In approaching this topic in this final installment, I thought that I would underscore a number of things that stood out in my reading of Prof. Wilson's book. These are some matters that I think are particularly important and will likely stay with me for some time to come. They do relate to character, but some of the strands themselves might not immediately seem to have much to do with it. My catalog of them may even seem a hodgepodge. Maybe it is. By the end, however, the tiles of the character mosaic will, I hope, have come into view, and I will have pinpointed some areas where Prof. Wilson's book has prompted me to think most.
Let me enumerate and discuss several of the most salient ideas.
1) Universality of moral sense. A chief concern of Prof. Wilson's is to argue that all humans do possess a moral nature: it exists, and we have it. His position automatically means that he is arguing for something extensive in scope, something universal in extent: “To say that there exists a moral sense (or, more accurately, several moral senses) is to say that there are aspects of our moral life that are universal, a statement that serious thinkers from Aristotle to Adam Smith had no trouble accepting” (225). It is no longer fashionable, however, these days to claim something as a universal. So this is a bold move.
Prof. Wilson believes himself to be compelled by the multi-disciplinary evidence that he has marshaled to buck the trend: “If there is any truly universal moral standard, it is that every society, without exception, feels obliged to have -- and thus to appeal to -- moral standards. … We want our actions to be seen by others -- and by ourselves -- as arising out of appropriate motives. And we judge the actions of others even when those actions have no effect on us” (230; my emphasis). Although this point may be intuitive or obvious, it is no less significant.
I have underlined two words, "feels" and "wants," to draw attention to a crucial aspect of moral sensibility in general and of character in particular. It is that emotions are integral to our moral nature. As we will see, they are also a key to assessing character.
2) Emotion as a moral source. Perhaps the most important concept to hit me afresh from reading Prof. Wilson is this centrality of emotions in morality. Maybe I should not have been so surprised to see this accentuated. The language of "moral senses" broadens out the components of morality from the intellectual realm (which includes judging or reasoning) to the sensory realm (e.g., feeling, intuiting, experiencing). And even if the moral sphere were restricted to our intellectual faculties, I suppose that I needed to be reminded that, to some degree, emotions and intellect are not divorced from one another.
As Prof. Wilson explains it, emotion is not only a source of our morality; it is also an integral one. Moral sensibility and moral reasoning are inextricably connected to emotion. Further, what might be harder for some to stomach is this: morality is not random just because emotion, which may seem spontaneous or fleeting, is tethered to it. More on this below.
3) Emotional response as index of moral character. Once I heard someone ask a psychologist how he could tell if a person were sincerely apologetic. The psychologist answered with a question and then an explanation: "What is the person's initial response? If, when he is told that he has hurt you, he is quick to say he is sorry and his voice softens, this is usually a good indication that he is genuinely feeling remorse. If, however, he hesitates, or if he quickly (perhaps too quickly and tersely) says, 'Sorry,' without any emotional indications of regret or remorse for unintentionally causing you pain, then he probably is being insincere."
I have always thought that assessing people's reactions along these lines was a good rule of thumb for personal interaction. It was not until reading James Wilson, though, that I made the connection between morality and a person's emotional response to a situation. At least, I had not before taken emotional responses a step further and seen them as a reflection of a person's character.
Part of the reason that we behave in a virtuous fashion -- i.e., why we often set aside self-interest for the sake of others, whether out of sympathy, fairness, duty, or self-control -- is to establish a trustworthy reputation. We not only want to be moral; we also want to be recognized as such. Sociability, not just our existing but our existing in relationship to others, is fundamental to being human. And so we want to be counted on, just as we want to be able to count on others, to act in a way that both advances mutual advantage (yes, there is an aspect of utility) and displays universally accepted goods (things we believe to be fitting in themselves and proper to relationships). When we recognize this about ourselves and our relational desires, we can understand better how our emotional responses in certain situations reflect the deep structure of our moral framework, which we often simply call character.
So, how do you determine if someone’s reputation for fidelity, his character, is deserved or fake? It is, Prof. Wilson says, sort of like the answer that the psychologist gave, only here the situation is a moral decision: “One important way … is by observing the emotions he displays when confronting a moral choice. Emotions communicate commitments more persuasively than arguments. One can contrive an argument, but it is much less easy (at least for most of us) routinely to fake love, guilt, indignation, or enthusiasm” (232). Whatever character is, one's emotional disposition and conditioning in the face of the constant moral decisions in life are part of it. This is largely because these emotional dispositions and responses reflect one's most closely held convictions and principles, the components of one's moral sense.
