Christianity and Modesty

To say that something, a house say, is modest is to say that it does not deserve attention. What I think is true and what I think Christianity says is that this is what modesty essentially is in all its senses. The essence of modesty is that something does not or someone believes that she does not deserve attention. A person of modest means is a person whose living quarters, profession and lifestyle do not deserve attention. Similarly, a person who dresses modestly does not want or thinks that she deserves or at least acts as though (I don't think there can be false modesty with regard to dress) she does not deserve attention for her dress. A modest person then is one who believes that she does not deserve attention. Thus, it is very much the same as humility which on the Christian conception is to be disposed to put God's will above one's own thereby recognizing God's superiority and one's subjection to God. One who does this obviously does not think that their own self deserves much attention; God is what/who deserves the attention. As far as I can see, modesty and humility are, in all the important respects, the same.

On the Christian account both humility and modesty are subsumed into temperance which means that they are to be understood as traits of resistance i.e. resisting temptations to sin. To be humble/modest is to resist the temptation to be proud, to elevate one's own interests above those of God. This is of course something to be resisted because the proper place of humans is to be God's subject and thus to do his bidding. Thus, humility/modesty is the opposite of pride, one who is humble/modest obeys God's will.

It is important to note that one who is doing God's will and is only concerned with doing God's will (as only doing God's will because one thought that it would make him look good to others is really to just be acting on the basis of his own interests which are to look good) is not interested in attention. They see themselves as an instrument for God's will and as it would be foolish to think that it is the scalpel rather than the surgeon that deserves attention so too is it foolish to think that the person rather than God deserves attention. Thus, the humble/modest person will shun undue praise and attention because it is not he who is important or at all deserving.

I think that this is what modesty really is all about.

An addendum

An example which will hopefully illuminate the point I am after. Suppose there is a club with a certain name, say the Charity club, and this club goes around doing good deeds for people. Then, after a time, membership in this club dies out and the club is disbanded. Some while later, a few people who remember it fondly reform the club however, instead of going about and doing good deeds, they just go out to dinner on Sunday's. Nevertheless when people here about the reformation of the club they are made happy as they remember the old Charity club for its good deeds and assume that this one is similar. If the name had not been reused people would have thought nothing of this club.

This is a silly example, no doubt, but I think it gets my point across. The idea is that the name of something carries with it a certain emotive content, but it only does so because of what it was the name of. It was the thing that was named that gives the name its emotive content. Despite the new club being totally different, people are still favorably disposed to it because of its name and what that name means to them. This is what I think is happening with modesty. Hopefully this is helpful in illuminating what I was trying to say in the previous post.

Christian Faith

I wanted to briefly write a bit about what the virtue of faith is supposed to be all about.

Essentially, to have faith is to totally accept the word of God, to have the disposition to see the world in light of this acceptance and to completely surrender oneself to God. So there is a cognitive aspect of faith which is to believe in the Christian doctrine as well as internalizing Christian values so that one sees actions and states of affairs in those terms. Moreover, there is a connative aspect of faith which is to want to be (literally) God's servant.

There can be no doubt that faith, so conceived, is no virtue if Christianity is false. Imagine, however, if one were to hang on to the idea that faith were a virtue without the Christian framework. What would that look like? The sort of thing I am imagining is someone claiming that faith is the disposition to believe those propositions that can not be proven yet without which one would fall into global external world skepticism. And this character trait is a virtue because skeptics, being unsure that other people exist, turn out to always be egoists and so having faith is required to get morality off the ground. (Or something like this, I am just thinking of a simple example. Maybe I am being foolish but I think that this is something that someone could say.) At any rate, something has gone wrong here. I would argue that the person making this claim has hijacked the term. Faith originally meant one thing and now it is being used to refer to something else. The problem here is that the original intuition or feeling that faith is a virtue was a result of its being so under the Christian description. Under the new anti-skeptic description it is something totally different yet it still maintains the emotive or intuitive appeal of the old one. (This is poorly worded, but I hope the idea has been conveyed. We can talk about this in our meeting.)

What has happened to faith in my silly example is what I think has happened to modesty in recent times with the modern characterizations. Many people, myself included, have the gut-feeling or intuition that modesty is a virtue and (I would guess) this is a result of Christian values which have been internalized in Western culture. We still to some degree, whether we believe the doctrine or not, are stuck with the Christian conceptual scheme. [I would need to argue for this point no doubt, though I feel that it is to some degree self-evident.] So we have this intuition (whose basis is in Christian thought) but we have dropped the Christian framework which means that we need a new characterization of modesty because we think the Christian one is false and so we make a new description of modesty. And yet we have gone awry because the intuition we are holding on to is a result of the framework we are rejecting. Modesty being a virtue is only plausible within that framework of Christianity but because we feel that modesty is a virtue and that Christianity is false we go on about modesty anyway.

My thought and point is that without Christianity modesty is not a virtue and that any attempt to make it so must fail as what is really occurring is the hijacking of the term and putting it under a new description. If Driver thinks that what she has described is a virtue that that is all well and good but she should not give it the name modesty because what she has described is not. The same, I would say, goes for your account which calls modesty the exact opposite of what the framework in which it gained the status of a virtue understood it to mean.

All this needs refinement and clarification but it is the basic thought that I have been having on this subject.

Christianity's conception of pride

In Christianity pride is considered to be one of the greatest sins or vices. Aquinas says of pride that it is the disposition to prefer one's own will over that of one's superior and, of course, the ultimate superior of all people is God which means that the worst form of pride is when one favors his own goals, desires, will, etc. over those of God. (One thing that I think is important to note here [and it is in Aquinas and other Medieval Christian writers] is that what people want is very different from what God wants. Being good is all about taming one's own desires and acting in accordance with the will of God and against your own. God's will and man's are divergent and thus man's will must be subjugated. This is something that will come up later with regards to modesty/humility.)

Proud people love themselves greatly and as a result put themselves above their proper station. Aquinas says that pride is at the heart of all the sins as each of them are instances of a person indulging his own desires at the expense of God's which is at the very least implicitly accepting that one's own desire is higher than God's. In short, pride is the root of all other sins.

