Bigg Elephant

In G. E. M. Anscombe’s seminal article “Modern Moral Philosophy” Anscombe argued that Kantianism and utilitarianism, the two major traditions in western moral philosophy, mistakenly placed the foundation for morality in legalistic notions such as duty and obligation. To do ethics properly, Anscombe argued, one must start with what it is for a human being to flourish or live well.

That meant returning to some questions that mattered deeply to the ancient Greek moralists. These questions focussed on the nature of “virtue” (or what we might think of as admirable moral character), of how one becomes virtuous (is it taught? does it arise naturally? are we responsible for its development?), and of what relationships and institutions may be necessary to make becoming virtuous possible.

Answers to these ancient questions emerge today in various areas of philosophy, including ethics (especially virtue ethics), feminist ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of literature.

The English word “character” is derived from the Greek charaktêr, which was originally used of a mark impressed upon a coin. Later and more generally, “character” came to mean a distinctive mark by which one thing was distinguished from others, and then primarily to mean the assemblage of qualities that distinguish one individual from another. In modern usage, this emphasis on distinctiveness or individuality tends to merge “character” with “personality.” We might say, for example, when thinking of a person’s idiosyncratic mannerisms, social gestures, or habits of dress, that “he has personality” or that “he’s quite a character.”

The views of moral character held by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are the starting point for most other philosophical discussions of character. Although these ancient moralists differed on some issues about virtue, it makes sense to begin with some points of similarity. These points of similarity will show why the Greek moralists thought it was important to discuss character.

Many of Plato’s dialogues (especially the early or so-called “Socratic” dialogues) examine the nature of virtue and the character of a virtuous person. They often begin by having Socrates ask his interlocutors to explain what a particular virtue is. In reply, the interlocutors usually offer behavioural accounts of the virtues.

The trouble one encounters in trying to give a purely behavioural account of virtue explains why the Greek moralists turn to character to explain what virtue is. It may be true that most of us can recognize that it would be foolish to risk our lives and the lives of others to secure a trivial benefit, and that most of us can see that it is unjust to harm others to secure power and wealth for our own comfort. We don’t have to be virtuous to recognize these things. But the Greek moralists think it takes someone of good moral character to determine with regularity and reliability what actions are appropriate and reasonable in fearful situations and that it takes someone of good moral character to determine with regularity and reliability how and when to secure goods and resources for himself and others.

Most of the Greek moralists think that, if we are rational, we aim at living well (eu zên) or happiness (eudaimonia). Living well or happiness is our ultimate end in that a conception of happiness serves to organize our various subordinate ends, by indicating the relative importance of our ends and by indicating how they should fit together into some rational overall scheme. So the Stoics identify happiness with “living coherently” (homologoumenôs zên), and Aristotle says that happiness is “perfect” or “complete” (teleios) and something distinctively human. When we are living well, our life is worthy of imitation and admiration. For, according to the Greek moralists, that we are happy says something about us and about what we have achieved, not simply about the fortunate circumstances in which we find ourselves. So they argue that happiness cannot consist simply in “external goods” or “goods of fortune,” for these goods are external to our own choosing and deciding. Whatever happiness is, it must take account of the fact that a happy life is one lived by rational agents who act and who are not simply victims of their circumstances.

The Greek moralists conclude that a happy life must give a prominent place to the exercise of virtue, for virtuous traits of character are stable and enduring and are not products of fortune, but of learning or cultivation. Moreover, virtuous traits of character are excellences of the human being in that they are the best exercise of reason, which is the activity characteristic of human beings. In this way, the Greek philosophers claim, virtuous activity completes or perfects human life.

Although the Greek philosophers agree that happiness requires virtue and hence that a happy person must have virtuous traits of character such as wisdom, bravery, temperance, and justice, they disagree about how to understand these traits. Several of Plato’s dialogues criticize the view that virtues are merely tendencies to act in particular ways. Bravery requires more than standing up against threats to oneself and others. Bravery also requires recognizing when standing up to these threats is reasonable and appropriate, and it requires acting on one’s recognition.

This led the Greek moralists to conclude that virtuous traits of character have two aspects: (a) a behavioural aspect — doing particular kinds of action and (b) a psychological aspect — having the right motives, aims, concerns, and perspective. The Greek philosophers disagree mostly about what (b) involves. In particular, they differ about the role played in virtuous traits of character by cognitive states (e.g., knowledge and belief) on the one hand and affective states (e.g., desires, feelings, and emotions) on the other. Socrates and the Stoics argued that only cognitive states were necessary for virtue, whereas Plato and Aristotle argued that both cognitive and affective states were necessary.