When internal moral dispositions are manifested outwardly, and properly, we say that a person has acted consistently, or with integrity. This is character. It is the imprint of one's unique moral identity that is visible to other people and sealed by one's responses to life situations.
4) The tradition of moral-sense theorists. This approach fits within a tradition of moral philosophy that has some famous representatives. Moral-sense theorists included Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume. Smith and Hume both believed that sympathy was the source (Smith) or a key source (Hume) of human moral sentiments. For Hutcheson, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes below, the moral sense was closely tied to benevolence.
The moral sense is one which perceives those properties which arouse responses of moral feeling (there is also an aesthetic sense, which stands to beauty as the moral sense does to virtue). The properties which arouse a pleasurable and approving response are those of benevolence. What we approve are not actions in themselves but actions as manifestations of traits of character, and our approval seems to consist simply in the arousal of the required response. (MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 163)Whereas Hutcheson, according to Prof. MacIntyre, merely asserts that we approve of things like benevolence rather than self-interest as a proper moral response, part of the contribution made by Prof. Wilson is explaining why we do so: dependability arising from sociability. (This we have explored previously in connection with self-control and duty.) Prof. Wilson, on my reading, also might differ from Hutcheson by demurring that certain virtuous actions are not right in themselves. In any case, the larger point is that Prof. Wilson agrees with Smith, Hume, and Hutcheson that moral actions, which may be aspects of moral feelings, reveal traits of character.
5) The emotional source of morality is legitimate. It is not enough to identify emotions as a source of -- and a mode of expressing -- virtues, important as this is. We need, further, to accept them as legitimate. That we, or I, do not always do that is one reason that I was struck afresh while reading The Moral Sense. My eyes were opened anew to the interconnections between emotions and virtues and, what is more, to their validity.
Our culture, it seems, still privileges reason over emotion, sometimes to the denigration or exclusion of the latter. It is true: sometimes human passions can be so powerful as to result in miscalculation and excesses that are contrary to the balance inherent in a virtuous life. But not all emotions have negative effects. Indeed, they may have decidedly positive results. Sympathy, for instance, may breed a stranger's loving protection of an infant. Emotion is the source of virtuous action, and it is legitimate for that to be the case.
Professor Wilson makes the same point about the validity of the emotional component of morality when he discusses the approach to the subject by the Scottish philosopher David Hume:
Morality, [Hume] said, rests on sentiment, and of course generations of students have understood this. But morality does not rest on mere sentiment, because there is nothing “mere” about certain sentiments. There are many ways of knowing; the teachings of the heart deserve to be taken as seriously as the lessons of the mind.Thanks to Prof. Wilson, I am trying now not to overlook it.
The heart’s teachings are subtle and often contradictory, as difficult to master as logic and science. But they are not the same as whim or caprice; the most important of them are quite compelling. This fact is often overlooked by professional philosophers and thus overlooked by their students. (238)
6) Moral conflict as a tension among two or more virtues (i.e., the moral senses). Moral conflict may often occur not only when I am struggling to choose to do something right instead of something wrong. The conflict may also occur when I am struggling to give expression to two or more more virtues that circumstances have placed into tension. As Prof. Wilson puts it, “The problem of wrong action arises from the conflict among the several moral senses, the struggle between morality and self-interest, and the corrosive effect of those forces that blunt the moral senses” (229).
An example is when my moral sense of fairness stands in tension to my moral sense of sympathy. I may wish to be virtuous by being impartial, but that may be compromised by my also wishing to be virtuous by being moved by the feelings and situation of someone else.
Yes, this is another way of talking about the moral dilemma of choosing between two good things. In that sense, it is perhaps unremarkable. Don't we empirically know about moral dilemmas from our own lives? Of course. However, there is power in being able to articulate what is going on when we face a moral dilemma, in being able to know more explicitly and consciously why it is a dilemma, and in being more self-aware of why we feel the internal conflict, pressed hard on both sides. And that power may help us to determine and to follow the best course of action. Repeated practice in so determining and following may lead over time to more success in habituating ourselves, both more correctly and more quickly, to choose the proper path. And that returns us to where we began, to character.