I think the Christian conception of pride lends support to my claim that your take on modesty sounded more like a take on pride. On your account the modest person is one who is motivated by goals derived totally from one's self, one who is not motivated by what one things will impress others. Essentially, a person who is modest does what he does because he thinks that it is worth doing, not because he thinks that others think that it is worth doing. Yet here we have a paradigm case of what Aquinas would call pride. For Christians a person ought do not want they themselves want but what God wants them to do. (This is what they think humility and modesty are all about as I will discuss later). To be motivated from within rather than from God is to be proud, not modest on the Christian conception. It would be the very opposite of modesty and humility.

Of course, this does not show that you are incorrect, because you were not writing from a Christian perspective, but at least to me it casts quite a bit of doubt on your conception. Especially when we consider that modesty and humility as virtues arose during the rise of Christianity it would seem very odd indeed if in truth their meaning had been quite the opposite of what early Christians had thought and in fact turned out to be the very things that Christians considered to be a vice. I think that if one is interested in the virtue you described, i.e. being motivated from within, it would be better categorized as pride.

A bit of Driver

I read Driver's response to your paper. I think that she has the right sort of critique of your positive account, but her own account still seems misguided.

Early on she gives a few examples of where ignorance is valued for some reason or another, but it would be a critical mistake to assume that a thing's being valued can lead to it in certain forms being a virtue. Youth, for example, is valued in our culture and so is wealth yet neither have any forms that turn out to be virtues. Youthfulness is no virtue and neither is the disposition to accumulate riches. But at any rate, her own examples do not even seem so good in this regard. She claims that ignorance of one's own beauty is said to enhance it, but this seems clearly false. One who does not continually point out her beauty is not thought to be more beautiful for not doing so but rather (maybe) more attractive as a person. This is of course the sense of attractive that does not mean only physically but considers all desirable traits. Furthermore, consider two people of equal beauty (twins say) one of whom know how beautiful she is while the other does not. Does Driver truly expect us to believe that the ignorant one is more beautiful than the other? What is valued is the lack of a "look at me attitude" which is consistent with knowing that one is quite beautiful. One might even think that being ignorant of one's beauty and for this reason not having the "look at me attitude" is nothing special at all. It is one who seems themselves in all their glory and truly see some things of great value who then refrains from the "look at me attitude" who is to be admired. (I would not call this person being modest either by the way, but rather displaying a sort of proper pride i.e. he does not shrink from deserved praise etc. but this is irrelevant here.) Another example she gives which I think is quite bad is that we value innocence in children. This is certainly true, but there is no way that innocence can be construed as a virtue because what it truly is is simple ignorance of the way the world actually is. One might say that innocence is the safety goggles we give children to protect them from certain facts about the world that would be too much for them to handle at their current state. Moreover, we do not value innocence in adults which really amounts to just being naive. (One might even say that this sort of ignorance is reprehensible in adults...) The point of what I have said is that, though on occasion we may value ignorance for some reason or another, it certainly does not follow that ignorance is ever a virtue.

Another point worth making is that her true/false modesty distinction is off the mark. She says that if you are talking to someone who is acting as though she is lesser than what she actually is and then you find out that she believes correctly that she is of such an such value then you will likely be offended. You would feel as though you have been patronized or condescended to. (I feel that Driver is wrapped up in her view that she can not see that this is not what condescending means...) She is just wrong about condescending. Consider these two stories: 1) After trying really hard to master some particular skill a player becomes frustrated. In order to raise the player's spirits his coach takes him aside and says that he should not feel bad as the coach himself had a lot of trouble with this skill when he was first learning it. Suppose that this boosts the players confidence and he goes on to succeed, but then later discovers that the coach never had any trouble learning that skill. Does the player now feel as though he has been condescended to? 2) Another player is learning a similar skill and having the same difficulties. His coach, noticing the problems, comments to the player that he should not feel bad about having difficulties as he is scrawny and weak and, well, no ever thought he could do it anyway. Does this player feel condescended to? Quite clearly, the first case is not an example of condescending behavior while the second case is. The point here is that false modesty has nothing to do with condescending behavior. In the first case the coach is an excellent candidate for false modesty on Driver's view, but is clearly not truly the case. He is not falsely modest despite the fact that he acted as though he believed something that he did not in fact believe but he did it for a noble purpose i.e. to help the struggling player. If Driver's account requires that this coach be falsely modest, then her account is wrong.

(What is a better account of false modesty? The only one that I think there is is the Christian one. This is that one behaves modestly at all times, saying that God deserves the credit and so on, but in his heart of hearts praises himself. Whereas the truly modest person will even to himself give all praise to God. The modest person acts and believes that he is not deserving and this sounds like Drivers' account but in fact it is crucially different as on the Christian view the modest person believes correctly that he is not deserving.)

In response to one of your challenges Driver tries to show that self-deception is not always bad and that sometimes it can be good. To do this she take the example of a mother who has deceived herself into having a slightly more elevated opinion of her children than the evidence warrants. She then asks us to suppose that this in fact has very good effects as children need praise in order to realize their potential and that parents who truly believe that their child deserves praise do a better job praising. I think that Thomas's work comes in handy here. He claims that a child who was valued by her parents only for her talents and abilities would live in a veritable hell. Would Driver's envisioned parent stop praising her children if she realized that they were not all she imagined them to be? What sort of parent is this? Thomas's point is that parents love their children totally and unconditionally simply because they are theirs. This and parent's constant reaffirmation to their child that they value her is what is important for the child's flourishing. She needs to know that she will be loved and valued even if she fails or is not so good at something. So it seems that what Driver is after (i.e. that children need to see that their parents value them) is something that can not come from self-deception nor does it have anything to do with the child's abilities or anything else that one could be decieved about. Moreover, she neglects the obvious fact that chilren who are praised for abilities they do not have may begin to believe that they do have them and this undoubtebly sets them up for future failure as well a bad case of the inflated ego.

