Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics for the 21st Century: Part III

Part I is here.

Part II is here.

Some Virtues and Vices

Even with all of our increased scientific knowledge and technology, doing a good job at living out the form of a human life is not easy for most of us: school is not easy, getting a good job is not easy, attracting the best mate you can is not easy, marriage is not easy, raising children is not easy.  The virtues are the states of character that aid us in living well. What follows is a list of some of the virtues that aid us in doing so. This is not a complete list; it is just the ones I think are especially important or neglected today.

Excellences of the body:

The organs of the human body all possess etiological functions and the excellences of the human body are those features which allow the body to function properly; what we call health and fitness. Without a healthy body we are severely impaired in living a human life well. Plus, physical attractiveness is important in other relationships such as attracting the best possible mate, and keeping a mate satisfied with one’s appearance. So hit the gym.

Institutional virtues:

We spend almost all of our lives as part of functional institutions such as the family, school, marriage, and our profession. Institutions possess etiological functions (I defend this claim here). What allows institutions to achieve their functions are its members performing their obligations or duties. The degree to which an individual can perform their duties excellently–how good they are as a student, worker, husband/wife, mother/father—goes a long way towards the ability to live a good human life.

I discuss the duties of marriage in more detail here but I wish to make one additional point. The existentialist view of authenticity as resistance to outside determinants over the will is toxic to marriage. We are pounded with the message that marriage is about respecting autonomy and individuality, and that any sacrifice in order to make your spouse happy is a violation of autonomy. Hogwash. Marriage ought to be about making each other happy, and we need to revive the notion that you have duties to your spouse.  So actually put in effort at making your spouse happy and forget all the destructive nonsense.

Social Virtues:

As discussed in part II, the social virtues are a subset of virtues that aid us in producing good relationships with other people, such relationships being crucial in living a good human life. Social virtue results when the will resists the push of the appetites and emotions and instead favors the working of the social emotions in producing their characteristic selected effect. In this section I am going to illustrate how this works for some of the virtues.

The way to analyze a virtue is to ask what behavior an appetite or emotion is designed to produce, look at what negative effect this may have on other people, and ask what social emotion may motivate us to resist our appetites.

Moderation:

Appetite/emotion: hunger.

Function: to get the organism to procure food.

There is nothing wrong with letting hunger do its job in getting us to procure food. But excessive eating leads to obesity. Obesity may be immediately disadvantageous to an individual in producing poor health, but obesity also has negative social effects in that it is unattractive. When I am perfectly honest to myself about why it is I work to stay in shape, the answer is that I don’t want to be seen as repulsive and unattractive by others. I don’t want my wife, friends, and co-workers to see me and react to me in that way. (I also work out in order to stay healthy.) And it is the strength of this social emotion to avoid these negative social consequences that motivates me to resist cravings for unhealthy foods and to burn calories at the gym. It is not easy! I really do crave fattening foods, but my social emotions have the function to prevent behavior that would produce negative social consequences, and this gets me to resist the working of these cravings.

Fidelity:

Appetite/emotion: sexual attraction.

Function: As with all the appetites, the appetite for sex is designed to get us to perform a certain behavior; in this case it is to get us to have sex with the object of our attraction.

It is probably best for society if sex if confined to marriage (an argument for another occasion), but as with hunger, I really don’t have a problem with someone allowing sexual desire to do its job of getting the organism to have (consensual) sex. But if the individual is in a committed relationship, fidelity demands suppressing sexual desire in favor of the social emotion of concern for the effects on one’s committed girlfriend/boyfriend, husband/wife, and children. In marriage one has taken on an institutional duty to one’s spouse to remain faithful, and the desire not to hurt one’s spouse or one’s children through divorce needs to get you to resist the impulses of sexual attraction.  In a healthy society, fear of social ostracism provides an extra incentive not to violate one’s wedding vows.

Self-control:

Appetite/emotion: Anger.

Function: Anger is designed to get us to be violent towards the object of our anger.

The most obvious reason to resist giving in to anger is that violence will end you up in jail. But there is something more than this in modern society. The British, for instance, delight in “taking the piss,” intentionally trying to make someone angry and then mocking them if they do. I confess I don’t really get it, but since those who are good at resisting anger gain status, and those that become angry are marked out for increased mockery, there must be something else going on. Nisbett and Cohen (Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists, 1996) claim that resistance to anger demonstrates that you can be trusted in cooperative endeavors. And since cooperation with others is important in social society, fear of ostracism motivates one to resist anger. As with all other virtues, emotions like anger have been selected for their ability to benefit us, and so in certain situations it is perfectly acceptable to let your anger produce violence, as in self-defense of in defense of one’s people, friends, or family.