7) Fine-tuning what we mean by "character." Professor Wilson makes an helpful distinction between two aspects of "character," personality and integrity, and he seems on target in describing the way in which we actually size up others:
Now by character we mean two things: a distinctive combination of personal qualities by which someone is known (that is, a personality), and a moral strength or integrity. We judge people as a whole, assessing their strengths and weaknesses and reckoning up the totals into a kind of human balance sheet. People with the best balance sheets -- that is, with the most admirable characters -- are usually not people who are perfect or have every single virtue to the highest degree; since the virtues -- that is, the moral senses -- are partially in conflict, that would be impossible. People with the best balance sheets are those who are the best balanced. (240)This moral, or rather character, calculation resembles Aristotle's famous view of the mean. What is more, it rings true to me as accurately reflecting a widespread human practice. It is, in fact, something that we really do.
8) Character and disinterested interior deliberation. But a question may arise, "This may be what character is, and it may be how we assess it in others, but how do I cultivate it in myself, especially when I face a moral dilemma?" Prof. Wilson is, characteristically, descriptive, not prescriptive. Still, we can chart an answer to this question based on what he describes as occurring within people whom we believe to have solid character, people whom we colloquially call a "good guy" or a "nice person."
When, as inevitably happens, we confront circumstances that require us to choose among our moral senses or confuse us as to whether there is a moral dimension to the problem, the good guy, the nice person, engages in an inner dialogue about what is required of him. For the moral senses to speak to us clearly and affect our actions importantly, we must be capable of seeing ourselves as others see us and, even more importantly, as we wish the noblest others to see us. (241)Developing this perspective, this noble moral vision, is not an easy task. "Countless emotions -- greed, passion, anger, self-love -- are constantly at work to suppress disinterested reflection," he admits (241). But it is possible, and valuable, to formulate in our minds and motives "an expressed justification for an action that will persuade an objective observer" (242).
This is something that develops and is refined by repetition:
A good character arises from the repetition of many small acts, and begins early in youth. That habituation operates on a human nature innately prepared to respond to training: "The virtues arise in us neither by nature nor against nature, but we are by nature able to acquire them, and reach our complete perfection through habit." (244; citing Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a23-26)We learn to be virtuous by acting with virtue. We learn by doing, suggest both Aristotle and Prof. Wilson. With a qualification and some clarification of terms, the apostle Paul might also agree.
9) The aesthetics of character: like poetry, blurring form and content. Conducting an inner dialogue may be a necessary and typical step for someone with good character to take when confronted with a moral dilemma. This process may yield justifications that would prevail upon an objective third party. But what we have in mind with character, most fundamentally, is that the moral deliberation and response is second nature. It flows, now, naturally as something to which we are predisposed to do. And the moral ideas that we might explain as motivating our second-nature response are most often, in fact, not explicated but seen in action.
A good character, however defined, is not life lived according to a rule (there rarely is a rule by which good qualities ought to be combined or hard choices resolved), it is a life lived in balance. The balance among the moral senses is, to me, more an aesthetic than a philosophical matter. It is aesthetic in two senses: it is a balance that is struck without deliberation or reasoned justifications, and in the character thereby formed there is no clear distinction between form and content. (243)In saying this, Prof. Wilson draws upon Michael Oakeshott. What is good character? It is not really what much moral philosophy seems to say that it is; it is not "the product of intellectual analysis that gives rise to rules, which can then be translated into behavior" (243). Nor, according to Mr. Oakeshott, is a poem: "'A poem is not a translation into words of a state of mind. What the poet says and what he wants to say are not two things, the one succeeding and embodying the other, they are the same thing; he does not know what he wants to say until he has said it'" (243). Explaining character does not teach character. Its content is embodied in its active form.
A poem's subject is really only known in the language of the poem; something essential to the poem is lost when one tries to extract its content from its form. Similarly, a person's good character is really only known in one's continuous action. To make the point, character is as character does.
10) What, then, of teaching morality? There is an often recurring debate about whether schools should teach morality. Based on what I've summarized from Prof. Wilson and myself said here, that debate is misguided “because it is based on a misunderstanding of the sources of morality:”
...children do not learn morality by learning maxims or clarifying values. They enhance their natural sentiments by being regularly induced by families, friends, and institutions to behave in accord with the most obvious standards of right conduct -- fair dealing, reasonable self-control, and personal honesty. A moral life is perfected by practice more than by precept; children are not taught so much as habituated. In this sense, schools invariably teach morality, whether they intend to or not, by such behavior as they reward or punish. (249)For parents, there is a lesson here about child-rearing: lasting lessons include what is caught indirectly by children in addition to what is explicitly taught to them. For everyone, there is a reminder here about the ubiquity of morality: it appears wherever human relationships exist, not just among families and friends but also the civic state. And for me particularly, there is a rich repository here of what the moral senses are, why they are virtuous, and how human character may be, with diligence, cultivated.
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