In an attempt to refine her view, Driver discusses Roger the fake-Nobel Prize laureate. He is duped into believing that he has won the Nobel prize despite the fact that he is not done any work worthy of that prize. She then discusses how on one view he could be considered modest. It is just wrongheaded, I think, to even be using this example because Roger obviously has nothing to be modest about. He just has a load of false beliefs floating around, there is no actual achievement about which he can be modest or not. (Again, she just seems so wrapped up in her view...) Another instance of this is how she claims that your example of the person who believes that he is worth less than he is but acts as though he is worth more than he is is actually an example of a modest person though here modesty is not functioning as it should. This person may be many things but he is not modest. Modesty requires a certain sort of belief and a certain sort of behavior. When I concieve of the modest individual I see someone holding up his hands and shaking his head when he is praised. If this behavior is lacking in some way then he is not modest not matter what he actually believes.

At any rate, I think that Driver's view can safely be discounted.

More Modesty

Smith says, "I conclude, then, that the modest person is one who applies a different—indeed, a higher—set of standards than others might apply to her case" and I am convinced that he is wrong. One ought to apply the correct set of standards, not ones that are higher than those that others may apply. Imagine a grade school child who, despite receiving and A on his short story, laments that fact that his stories pale in comparison to Kafka. This child is not being modest, he is being foolish.

He discusses the arrogance of philosophers in his section VIII. Why Modesty is a Virtue: Consequences but I do not think that this tells us anything about modesty. The mean between arrogance and excess humility was pride for Aristotle, not modesty and thus I think that Smith's point could be made just as well by recommending pride rather than modesty. Reading this paper and thinking about modesty in general has led me to the conclusion that modesty is no virtue after all. Unless I am mistaken it did not arise as a virtue until the Christian times and I believe that, as Flanagan's view accepts and as your view sort of accepts at the end (I think), modesty requires that one view his accomplishments against a backdrop that renders them or his role in them insignificant. There is something out there that if taken into consideration would force one to the conclusion that he is not so special after all. This, to me, clearly stems from Christianity and thus ought to be jettisoned along with the religion if we are not to take its theology seriously anymore. Aristotle did not worry about modesty and I do not think that modern virtue theorists should either.

Pride, I think, is the real virtue. (Smith's last section seems to be discussing the value of pride not modesty.) To be proud is to believe truly that one is of value. The proud person does not underestimate or overestimate his worth nor does he go around telling everyone about how great he is as such conduct belies a sort of underestimation in that he needs to approval of others in order to believe that he or his work is of value. There is no need to go into greater detail here, however, but what I think is important is that much of what has been said about what is good about modesty is really what is good about pride. In the end, it would seem that modesty requires those who are great to never truly accept it (they may accept that there work is great compared to others, that they can do extraordinary things, etc. but never that they are great) and this is a sad thing I think. To be such a special sort of person and yet to never accept it is a true shame as it deprives that person of self-knowledge. (There is much more to be said here.) Pride on the other hand requires that one have that self-knowledge and is thus superior as it gives one the correct view of things. Now of course this sort of view is in trouble if what you are saying about the value of the individual is true. So let's talk about this at our meeting.

Comments on Modesty

To begin with, I could not agree more that Driver's account is just plain wrong. No form of ignorance or self-deception can count as a virtue, regardless of the benefit it renders on society. As far as I can see, a virtue is a virtue insofar as it benefits the agent not the society (obviously justice is a problem for this sort of thinking, but this is beside the point [I think at least] for this purpose).

I also agree with your take on the accuracy account. One is not modest just because they correctly gauge their skill. (The global and focused modesty point is very good.)

"She could care about whether her writing really did constitute a genuine accomplishment, which is what the critics views call into question, while not worrying about what anyone thought of her for accomplishing it."I think that this is a very interesting distinction.

What I am curious about however, is this line, "And this will be, on this account, connected to the essence of modesty since someone who is trying to be modest, or to do what a modest person would do, is typically doing so in order to appear modest to someone (even if this is, in the limiting case, only herself). And in that case she does after all care what people think of her." I am not sure that this sounds right to me. How could a person not care what she thought of herself? Good self-esteem seems to be something that is very psychologically valuable and requires a positive self image. I really could not imagine someone who did not care about herself where this not caring is meant to be neutral rather than negative. To me, this sort of consideration brings into question the concept of "false modesty". I do not think that one is falsely modest who first wonders what the modest person would do and then acts accordingly for the same reason that I do not believe that the soldier who wonders what his hero would do and then acts accordingly is not acting courageously. False modesty, if it is anything, is to my mind simple insincerity i.e. when one compares his accomplishments to those of another by saying how much greater than his own those of the other are while saying this in a manner that makes it obvious that he does not think the other's accomplishments are very great. At any rate, I think there is something to talk about here.

Also, I would like to discuss your final paragraph where you say why you think modesty is a virtue. I would like to know more about the thoughts behind that paragraph. Is there a bit of determinism in there? Moreover, I have the intuition that some people are (at the very least) morally better than others and that they deserve praise for being so. It would seem wrong to praise only their acts but not the people. Take another example: the Olympics. Imagine that medals were not given to the athletes but rather to the performances. That would seem ridiculous. Another point, what about willpower? Do you want to say that those who persevere through all sorts of hardships to go on and accomplish something great are not to be praised? To me there seems to be more than just the accomplishment which is valuable but also the process that led to it. One last related point on this issue, imagine a struggling artist who, despite being good, has yet to be recognized. What I imagine this person to want is not just for his paintings to be viewed as good but for him to be viewed as being a good painter. What is important to him is that he has done well. Contrast his situation with one where a man has the ability to snap his fingers and 'poof' create masterpieces ex nihilo. In this case, we would rightly only value the painting not the man (at least for aesthetic reasons, we may value him for magical abilities but that is another story), yet this story seems entirely different than the one with the actual painter. At any rate I would really like to discuss this tomorrow as maybe, I am misconstruing your view and just need a clarification...

Morals By Agreement: Part I

To begin, Gautier outlines what he plans to show in his work.

According to Gautier, rationality is all about seeking the maximization of benefits for oneself. To be rational is to determine your greatest interest and then to pursue it. Despite the fact that this view would seem to imply that people who act on moral grounds are irrational, Gautier says that this is not so. On his view, acting in accordance with the constraints of morality is rational because when one does so along with his community he will maximize his benefits more than if he along with everyone else failed to act morally. The idea is that completely free agents acting so as to maximize their own benefits will not fare as well as slightly constrained agents acting so as to maximize their own benefits. Morality is to be understood as the constraints.

