Philosophical Quarterly, xxii (1985), 47.Google Scholar

4 For other serious challenges, see Trianosky, Gregory W., ‘Supererogation, Wrong doing, and Vice: On the Autonomy of the Ethics of Virtue’, The Journal of Philosophy, lxxxiii (1986), 26–40Google Scholar; and Conly, , ‘Flourishing and the Failure of the Ethics of Virtue’, 83–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, New York, 1974.Google Scholar

6 It is no good trying to rescue the explanatory claim by saying that a callous action is one that would be performed by a callous person, either. Such a person would only do so if he were acting in character.

7 Compare Kant, , ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals’, Kant's gesammelte Schriften, vol. iv, Berlin, 1903, pp. 397–8.Google Scholar

8 It seems to me that an unexercised disposition is not part of a person's character. Anyone who disagrees with this, though, can replace the suggested account of character with one referring to the dispositions which give rise to the pattern I mention without affecting any of the subsequent arguments.

9 See e.g. William Sargant's pioneering study of such cases, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing, London, 1957.Google Scholar

10 For some dissenting voices, though, see Singer, Peter, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, i (1972), 241Google Scholar, and Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality, Oxford, 1989.Google Scholar

11 An action is morally demanded of an agent, on my usage of this phrase, whenever it would be morally wrong for Hm not to perform it.

12 This iterative approach seems to be assumed in Peter Singer's argument for the conclusion that ‘we ought, morally, to be working full tune to relieve great suffering of the sort that occurs as a result of famine or other disasters’ (Singer, , 238).Google Scholar

13 It must also explain it in the right, non-deviant way. If, having acted callously, I am remorseful, then presumably a full explanation of any remorseful action of mine will include the explanation of the callous action which gave rise to it, but the remorseful action is not callous. I shall not try to spell out here, though, what non-deviancy consists in.

14 See e.g. Hume, , A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., 2nd edn., Oxford, 1978, H.ii.1.Google Scholar

15 Compare: my motive for shooting at an intruder is unlikely to be my thinking that injuring people in self-defence is morally permissible.

16 This paper has been much improved by the helpful comments of Berys Gaut, John Haldane, and Brad Hooker.