Diligence:

Appetite/emotion: laziness

Function: We are actually designed to not expend energy unless it is necessary.

It is very difficult to resist the impulse to not expend energy unnecessarily. Perhaps in humanity’s long history as hunter-gatherers this impulse was very useful. But in order to live a good life in social society we are required to get up, go to work, do homework, hit the gym, work on that project, meet that client, do housework, mow the lawn, and so on.

Humility

Appetite/emotion: pride

Function: To keep us from being exploited by others

Pride can motivate us to neglect our obligations and damage our relationships.  I’m a fan of old movies and what comes to mind, of all things, is this old movie called The Women (1939). In it, a man cheats on his wife. Her mother councils that she swallow her pride for the sake of the family. Instead she destroys her family out of pride. In the end though, she decides to forgive her husband and save her family. (Tellingly, in the horrible remake with Meg Ryan the lesson is to never forgive and to destroy your family in order to serve your ego). When pride would cause us to destroy our relationships with others, humility is called for. On the other hand, pride is fine to keep us from being repeatedly exploited by others. It is only where humility would benefit us and our families, and where pride would harm us or our children, where pride should be swallowed.

Greed

Appetite/emotion: desire for material goods

Function: to acquire resources

For the most part, people only become angry at another person’s greed if their desire for material resources is impinging on another’s ability to acquire resources. Letting your acquisitiveness harm others will produce a negative reaction from them. This can take many different forms from social exclusion, refusal to trade, or even violence.

Masculinity and femininity:

Masculinity and femininity are signs that you would make a good mate. It may well be that the historical environmental conditions that produced masculinity and femininity no longer exist in much of our modern technological society. But we are still designed by our long evolutionary history to find these traits attractive. So the social emotion that ought to motivate masculinity and femininity is the desire to be attractive to the opposite sex, in order to satisfy our desire for companionship in attracting a wife/husband, and then, once in a relationship, these traits will keep our spouse happy, and will hopefully motivate them to be attractive in kind.

Loyalty:

I discuss the virtue of loyalty here.

Tactics Going Forward

This series has merely been the first word, not the last. I haven’t discussed many virtues such as Hume’s “qualities useful to ourselves”: intelligence, benevolence, discretion, frugality, honesty. I haven’t discussed envy, spite, resentment, or jealousy. I haven’t discussed the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. I view these later virtues as socially beneficial as they prevent social problems.

In fully functioning virtue-based societies such as depicted in Pride and Prejudice, everyone has been educated in the virtues and seems aware of their vices (even if they continue to act on them) so there is no reason to belabor the point.  But we do not live in such a society. Instead, our current public morality is the unapologetic dedication to acting on one’s appetites and the shaming of anyone who dares suggest we not do so.   But tolerance and non-judgmentalism aren’t really doing anyone any good.  To a great extent it is social pressure that produces the social emotions which motivate us to resist our appetites.  All tolerance and non-judgmentalism do is give the appetites free reign to destroy the quality of our life and relationships with others.

In order to kill our current public morality and restore a virtue-bases ethics, I would suggest two courses of action. First, we will need to once again point out and criticize the vices of others. As I mentioned, in a healthy virtue based society, people are aware of their virtues and vices, and they are mostly left to them. But to get us to this point we need to be more critical. People need to once again be educated in the virtues, and until this is done people’s vices need to–gently, if possible, more harshly if not—be criticized. Notice when people are merely acting under the influence of their appetites and what effect it has. Call them out on it whenever possible. Rationalizing acting on our appetites is our national pastime. If someone is flaunting their vices do not hesitate to use a withering comment.

–You were hungry and you ate. Do you want a reward?

–You didn’t go to the gym because you’re a lazy bastard.

–Desiring another person’s stuff isn’t a grand political statement.

–Don’t be so beta.

–Know what would actually be impressive? If you were horny and didn’t have sex.

If you can get away with it, criticize someone’s vices. Be more judgmental. My male friends used to constantly jokingly criticize each others flaws as a way of keeping each other in line. But you should leave strangers and co-workers alone (except on the internet where you can openly criticize someone who is flaunting their vices.)

For women it seems more complicated. Women don’t “take the piss out of” (to use a British expression) each other the way men do (at least not to their faces). Traditionally, girls learned virtue from their mothers and through their religious moral education.