I want to draw attention to two things Gautier says. "The contractarian need not claim that actual persons take no interest in their fellows: indeed, we suppose that some degree of sociability is characteristic of human beings. But the contractarian sees sociability as enriching human life; for him, it becomes a source of exploitation if it induces persons to acquiesce in institutions and practices that but for their fellow-feelings would be costly to them." I think that the final statement is false. There are certain things that we do for our friends and loved ones that we do not do for just anyone else (raising children, helping elderly parents, doing selfless favors for friends) which would seem to be very costly to us were it not for our "fellow-feelings". Does this in anyway show that these practices are forms of exploitation? Surely this can not be true as it is the "fellow-feeling" that makes us want to do these things. The benefit to us is the well-being of the other person. Another thought that if Gautier takes the sort of approach that he does here with other people's interests, how can he not take the same approach when it comes to a person's own interest? Why not say 'in cases where it would appear costly to partake in a particular practice were it not for his self love, then a person is irrational if he engages in that practice? (Epicetus once wrote (for another purpose) to the effect that it is only because of the fact that we love our bodies so much that we do the things we do as when we imagine having to do these things for others they seem repulsive i.e. washing oneself. The point that you can not separate our affections for something from it when trying to determine whether or not acting in a particular way with regard to it is rational.)

The other statement that I find myself disagreeing with is when he says "Those who claim to establish the rationality of such compliance (with moral principles) appeal to a strong and controversial conception of reason that seems to incorporate prior moral suppositions." The thought that I have here is that it would seem as though those leave out these moral considerations in their conception of reason have the supposition that moral principles are not a part of reason. He says that those who take morality to be a part of reason have just assumed it to be there, but my point is that he has just assumed it not to be there; no argument has been given as to why it is not a part of reason or why it can not be. Maybe an argument will come for this later on, but at this point there is none.

Thomas: Chapter 7 and 8

In these chapters Thomas's goal is to argue that those who have a morally good character are more likely to live well (i.e. living a good life, reaching contentment, flourish, be happy). He does not want to say, like Plato, that every person with a morally good character is happier in virtue of having a morally good character than a person who is without it.

For Thomas, flourishing requires (among other things) a proper regard for oneself which is to be concerned with oneself and one's interactions with others, friends and loved one's in particular. Proper regard for oneself amounts to self-love which is the belief that one ought to be treated morally and the desire to flourish (there is nothing necessarily egoistic about this as one can still at times prefer the interests of others over his own). In terms of one's friends and loved ones, it is clear that a person could not be happy without these social relationships and that one can not truly be said to be a friend of another if he does not (or is not willing to) contribute substantially to the well-being and interests of the other person. Moreover, with regard to strangers and people who one does not know well, he should realize that if he desires to be treated morally (and that moral treatment is required for flourishing in that one who is unjustly hindered at all times could never flourish) then other people will desire the same and have the same right to be so treated as he has.

Thomas also makes the claim that psychic harmony is very important to one's well being and that the person with a morally good character is more likely to achieve psychic harmony. Psychic harmony is to be understood as our knowledge of our reasons for acting. As it is the case the person of moral character will not have to feign his true feelings, the reasons that he gives for doing things are the reasons that he actually has. The same is not so for the immoral person. He must give very different reasons for acting than the one's he actually has for otherwise he would be suspected and hindered by other people. (Roughly, the idea is that it is extremely psychologically taxing to keep all your lies straight and so on.) Moreover, Thomas wants to say that the immoral person is essentially insincere. A promise from him does not mean the same thing as it does from a moral person and even to those who he truly loves and cares about his word can never be as solid as the truly honest man. The immoral person in virtue of being immoral lives a life of insincerity and, what is more, it may well turn out that after a time he himself has trouble distinguishing between sincere and insincere feelings, motives, etc. It is in this sense that Thomas means that he is lacking in self-knowledge (i.e. knowledge of his motivations) whereas the moral person is not lacking this knowledge. [argument for this p. 216-232] Furthermore, [p.229-230 "John and Peter"] even when the immoral person is dealing with those whom he loves and cares about his reasons for acting in the way he does toward them could be, as a result of his typical immoral way of dealing with and reasoning about his interactions with people, not out of actual care for them but out of his self-interested desire to maintain them as friends. And this it would seem would be quite distressing to the genuinely immoral person because he truly does care about his people and wants that to be his reason for acting as he does. This sort of thing can not happen to the moral person as he is not a master of insincerity and thus is not as readily able to act in this way. [I did not give this argument much credit the first time I looked at it, but at a second glance I like it a lot more.]

Thomas: Chapter 6

This chapter deals with how morality/altruism between strangers works and though it does not give much in the way of argument as to why it does and should work, I think that Thomas has some very interesting insights throughout.

To begin, Thomas starts out with the uncontroversial claim that a person who is treated well by another person will tend to like that person more. In other words those who are consistently nice to us gain our affections. (This is the same reasoning that was behind why children love their parents.) This is important because not only does it make us favorably disposed toward those people who are nice to us it also gives us certain counterfactual beliefs about these people. For example, if Smith always helps me out whenever I am indeed then I will likely form the belief that if I end up being in need Smith will help me out. The idea here is quite simple and it is that as I become more favorably disposed to those who are kind to me I will also become more likely to do kind things for them, which will in turn increase their feelings towards me and so on.

What is more is that we all (at least in most societies, though not all) have a basic level of trust for one another. Even though we tend not to think about it, no one runs around believing that the strangers he passes on the street desire to kill him. If we thought for a moment that people desired to kill us or do us harm it would be psychologically impossible for us to live decent lives. We would always be terrified that someone would try to do us in. This is still the case even if we imagine that murders were always caught by the authorities and harshly punished. It is the thought that people desire to harm us and would if they could only get away with it that would make this state of affairs psychologically unbearable. The sort of life that we lead depends in large part on our tendency to at least on a very basic level trust one another. A further example. It is quite common for one person to ask a complete stranger what time it is or when the next bus will arrive. Yet when we ask such things there is not even the slightest suspicion that the person might lie to us (at least in ordinary circumstances). Even if it turns out that the wrong information was given our tendency is to think that the person was ignorant of the facts or just foolish and not that he was being malicious. Again this displays that basic level of trust that we have for one another and also the fact that in general people do not desire to harm one another (so long as their interests are not at state, then we have a different story).