Both Plato and Aristotle argue that virtuous character requires a distinctive combination of cognitive and affective elements. In the Republic, Plato divides the soul into three parts and gives to each a different kind of desire (rational, appetitive, or spirited). As types of non-rational desire, appetitive and spirited desires can conflict with our rational desires about what contributes to our overall good, and they will sometimes move us to act in ways we recognize to be against our greater good. When that happens, we are incontinent. To be virtuous, then, we must both understand what contributes to our overall good and have our spirited and appetitive desires educated properly, so that they agree with the guidance provided by the rational part of the soul.

Aristotle provided particular virtues to provide illustrations of character. Each virtue is set over or concerned with specific feelings or actions. The virtue of mildness or good temper, for example, is concerned with anger. Aristotle thinks that a mild person ought to be angry about some things (e.g., about injustice and other forms of mistreatment) and should be willing to stand up for himself and those he cares about. Not to do so would, in Aristotle’s view, indicate the morally deficient character of the inirascible person. It would also be inappropriate to take offense and get angry if there is nothing worth getting angry about. That response would indicate the morally excessive character of the irascible person. The mild person’s reactions are appropriate to the situation. Sometimes intense anger is appropriate; at other times calm detachment is.

Aristotle says that the non-rational part of a virtuous person’s soul “speaks with the same voice” (homophônei, Nicomachean Ethics 1102b28) as the rational part. That the virtuous person’s soul is unified and not torn by conflict distinguishes the state of being virtuous from various non-virtuous conditions such as continence (enkrateia), incontinence (akrasia), and vice (kakia) in general.

Aristotle believes that any non-virtuous person is plagued by inner doubt or conflict, even if on the surface she appears to be as psychologically unified as virtuous people. Although a vicious person may appear to be single-minded about her disdain for justice and her pursuit of material goods and power, she must seek out others’ company to forget or ignore her own actions. Aristotle seems to have this point in mind when he says of vicious people in Nicomachean Ethics IX.4 that they are at odds with themselves and do not love themselves. Virtuous persons, on the other hand, enjoy who they are and take pleasure in acting virtuously.

Like the morally vicious person, the continent and incontinent persons are internally conflicted, but they are more aware of their inner turmoil than the morally vicious person. Continence is essentially a kind of self-mastery: the continent person recognizes what she should do and does it, but to do so she must struggle against the pull of recalcitrant feelings. The incontinent person also in some way knows what she should do, but she fails to do it because of recalcitrant feelings.

Because Aristotle thinks that virtue is a unified, unconflicted state where emotional responses and rational assessments speak with the same voice, he, like Plato, thinks that the education of our emotional responses is crucial for the development of virtuous character. If our emotional responses are educated properly, we will learn to take pleasure or pain in the right things. Like Plato, Aristotle thinks that we can take a person’s pleasures and pains to be a sign of his state of character.

To explain what the virtuous person’s pleasures are like, Aristotle returns to the idea that virtue is an excellent state of the person. Virtue is the state that makes a human being good and makes him perform his function well. His function (his ergon or characteristic activity), Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics I.7, is rational activity, so when we exercise our fully developed rational powers well, we are good (virtuous) human beings and live well (we are happy).

According to Aristotle, human beings can reason in ways that non-human animals cannot. They can deliberate about what to do, about what kind of lives to live, about what sort of persons to be. They can look for reasons to act or live one way rather than another. In other words, they can engage in practical reasoning. They can also think about the nature of the world and why it seems to behave as it does. They can consider scientific and metaphysical truths about the universe. This is to engage in theoretical reasoning (“contemplation” or theôria).

How do one realize these powers fully? Aristotle’s idea is that an individual develops these abilities to the extent that he enjoys and values the exercise of his realized rational powers in a wide variety of different and even seemingly unconnected activities. When that happens, his exercise of these abilities is a continuing source of self-esteem and enjoyment. He comes to like his life and himself and is now a genuine self-lover.

In Nicomachean Ethics IX.8, Aristotle takes pains to distinguish true self-love, which characterizes the virtuous person, from vulgar self-love, which characterizes morally defective types. Morally defective types love themselves in the sense that they love material goods and advantages. They desire to secure these things even at the expense of other people, and so they act in ways that are morally vicious.

Genuine self-lovers, on the other hand, love most the exercise of their developed human activity, which is rational activity. When they enjoy and recognize the value of developing their rational powers, they can use this recognition to guide their decisions and to determine which actions are appropriate in which circumstances. This is the reasoning of those who have practical wisdom (phronêsis). Moreover, because they now take pleasure in the right things (they enjoy most figuring things out rather than the accumulation of wealth or power), they will avoid many of the actions, and will be unattracted to many of the pleasures, associated with the common vices. In other words, they will act as a virtuous person would.