Secondly, do not let people receive the characteristic beneficial effect of virtue without displaying the virtue itself. On the account given in this series, virtue has a selected effect, so if someone is not producing that effect, don’t give them the benefits of acting virtuously. If someone in your military unit or police department is a coward, do not reinforce this vice by giving them the good opinion that is deserved of the brave. The military needs to punish cowardice, and squadmates should not let the coward enjoy the same reputation as a brave man. Do not act like someone who is obese is actually attractive (unless you are married to them 🙂 ). Do not forgive cheaters. Don’t flatter a women’s vanity. Do not continue to do business with an unjust man, and so on.

Most of all, work to inculcate the virtues in yourself. Remember, the virtues are designed to aid you in producing successful, rewarding, beneficial relationships with others. Pay attention to the effect you produce on others and learn to control it. Even though resisting our appetites and emotions may be momentarily unpleasant, the exercise of virtue is designed to ultimately produce a good human life.

Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics for the 21st Century: Part II

Part I is here.

The Revival of Teleology: Functions as Selected Effects

Virtue ethics went out of favor when modern philosophy eschewed the teleology upon which it rested (see my “Teleology and the Dark Enlightenment”). But teleology has undergone remarkable comeback in recent decades in philosophy, sparked by the publication of Millikan’s Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, in 1984. (Find an article called “The Modern Philosophical Resurrection of Teleology” by Mark Perlman for a nice history of this revival and an overview of the various positions on the issue.) The main issue was that it seems clear that biological items such as hearts do in fact have functions. This is as much a natural phenomena as the things studied by physics. Biology is focused on understanding the functions of the kidneys, the liver, mitochondria, etc., and how these things go about performing them, as well as the reasons why they sometimes fail to perform them. There still remained the problem of understanding which of all the things something can do is its function? Hearts do lots of things: they squish when stepped on, they freeze when put in liquid nitrogen, they take up space in the chest, they have a mass, they make “lub-dub” sound, they pump blood. Of all the things hearts do, what is special about pumping blood?

The modern approach to functions is called the “selected effects,” or etiological, or teleofunctional approach. According to Millikan, to have a “proper function” requires that the features of an item were copied from previous ancestors (the way our genes are copied from our parents’ genes for example, or that manufactured items are copies of a prototype or blueprint) and that they were selected as opposed to objects lacking this feature because it did this thing. And so a hammer has driving nails as a function because it was its ability of previous hammers to drive nails by possessing some particular shape and hardness that caused this hammer get its shape and hardness through our copying these features in manufacture. Similarly, hearts have pumping blood as their function because it is due to that fact that its ancestors pumped blood–not that they squish when stepped on, or make a “lub-dub” sound–that has helped account for proliferation of the genes responsible for making hearts. The possession of a proper function is a purely natural fact of the matter as to whether an item possesses such a history.

To understand something’s function then is to understand what effect its ancestors produced that explained why these features keep getting copied or reproduced. To put it more simply, you can think of an item’s teleofunction as what it was selected for. This approach has the additional benefit in that it allows us to understand where classical teleology went wrong. Atoms, rocks, fire, chemical compounds, planets, and the like do not possess a history of selection and copying and so do not have functions.

As Plato and Aristotle said, the virtues or excellences are the features of a thing that allow it to perform its function. The same account can be given of the etiological functions we have been discussing. Having naturalized function, we have also naturalized virtue. As I mentioned, the etiological account of function focuses on certain features that are reproduced because they historically produce some effect. The structure of the heart is reproduced each generation because this structure has historically been selected for their ability to produce the effect of pump blood. The features of computers are reproduced as they roll off the assembly line because these features can process information. Shoes possess the features they do because these features are good for hiking, or running, or look fashionable (whatever the function of this particular kind of shoe is.) These features selected for reproduction because they historically produced their selected effect are the virtues or excellences of the item in question. Thus, the possession of virtues is just as objective a fact as any other natural fact. (There are philosophical arguments that something normative like a virtue can not be natural properties, but they are wrong. See John Post’s important book From Nature to Norm.)

Strangely, although both teleology and virtue ethics have made a comeback in recent decades, no one to my knowledge has managed to put the two of them together. (Fillippa Foot comes close in Natural Goodness, but chickens out.)  That is the aim of this current series of posts.