Now Thomas points out that this level of trust need not exist, as it likely does not in some countries that have experienced extreme hardships (i.e. famine, disease, civil war, etc.). Moreover, just as kind actions from another tend to improve our opinion of them, mean acts from another tend to diminish our opinion of them. Thus, the circumstances play a very important role whether these morality-friendly conditions exist. (This idea reminds me of Aristotle's points about certain conditions need to be met in a persons environment before it is even possible for that person to attempt to achieve eudaimonia.)

Despite the fact that it need not be the case that we live is a society where these conditions are met, it seems to be the case that (at least most of the time) these conditions are met in our society. Thus, if we get a good start in life and are shown kindness by those around us it becomes more and more likely that we will acquire beliefs about the people around us that they will try to help us if we are in need. This then, coupled with the fact that people in general to not desire to harm other people, can form the basis for our basic level of trust of those around us who we may not know well as well as strangers. Again, this is not meant to give us any answer to Gyges type problems but is rather meant to be seen as an explanation of why things are the way they are morally speaking. Thomas wants to say why people have moral sentiments and desires not why they should.

Thomas: Chapter 4 and 5

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with friendship and its importance for morality. Thomas echoes Aristotle's sentiments in saying that a person's life would not be worth living, even if he had every other good in the world, were he to be without friendship. Friendship is an extremely important of a person's life and contributes substantially to that person's flourishing. Thomas discusses in depth his conception of friendship but that is not directly relevant to our purposes so I will leave it out. The important point from these chapters is that friendship requires altruism which is to say that it requires friends to act in such ways so as to respect, advance and protect one another's well being. A true friend is happy to see his friend succeed or flourish and is sad to seem him fail. The flourishing of one requires the flourishing of the other. Given the good that friendship is for people and the importance we attach to it there can be no doubt that we develop the ability to perceive the interests of our friends as well as the motivation to help them. Thomas says that these are essentially moral sensibilities as we learn how to determine and care about advancing the interests of others.

This is important to morality as a whole because our friends are not a separate species from other people and thus the moral sensibilities we develop in dealing with friends can also be applied to other people. For example, we can clearly see how an action may help or hinder the interests of another person even if we are not friends with that person. In other words friendship gives us the tools for social interaction at large.

However, I have to add some commentary here. Everything that Thomas said here is compatible with the gangster egoist we have imagined before. One can truly see and care about the well-being of some people without caring at all for the well-being of others though he may know full well what it would be to hurt or help it. What Thomas is trying to do is lay the foundation for moral sentiments/feelings. He wants to show that people are not inherently only self-interested and he wants to show where altruistic feelings come from. In this regard I think he has done quite well, but what none of this does is show that these feelings are applied to complete strangers or anybody out of one's circle. Certainly these feelings can be applied to others but showing that they arise in certain contexts does not show in anyway that they are spread over all contexts. Thomas needs something more in order to get around the problem of the the gangster who does everything he can for the well-being of his family and friends but sees everyone else as expendable when it comes to accomplishing his goals.

Thomas: Chapter 3

In this next chapter Thomas builds off what he established in the previous one. Though it has been argued that biology provides us with the capacity for morality/altruism it does not guarantee it. Like other abilities it needs to be developed from a young age in order to produce a person with a good moral character. Thomas believes that in order to account for this fact one must again look at parental love and see how it can affect the child.

The essence of his argument is that parental love is a clear instance of altruism. Parents sacrifice many opportunities for personal benefit in favor of benefiting their children. This is especially important for a child as it is, in its early stages, completely vulnerable and unable to take care of itself. Moreover, realizing these facts causes the child to reciprocate the love of its parents. It is from this that from an early age children learn what it is to act altruistically towards another person which in turn helps to develop their altruistic capacity. (Of course, not all parents treat their children well and thus this explanation leaves out those children whose parents were not so good. However, Thomas's point requires only that this sort of parental love and reciprocation does happen some times.)

Moreover, children have a great tendency to emulate their parents. This is important because upon realizing the connection between their parents's love for them and their altruistic acts the child tends to act in kind. And this is true as, even though children can obviously not match their parents in terms of benefiting each other, children often do (or try to do at least) nice things for their parents. The point here is that at an early age children (can) learn what it is like to be loved and have other people act altruistically towards them. Furthermore, this serves as the basis of the child's reciprocation and thus their motivation to act for the well-being of another.

Another important point about parental love that Thomas mentions is its importance in a child's development of moral autonomy self-esteem. Parents, through their unconditional love, show their children that they are valued not for anything they do but just for who they are. A parent may approve or disapprove of a child's aciton and thereby teach the child what is appropriate and what is not, but despite this does not accompany disapproval with rejection. The child is always accepted and loved. This is very important for the psychological security of the child as it knows that whatever it does it will still be valued and cared for. Also, this helps the child build up a conception of its self worth and is thus less affected by attacks on that worth by others. Through their love and support, Thomas argues that parents bolster their children's self-esteem/sense of self worth against failures and the criticisms of others. Moral autonomy is also in part developed here as the child is not required to adhere unquestioningly to some authority in order to gain acceptance.