According to Aristotle, the full realization of our rational powers is not something we can achieve or maintain on our own. It is hard, he says in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9, for a solitary person to be continuously active, but it is easier with others. To realize our powers fully we need at least a group of companions who share our interests and with whom we can cooperate to achieve our mutually recognized goals. In this kind of cooperative activity, we are parts of a larger enterprise, so that when others act, it is as though we are acting, too. In this way, these activities expand our conception of who “we” are, and they make the use of our powers more continuous and more stable.

As Aristotle explains in Rhetoric II.4, if we and our cooperative partners do their parts responsibly, each will develop feelings of friendship for the others involved. In this way, successful cooperative activity transforms persons’ desires and motivations. Although we may have initiated activity for self-interested reasons, the psychological result is that we come to like our cooperative partners and to develop a concern for their good for their own sakes. This change, Aristotle indicates, is caused to occur in us. It is not chosen. Once bonds of friendship are formed, it is natural for us to exhibit the social virtues Aristotle describes in Nicomachean Ethics IV.6–8, which include generosity, friendliness, and mildness of temper.

Aristotle thinks that, in addition to friendships, wider social relations are required for the full development of our rational powers. He says we are by nature political beings, whose capacities are fully realized in a specific kind of political community (a polis or city-state). Aristotle’s ideal political community is led by citizens who recognize the value of living fully active lives and whose aim is to make the best life possible for their fellow citizens. When citizens deliberate and legislate about the community’s educational, office-holding, and economic policies, their goal is to determine and promote the conditions under which citizens can fully develop their powers to think and to know.

The Stoic philosophers have a view of character that is close to Socrates’, but they reach it through agreement with Aristotle. The Stoics assume that the good life for human beings is a life in accord with nature. They agree with Aristotle that the human being’s essence is a life in accord with reason. The Stoics conclude that human good consists in excellent rational activity, for a person can guide his actions by rational choice, no matter what misfortunes he may encounter. The virtuous person becomes the sage (sophos) who has and acts on knowledge of the good. His actions are informed by his insights about the advantages of perfecting one’s rationality by acting in agreement with the rational order of nature. Like Socrates, the Stoic view of virtue focuses on the virtuous person’s cognitive state: it is his knowledge of the rational order of the universe and his desire to accord with that rational order that leads him to act as he does.

To be virtuous, there is no need to develop any capacities other than cognitive capacities, for the Stoics claim against Plato and Aristotle that there is really no non-rational part of the soul. Although the Stoics admit that there are passions such as anger, fear, and so on, they treat them as mistaken judgments about what is good and evil. Since the sage or virtuous person is wise and has no mistaken judgments about the good, he has no passions. So if the sage loses any natural advantages in misfortune, he has no emotion about them. Rather, he views them as “indifferents” (adiaphora).

Unlike Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics did not think virtue was developed and sustained by any particular kind of community. Granted, social relationships and community are among the preferred indifferents in that they are to be preferred to the opposite conditions of hostility, war, and enmity. But they are not necessary for anyone’s happiness. If we lose them, it is not a loss of a genuine good. So the Stoic Epictetus (c. 55-c.135), a freed slave, argued that the death of one’s family members is no real loss and is no worse than the breaking of a cup. The community that did matter to the Stoics was cosmic.

Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) objected to Aristotle’s approach to virtue and especially to his attempts to find a mean in terms of which to understand justice. It does not matter, Grotius complained, what moves someone to act unjustly — the only thing that matters is that unjust action violates the rights of others. Grotius acknowledged that one may develop emotional habits that support right action, but he thought this was a matter of having reason control passions and emotions so that they do not interfere with right action. That reason should control passions indicates that the desired state is for one part of us to rule the other, not for both parts, in Aristotle’s words, to speak with the same voice. On this view, moral character is a state closer to what the Greeks considered self-mastery or continence than it is to what they considered virtue.

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides moral philosophy into two domains, that of justice or law on the one hand (the Doctrine of Right), and that of ethics or virtue on the other (the Doctrine of Virtue). The duties that form the subject matter of the Doctrine of Right are like the natural law theorists’ perfect duties: they are precise, owed to specifiable others, and can be legally enforced. They require that we take or forego certain actions. Other duties (which form the subject matter of the Doctrine of Virtue) are duties to adopt certain ends.