Biofunctional psychology

What we now need to do is apply the etiological framework to understanding psychology. I said in Part I that I agree with Plato that virtue involves controlling the appetites and emotions, but I have also agreed with Hume that reason can not produce any action. How can a make these two views compatible? The first step is to present a modern, biological view of psychology which profits from the contemporary view of teleology I just outlined.

Biofunctional psychology looks to understand psychological states—beliefs, desires, intentions, feelings—the way a biologist looks at hearts, livers, and kidneys. That is, it looks to understand what it is these mental processes do (or better yet, what their ancestors did) that has proven to be evolutionarily advantageous.

The same approach I outlined above when discussing the function of hearts can be given to the understanding of psychological states. For example, take hunger. What does the subjective feeling of hunger do for the organism that benefits it? The answer is that the function of appetites like hunger is to get the organism to perform a certain behavior–food procurement in this case. Other psychological processes can be given a likewise functional understanding. The function of emotions such as fear, for example, is to produce certain behavior; to seek safety in this case. The function of beliefs is to be combined with other true beliefs in order to form new true beliefs in the process of inference, and ultimately to be invoked by desires in guiding them in successful actions. The function of desires is to produce the conditions of their own fulfillment. Notice that the function of all psychological states is ultimately to contribute to successful behavior; beliefs are supposed to be true because it is by being true and representing the world in an accurate way that they may invoked by desires as useful guides for behavior. (Those interested in biofunctional psychology should read Millikan’s White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.)

Even though it is the function of psychological states is to produce certain behaviors, we do have the ability to resist, to some degree, the behaviors that our appetites and emotions are designed to produce. I can resist acting on my hunger, at least for a while, and someone like Ghandi who is fiercely dedicated to a cause can resist it for much longer periods. What allows us to do this?

Social emotions:

There is another class of emotions that we can call the social emotions. For example, does a solitary animal like a bear feel loneliness? I doubt it. They at least don’t display any behavior that would indicate they are distressed by their solitary life. But herd animals like sheep or goats become very agitated when isolated. Humans are similar in that we experience social emotions like loneliness, anxiety, and fear of exclusion. Our long evolutionary history as social creatures has built into our psychology a wide range of social emotions. These emotions are designed to benefit us in our relations with other people.

Take bravery, for example. Soldiers almost universally report that what motivates their bravery is their regard for the opinion of men in their unit. It is not some rational calculation as to whether they are in a situation that ought to be feared, as Plato says. They do not want to let down their squadmates and bear the social consequences. This regard for the opinion of their squadmates allows them to overcome the urging of their fear in acts of bravery. (Sometimes the fear proves to be too much and they neglect their duty. This is why the military always must punish deserters. If their fear of danger proves stronger than their fear of ostracism, then fear of the firing squad will have to be even stronger.)

So this is the function of the social emotions, to produce behavior that is beneficial in our relationships with other people. But what’s more is that the social emotions are designed to resist the appetites. In the soldier example above, the fear the individual felt was resisted by the concern for the good opinion of his squadmates. Our long history as social animals has shown that our relationships with others is often (though not always) more important that the immediate satisfaction of our appetites and emotions. Nature has given us the social emotions in order allow us to restrain the emotions and appetites in social situations where it is beneficial to do so.

And so this is the way to square Plato and Hume. Virtue is indeed the controlling of the appetites and emotions, but it is not the reason that does the controlling. Hume is right that reason alone can not produce or prevent a behavior. But he ignores the necessity to control our appetites in order for virtue to flourish. What controls the appetites in the case of social virtues is not reason but the social emotions which are designed to control the appetites and emotions in order to produce mutually-beneficial cooperative effects on others.

Social virtues:

Putting these threads together allows us to produce an account of the social virtues. There are virtues other than the social virtues, but I will be emphasizing the latter. For example, take someone who resists his fear to make a risky business decision. I don’t wish to enter into a semantic discussion as to whether this really counts as bravery or whether some other term such as “nerve” is more suitable. There are a whole host of these immediately useful virtues such as practical wisdom, intelligence, frugality, determination, and so on. I am going to restrict myself to discussing the social virtues.

Social virtues are the resistance to an appetite or emotion in favor of producing an advantageous effect on other people driven by the social emotions. So social bravery is the resistance to acting on one’s fear driven by the desire to produce a favorable, or avoid an unfavorable, reaction in other people. Our concern for our reputation and fear of the harmful consequences of developing a negative reputation–ostracism, alienation, enemies, and the like–drive us to resist doing what fear is prodding us to do.

We will apply this framework to additional virtues in part III