Thomas: Chapter 2

In this chapter, Thomas attempts to build the foundations of altruism in biology. The essence of his argument is that love is a form of altruism and that given the sort of species that we are love is essential to our survival. An infant would never grow to maturity were it not for parental love. He quickly dispatches the thought that any altruism based in biology is really masked self-interest by saying 1) that a person acting altruistically toward his child does not first think "does this act help preserve/strengthen the future of my genetic material" but rather only thinks "does this act help my child" and 2) it makes no sense to say that altruistic acts towards non-family members are in any way meant to or in anyway do ensure the future of ones genes. Furthermore, he claims that there is a clear difference between what we desire to do and what biology disposes us to do (I found this to be very interesting). Biology may dispose us to have altruistic feelings towards an infant that is crying but that does not say what we desire to do. We may desire to act on those feelings or not to. Moreover, supposing that we do desire to help the child we may be glad that we have the disposition to feel as we do towards it. (Another example, a smoker may desire to quit and as a result lament urges to smoke whereas a sky diver may desire to jump out of planes with a parachute and as a result be glad that he has the urge to thrill seek.) The point is that it is our desires that matter when it comes to moral motivation and that our biological constitution does not determine our desires as they can be in line with it or against it. Thomas also makes the point that there is a difference between doing something that benefits you and doing something that benefits you because it benefits you. This means that altruistic acts may benefit the actor in some way or another but this does not mean the acts were not altruistic. Thus claiming that there is a biological basis of altruism is not a self-defeating claim.

Thomas then goes on to talk about the importance of parental love in morality. This is a case where people (parents) make enormous sacrifices for the well-being of other people (their children). What is especially important here is that parents love their children with no strings attached so to speak. They care only for the well-being of the child and this is not tied to any particular trait the child has. It is this unconditional love, Thomas argues, that provides a child with psychological security; it knows that it will always be accepted and loved by those on whom it depends entirely. This accounts for the child's reciprocation of that love. What is also important here is that this love and concern for another's well being can not be explained away as self-interested from a biological point of view because it also exists between parents who have adopted and their adopted child. The point that Thomas is trying to make is that our biology has endowed us with altruistic sentiments/feelings (i.e. parental love) and that, as these sentiments are essentially moral sentiments, biology can clearly be seen to be a part of the basis of morality and not just the basis for our self-interestedness (i.e. survival instinct).

Thomas goes on to say that once these moral sentiments are established, we can at least see that people are not inherently only self-interested beings. Given this, we can see the beginnings of how altruistic sentiments can spread to include other people as well. What is important to note here, however, is that thus far Thomas has not claimed to find the basis of morality or ground it in any substantial way. All he has tried to show at this point is that moral/altruistic sentiments are not contrary to our biological make up or intrinsic nature; biology does not show that we are just self-interested. It is this fact that Thomas takes to be part of the basis for morality as it shows that human beings have the capacity for moral/altruisitc sentiments and therefore motivations.

Thomas: Chapter 1

The first point that Thomas makes is that having a good moral character does not imply having correct moral beliefs. What it is to have good moral character is to be motivated by the right sort of thing which Thomas assumes is altruism. So then two people may differ in their opinions on abortion and yet both have a good moral character because both have altruistic motivations. Essentially, what is important is that one want to do what is best for others not necessarily that one in fact does so. In support of this he gives an example of three moral exemplars: Socrates, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.. Despite all being moral, each had a very different view on the morality of slavery. Again, this is meant to show that it is not correct moral belief that counts but rather one is motivated by moral considerations (i.e. altruistic considerations). [He gives more argument in favor of this but I think that the claim is obvious enough.] Though, of course, it is not just being motivated by moral considerations but also having moral views that are defensible. If one holds certain moral belief in the face of overwhelming evidence one can then question this person's actual motivations and his commitment to altruism.

As for what counts as a defensible moral theory, Thomas says that "(i) a person's moral views call for treating all innocent (full-fledged) persons in a minimally altruistic way; and (ii) the criteria by which a living being is determined to be a full-fledged person are grounded in the best scientific and sociological considerations available, and the criteria by which a person is determined to be noninnocent are not contrived." 'Minimally altruistic' means roughly that people are treated well not for self-interested reasons and also that one does not act with the with the sole point of harming others. Thomas includes a small caveat to (ii) where he says that defensibility requires that one's views are the best that can be expected of him given his early experiences, social environment and availability of information. Basically, what Thomas is getting at is that someone who holds a view that, from our standards, is absolute rubbish so long as he holds it as a result of his 'nonculpable' (probably not a word; I mean 'not his fault') ignorance and that he would change his rubbish view if his ignorance of certain facts was removed. The point of this is to make room for the racist young boy who has a good heart yet through no fault of his own mistakenly believes that non-whites should be treated as lesser beings in comparison to whites. Now of course if this boy grows up, moves away from his homogeneous and racist town, meets some average non-whites and then maintains his view, then we can say that he does not really have a good heart (good moral character) after all.

So then, at this point, the essence of Thomas's claim is that to have a good moral characther a person must be motivated by altruistic considerations, have defensible moral beliefs given his epistemic context and must change his beliefs in accordance with "corrective experiences" (i.e. when the racist boy meets a nice black man). [What I think is interesting here is that having moral knowledge does not entail having a moral character. I suppose this is obvious, but stating it, I think, helps brings out another point: one does not change the ammoralists mind by sharing moral knowledge with him. Even if we had the correct moral theory to offer him, Gyges would not be moved by the fact that his actions were wrong. In the context of combatting ammoralism, moral facts are not what matters but rather that which motivates is what is at issue. We do not need to show Gyges anything to make him moral. We need to change what motivates him.]

Another important factor in having a good moral character is that a person be morally autonomous. This is to say that it matters to this person not just that his moral views are defensible but that he can defend them. A person who is morally autonomous will not appeal to certain facts about what the majority of those in his community believe to be the correct moral views. Appeals to authority will have no weight with this person. What matters to this person is that he has well thought out and consistent ethical principles which he can expound. (For example, a morally autonomous person may cite the categorical imperative (while understanding what it means) while the morally non-autonomous person cites the 10 commandments). A good indicator of moral autonomy is whether or not 'corrective experiences' actually cause a person to change his beliefs. If the boy brought up in a racist town rejects the orthodoxy of his community in the face of contradictory evidence rather than dogmatically reasserting it, then the corrective experience has in fact served to correct his moral views and this reflects his reliance on himself, not authority, in making moral judgments and hence reveals his moral autonomy. Thomas does say that one can have a good moral character without being morally autonomous, but this would seem to be a case where the person is just lucky for having accepted the authoritative moral views of his community which also happen to be good (or at least defensible) moral views. What this person lacks however is the independent understanding of why his views are defensible which makes him vulnerable in cases where the received opinion is dubious. This person lacks the tools to amend his beliefs when amendments are needed and are not forthcoming from the resident authority figures.