Many of them are imperfect, in that they do not specify how, when, or for whom (in the case of duties to others) they should be achieved. Examples are the duty not to let one’s talents rust or the duty not to deny help to others. Because we cannot be compelled to adopt ends, but must do so from free choice, these duties are not legally enforceable. They require inner, not outer, legislation, so we must impose them on ourselves. Because, according to Kant, we are always fighting against the impulses and dispositions that oppose the moral law, we need strength of will and self-mastery to fulfil our imperfect duties. This self-mastery Kant calls courage.

That virtue is a form of continence for Kant is also suggested by his treatment of other traits such as gratitude and sympathy. Although Kant thinks that feelings cannot be required of anyone, some feelings are nevertheless associated with the moral ends we adopt. If we adopt others’ happiness as an end, we will not take malicious pleasure in their downfall. On the contrary, we will naturally feel gratitude for their benevolence and sympathy for their happiness. These feelings will make it easier for us to perform our duties and are a sign that we are disposed to do so. Kant remarks of sympathy that “it is one of the impulses that nature has implanted in us to do what the representation of duty alone would not accomplish” (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Ak. 457).

Thus it matters to Kant that we perform the duties of virtue with the properly cultivated emotions. But to do so is not to develop our nature so that the two parts of us, reason and passion, are unified and speak with the same voice. Rather, if we perform our duties of virtue in the right spirit, one part of us, reason, retains control over the other part, passion. Kant writes that virtue “contains a positive command to a man, namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control and so to rule over himself.

David Hume (1711–1776) explicitly professes a preference for ancient ethics (Hume, Enquiries, 318), claiming that morals are the one science in which the ancients are not surpassed by the moderns (Hume, Enquiries, 330). Like some of the Greek moralists, Hume thought morality must be rooted in our passional nature. For morality moves us to action whereas reason alone, Hume thought, does not. His preference for ancient ethics is most obviously seen in his focus on the nature of the virtues and in his efforts to explain how virtues arise from our feelings and desires.

Hume divides the virtues into two types: artificial and natural. Artificial virtues include justice, promise-keeping, and allegiance to legitimate government. Natural virtues include courage, magnanimity, ambition, friendship, generosity, fidelity, and gratitude, among many others. Whereas each exercise of the natural virtues normally produces good results, the good of artificial virtues is indirect in that it comes about only as a result of there being an accepted practice of exercising these virtues.

Hume’s  discussion of the natural virtues (consisting of courage, magnanimity, ambition, and others) is based on, or may even be a form of, self-esteem: “Whatever we call heroic virtue, and admire under the character of greatness and elevation of mind, is either nothing but a steady and well-established pride and self-esteem, or partakes largely of that passion. Courage … and all the other shining virtues of that kind, have plainly a strong mixture of self-esteem in them, and derive a great part of their merit from that origin” (Hume, Treatise, 599–600). Yet these virtues based on self-esteem must be tempered by a second group that includes generosity, compassion, fidelity, and friendship; otherwise traits like courage are “fit only to make a tyrant and public robber” (Hume, Treatise, 603). This second group of virtues is based on broadly-based feelings of good will, affection, and concern for others.

Hume believes that we develop self-esteem from what we do well, if what we do well expresses something distinctive and durable about us, and he seems to recognize that realized deliberative abilities are among the most durable features of ourselves. As we gain a facility at deliberation, we come to develop self-esteem and enjoy who we are, like Aristotle’s virtuous person who enjoys most the exercise of his developed deliberative powers. Moreover, Hume’s recognition that self-esteem must be tempered by benevolence is reflected in Aristotle’s argument that the development and preservation of proper self-love requires friendships in which persons come to care for others for others’ own sakes.

Hume’s account of how we determine what is right and wrong illuminates the role character plays. When Hume’s “judicious spectator” determines what is right and wrong, she fixes on some “steady and general” point of view and “loosens” herself from her actual feelings and interests. It appears that someone who has developed an enjoyment in the activities of deliberating and reflecting, and whose self-esteem is based on that enjoyment, will be more likely to take up the point of view of the judicious spectator and to perform the subtle corrections in response that may be necessary to loosen oneself from one’s own perspective and specific passions.

Someone whose self-esteem is based on an enjoyment taken in deliberation will be attuned to wider complications and will have the wider imaginative powers needed for correct deliberation from a steady and general point of view. Hume’s view of the relation between passion and deliberation is reminiscent of the Aristotelian view that someone with proper self-love will also be practically wise, in that his self-love will enable him to size up practical situations correctly and determine correctly what it is best to do.