A little ways on, Thomas accepts the neo-Humean view that reason is the slave of the passions (p. 25) as he thinks that the most important thing in morality is that a person have good will or an altruistic nature. This is just assumed however; no argument in favor of it against moral rationalism is given. He says that he wants to see "what follows if they (moral rationalists) are wrong". Naturally then, he wants to consider what desires we as humans have and how entrenched they are. His belief is that an altruistic account of human nature can be given as opposed to a self-interested account. His account of human nature comes in what follows.

A little more on Self-Interest

My point in the last post was that, given certain circumstances, it can be in your interest to smoke or to not be healthy. What I hoped that this would show is that whatever activity you may do or property you may have the circumstances could be such that doing it or having it would be in or against your self-interest.

You asked in your comment how it could be against one's self interest to live a long healthy live even if that person did not want to, but I think that cases can be imagined where it would not be in that person's interest. Imagine a totalitarian state (like the one you mentioned in your example) where it is also a law that anyone who lives longer than the last great leader is deemed to have "undesirable genes" and so all of these people are painfully put to death along with their descendants. Here it would seem that a long and healthy life is against one's self-interest and is also likely to be something that someone does not want. Another example. Imagine a person who in the prime of his life commits a terrible crime and is, as a result, sentenced to prison for the rest of his life where he is occasionally tortured yet closely monitored my medical professionals so that he will live as long as possible. It would seem to me that a long and healthy life is not in this man's self-interest whereas a quick an painless death would seem as though it is.

My question then is, if these examples are correct, how could it possibly be that a long and healthy life is always in one's self interest? Imagine a war scenario where the fate of a nation rests on a stranded platoon of soldiers who, if they continue to fight will all surely perish, yet they will give the rest of the army enough time to turn the tide of the war and secure their nation's independence. However, they are also offered the chance by the opposing side to surrender and thus live long and healthy lives, yet be subject to a foreign power. Which option is in the interest of the soldiers? Here I think the question is difficult, but again what I think it shows is that a long and healthy life is not obviously in one's interest nor is it always in one's interest.

So then my point is this, no property of an individual or activity in which that individual is engaged is always in that individual's self-interest. If this is true then what can it be that determines self-interest other than the individuals desire to accomplish certain goals? The only thing that does seem to be always in one's self interest is, given the right sort of understanding, desire satisfaction. Of course it would be the satisfaction of every whim, but rather of those desires which are derived from some overarching major desire such as to achieve eudaimonia. On this understanding it would be easy to see why certain properties and actions become or stop being in one's interest because one's circumstances would without doubt have an effect on how one goes about satisfying his desires.

Possibly, one might think that the good is that which determines self-interest. But then an analysis of the good would need to be given which allows for what is good to be relative to the set of circumstances being considered. I don't know if there are any accounts of the good that are likes this.

My question then is this: what other than some sort of desires view could account for the relativity of self-interest? And, if none can be given how could the desire view be opposed?

Smoking and Self-Interest

I think that I have to disagree about your comments on smoking and a person's self-interest. It seems to me that smoking is only against your self-interest if you desire to be healthy and if it is true that smoking is unhealthy. To say that smoking is without exception against one's self-interest (now you did not say "without exception" so maybe I am being unfair here but I think that something along those lines is what you meant) is similar to Foot's thought that deep roots are good for an oak tree and I think that it faces the same problems.

Imagine that in ten years time air pollution becomes such a problem that people are barely able to live past their thirties. However, there is one demographic that is an exception to this grim fate: smokers. The tar build up in one's lungs that is caused by smoking also serves to prevent the harmful toxins in the polluted air from entering one's bloodstream and thus causes the smokers to live longer than the non-smokers. Of course smokers still face the same health problems down the line that they do now, but nevertheless despite these problems they still live longer than non-smokers.

Clearly, in this case smoking would not be bad for you and in fact would seem to be good for you if you wanted to be healthy (or maybe as healthy as possible is what I should say here or maybe just to live as long as possible, regardless I am sure you see what I mean). The point here is that there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about smoking but it is only good or bad it relation to its effect on ones health. Yet, if this is true, then I think that the same can be said of health (i.e. maybe consistently doing the right thing has a negative effect on one's health for example). It is considerations such as these that make me think that one's self-interest can not be understood independently of one's desires.

Desire Fulfillment and Self-Interest

I have been thinking a bit about the difference between acting so as to fulfill a desire vs. acting in one's self-interest. The problem I have been having is that I can not make up my mind as to whether they are the same or not, though I will say that I lean toward thinking that they are different. I lean this way because it would seems that someone who desired to commit suicide who in doing so would fulfill his desire would nonetheless have acted against his self-interest. But then, I could imagine another way of understanding self-interest whereby even suicide would count as acting for it. I think that it may depend on whether self-interest is understood as subjective and is something like the conjunction of an actors goals or if it is understood as objective and is something like that which is 'good' for the actor.

However, it seems to me that both of the options I just gave have some problems. It seems ridiculous to think that acting on any desire at all is acting out of self-interest (what about the desire to help the needy or to sacrifice oneself for an unknown person in need). And, on the other hand, it is very difficult to figure out what is 'good' for the actor let alone why the actor should pursue it if he did not want to (even if we figured out what the good is it would not move someone like Gyges to live differently if he did not want to).

So, I am not sure what to think, though I do have a new idea which may be a good one. My thought is that if we were to take a sort of middle path on the question of what one's self-interest is we may be able to solve the problem. We could accept the subjective view of self-interest but add an objective aspect which would be how strongly one desires certain goals. Thus, one's self-interest is a product of one's own desires but there is an objective criteria for examining whether or not one has acted in his self-interest. Suppose that I have a weak desire to buy a motor boat and a strong desire to buy a car and then suppose that I go off and buy a motor boat. One can say that because I wanted to buy the car more I have acted against my self-interest even though I have fulfilled one of my desires.

I like this conception of self-interest and, if it is accepted, I think that it can help with showing where Gyges goes wrong. We can say that he, like all other human beings, has as his strongest desire the desire to be happy (surely, however, this is something to be debated) (and I mean the Aristotelian or Taylor type version of happiness) and that by acting on his nasty desires he is leaving unfulfilled his greatest desire. Thus, he is not acting for his self-interest but is rather acting against it. What do you think of this?