Both Marx and Mill accept Aristotle’s insight that virtue and good character are based on a self-esteem and self-confidence that arises from a satisfaction taken in the fully realized expression of the rational powers characteristic of human beings. They also accept Aristotle’s recognition that the production and preservation of this type of self-esteem require that individuals be part of specific socio-political structures.

Marx, Mill, and Rawls suggest how character can be moulded by antecedent circumstances – Marx by economic structures; Mill by paid work, political life, and family relationships; Rawls by the institutions regulated by the two principles of justice. Yet these insights about the effect of institutions on character seem to raise other, more troubling questions: if our character is the result of social and political institutions beyond our control, then perhaps we are not in control of our characters at all and becoming decent is not a real possibility.

Among contemporary philosophers, Susan Wolf is one of several who address these worries. In her “Freedom within Reason,” Wolf argues that almost any morally problematic upbringing could be coercive and could render a person unable to see what she ought morally to do or render him unable to act on that recognition. Wolf thinks that there is no method for determining which upbringings and influences are consistent with an ability to see what should be done and to act accordingly, and hence she thinks there is always the risk that we are less responsible for our actions than we may hope. For if good character is based on naturally occurring psychological responses that most people (including persons brought up to embrace racist and sexist beliefs) experience without difficulty, then most people should be able to become better and to be responsible for actions that express (or could express) their character.

Still, this is not to say that changing one’s character is easy, straightforward, or quickly achieved. If character is formed or malformed by the structures of political, economic, and family life, then changing one’s character may require access to the appropriate transforming forces, which may not be available. In modern societies, for example, many adults still work at alienating jobs that do not afford opportunity to realize the human powers and to experience the pleasures of self-expression.

These considerations indicate why character has become a central issue not only in ethics, but also in feminist philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of literature. If developing good moral character requires being members of a community in which citizens can fully realize their human powers and ties of friendship, then one needs to ask how educational, economic, political, and social institutions should be structured to make that development possible.

Some recent philosophical work is sceptical of character. This work relies on results in experimental social psychology to call into question the conceptions of character and virtue that are of concern especially to the ancient Greek moralists and to contemporary philosophers whose work derives from ancient views. Philosophers impressed by this tradition in experimental social psychology–which is often labelled “situationism”–have denied that traits of character are stable, consistent, or evaluatively integrated in the way that ancient or contemporary philosophers suggest.

The ancient moralists assumed that virtues are, in John Doris’s description, “robust traits: if a person has a robust trait, they [sic] can be confidently expected to display trait-relevant behaviour across a wide variety of trait-relevant situations, even where some or all of these situations are not optimally conducive to such behaviour” (2002, 18). But Doris and others argue that traits are not robust or “global.” They are not stable or consistent and are wrongly invoked to explain why people act as they do. Rather, these philosophers argue, and as the experimental tradition indicates, much of human behaviour is attributable to seemingly trivial features of the situations in which persons find themselves. Scepticism about global traits of character emerges from some famous experiments in social psychology.

Perhaps most damning for the robust view of character are the results of the experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. In these experiments the great majority of subjects, when politely though firmly requested by an experimenter, were willing to administer what they thought were increasingly severe electric shocks to a screaming “victim.” These experiments are taken to show that if subjects did have compassionate tendencies, these tendencies cannot have been of the type that robust traits require.

Philosophers influenced by the experimental tradition in social psychology conclude that people do not have the broadly based, stable, consistent traits of character that were of interest to the ancient and modern moralists, or to contemporary philosophers working with some version of those views. Rather, the psychological studies are taken to show that persons generally have only narrow, “local” traits that are not unified with other traits into a wider behavioural pattern. Persons are helpful when in a good mood, say, but not helpful when in a hurry, or they are honest at home but not honest at work.

These interpretations of the experiments in social psychology have been challenged by both psychologists and philosophers, especially by philosophers working in the tradition of virtue ethics (see related entry on virtue ethics), who claim that the character traits criticized by situationists have little to do with the conception of character associated with the ancient and modern moralists. The objectors say that the situationists rely on an understanding of character traits as isolated and often non-reflective dispositions to behave in stereotypical ways. They wrongly assume that traits can be determined from a single type of behaviour stereotypically associated with that trait.

Or consider the Milgram experiments. During the experiments, many of the subjects protested even while continuing to obey the experimenter’s commands. In post-experiment interviews with subjects, Milgram noted that many were completely convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing. But the presence of conflict need not indicate an absence, or loss, of character. On a traditional conception of character, as examined in this entry, many of Milgram’s subjects are best described as incontinent. They have character, but it is neither virtuous nor vicious. Many of us seem to fall into this category. We often recognize what it is right to do but we nevertheless do not do it.(Summarised from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).