MacIntyre's rejection of Emotivism

MacIntyre begins his book by tackling the problem posed by emotivism, the idea that there are no moral facts and that moral statements mean nothing more than the expression of the speaker's approval or disapproval of something. He believes that this view has three major problems:

1. Emotivism does not explain what sort of approval it is that is expressed by the pro-attitudes behind moral statements. The emotivist can not say that it is moral approval because this would be circular. It is, as a result, unclear what sort of approval an agent is giving when he deems something morally praiseworthy.

2. There seems to be a difference between saying "I want you to do X." and "Duty requires you to do X." The difference seems to lie in the fact that in the first sentence the relation between the speaker and the actor matters in whether or not a reason has been given for doing X whereas in the second sentence this is not the case. Emotivists, however, have to say that the second sentence is just another way of saying the first sentence because they mean the same thing. Thus, emotivism is stuck with the problem of how to make sense of what seems to be a clear difference between these two sentences which, on the emotivist's theory, must mean the same thing.

3. The final problem with emotivism is that there is a difference between what a sentence means and what it expresses. If I say "Go away!" I may be expressing my anger, yet 'my anger' is not what the sentence means. So it may be true that moral statements express the speakers feelings but that does not mean that moral language just means those feelings.

MacIntrye believes that these three problems for emotivism shows that it is not a problem for morality but rather is only a problem for some moral systems. The one he has in mind for which emotivism is a problem is the one which it was first developed as an objection to: intuitionism. MacIntrye goes on to say that intuitionism turns out to be a moral theory that relies on one's feelings and sentiments and that, therefore, emotivism works as a response to it. However, as has been shown, emotivism does not pose a threat to all moral systems. Nevertheless, emotivism has become ingrained in our culture according to MacIntrye and is accepted not only by most philosophers but by most lay people as well.

Little - Virtue as Knowledge

In her paper, Little attempts to disarm objections from the philosophy of mind to the claim of some virtue theorists that virtue is a form of knowledge. Some virtue theorists believe that the virtuous person is motivated to act simply by perceiving aspects of reality. When he sees that doing X is the courageous thing to do he is thereby motivated to do X.

Some have objected to this idea by saying that a conception such as this flies in the face of our basic understanding of the philosophy of mind. They claim that there is a clear difference between beliefs and desires and that the conception offered by the virtue theorist requires some sort of converging of these two different mental states. Either one is forced to postulate the "besire" which is one mental state having both the properties of a belief and a desire or one is forced to accept that certain beliefs entail desires. The objectors find neither of these options acceptable and thus condemn the idea of virtue as knowledge. Little, however, argues that there is nothing wrong with conceiving of mental states such as these. For example, she points out that the fact that one has any beliefs at all entails that one desires his beliefs to be true. Moreover, she discusses the sort of mental state that Humeans who have a sort of projectivist meta-ethical theory are forced to posit. For those with this sort of theory, the mental state that one forms when he forms an ethical judgment must have components of his sentiments (which he projected onto the world) and his beliefs. Thus, it seems to Little that mental states are more diverse and complex than simple beliefs and desires and that as a result one can not rule out virtue as knowledge theories on the basis of their requiring more than just beliefs and desires.

I am unsure of this as I think that a closer analysis may find that beliefs and desires are all that is needed. Take Little's example of desiring true beliefs being entailed by having beliefs. I think that she has it backwards here. To me it would seem that one wants something, then realizes that in order to achieve it he must have an idea of how the world is and so he wants to belief what is true. Then he goes about investigating his situation so as to discover what he must do to realize his original desire.

Pride

I had been planning to read and write about MacIntyre's "After Virtue" but have instead ended up reading another Taylor book which I have found to be very worthwhile. The book is "Restoring Pride" and is concerned primarily with discussing the concept of pride.

According to Taylor, pride is the justified love of one's self (as opposed to conceit or vanity which are both instances of unjustified self-love). However, though all people love themselves, not all are able to be proud because not all are justified in doing so. From this point most of the discussion focuses on answering the question of what serves to justify self-love. The answer, for Taylor, is not what a person has or does but what a person is. What matters is that a person is a good person and that it is only by being a good person that one can be proud.

By good person, however, Taylor does not mean 'good' as it is typically used today but rather he is employing the ancient conception of goodness where its meaning can be understood as superiority or excellence (this greatly opposed to the modern conception of a good person which more or less means a benevolent person). For Taylor, a person is good who has cultivated his talents to the point where, with respect to these talents (or virtues, or skills, or gifts, etc.), this person is literally superior to other people. What is important here is that the things that are essential to one's goodness, so construed, are all things internal to one's self. It is not riches, positions of power or immense fame that make a person good and thus have nothing to do with a person's goodness. Because goodness consists in superiority (or excellence) it means that its possessor is able to do certain things better than others and thereby create this better method of doing things or this better final product. A superior artist creates paintings that in ways and of a quality that lesser artists could not. Similarly, a superior athlete creates his own way of playing that can not be matched by the average player. Thus, for Taylor, superiority, and thus goodness, consist in a person's creative power; their ability to add something to the world that, but for them, would have never existed. It is one who has this sort of creative power and who cultivates and uses it can be proud.

What I would like to emphasize, and what I found to be the most important part of this book, is that what matters on this conception is what you are. The things you may have such as power, wealth and fame can be had by anyone and are thus no reflection of your goodness or superiority. On the other hand, your creative powers, the cultivation of which having been your life's toil, are no doubt uniquely yours and are expressed in ways that are yours alone. It is clearly here where your superiority or goodness can be found. Taylor discusses this concept in greater detail as well as how it can affect your relations with other people, but what I think is very important is the distinction between the significance of what you are and what you have. I think that this is important because I think that these ideas can be used to formulate an answer to the Gyges ring problem. This is something that I would like to discuss in the meeting, but the essence of it is this: what Gyges is focusing on the wrong thing. If he truly understood what mattered in life he would not act as he does. His actions show that he values externals over that which he truly is and is thus sacrificing the greater good for the lesser one.