On the other hand, if you believe in character, as Schopenhauer does, then you might be less likely to forgive and forget, because a person's actions, as you see it, reveal something about their nature. So while a kind deed might prompt you to think of them as nice, a cruel deed might strike you as showing what a nasty piece of work they really are. It's hard to forgive an action if you see it as evidence of something else, some underlying, and probably ongoing, problem.
Perhaps, then, we might all get along better if we think of actions as isolated incidents that reveal nothing at all about anyone's character. Perhaps we would be better off not believing in character at all. But it's very hard to do that. Sartre's view, for instance, strikes me as being the opposite of Schopenhauer's. It takes everyone to be 100% free and to have no character except in retrospect, this character being created by one's choices, not revelatory of any pre-existing condition. So if you have been kind to me a thousand times I have no reason to expect you to be kind again, or to think of you now as a kind person (rather than one who has been kind in the past). Which means that liking you (as opposed to something like being grateful to you) is likely to seem irrational to me, or at least a-rational.
Probably the best view to take is neither Schopenhauer's nor Sartre's, but the issue seems interesting to me. Something like it is raised by Nafsika Athanasouli's question:
Does anyone know of a non-dispositional account of friendship? I am thinking here of philosophers who argue that evidence from psychology shows there is no such thing as character (or, if it exists, that it is not the kind of collection of dispositional traits some philosophers assume it to be). Some of these philosophers go on to give accounts of morality without relying on character (e.g. John Dorris), but does anyone try to give an account of friendship without dispositions (or character if you prefer)?
"Perhaps we would be better off not believing in character at all. But it's very hard to do that.
ReplyDeleteActually isn't it impossible to do? Isn't thinking in that way outside the human framework itself? If we recognize other agents then we can't help but recognize a mental life and what is that but the nature of the deliberating agent, i.e., its character. As you note it seems outside the realm of the possible to disregard the role of character when thinking about others from a Sartrian perspective because, well because agents aren't merely automatons even if some philosophers have imagined they can be conceived of in that way. Aren't we bound, by the very terms of the world in which we find ourselves, to see agents (where behavior by choice occurs) as well as things (where behavior is caused)?
How can we give any kind of coherent account of ourselves and others like us (capable of deliberative choice) without presuming character in the mix? And isn't this the real bottom line which underwrites our moral judgments? Must it not always and ultimately be about character not outcomes or mere activity?
It does seem very hard to do without the idea of character, I agree. Whether it's literally impossible to do so, and whether ethics is ultimately all about character, I can't say. I lean towards Yes and No, respectively, but these are huge claims that need a lot of evidence to support a definite answer. Or, at least, I haven't thought about them enough to be confident that my hunches are right.
DeleteI don't know how we get evidence for the idea that character is crucial to our conception of the moral. Is there any example anywhere of people treating others as automatons (not merely as slaves because slavery has existed in human society but as if the others have neither mental life nor feelings relative to the world around them)? We can imagine a world of machines, of robots perhaps, but once we take the further step of imagining they behave as we do, haven't we already imputed some form of mental life to them qua intentionality?
DeleteWould discovery of a "society" in which that was actually the case even be possible? Imaginable? Imagine a world in which the human creatures move about without regard for the intentionality of one another. Could we actually imagine ourselves as zombies in a zombie world? But if we can't, isn't that itself a kind of evidence for its impossibility?
If science is about searching for and interpreting the evidence of observation, must not philosophy be about interpreting our interpretations themselves? And in that case what evidence would we need but what we actually think when thinking about anything?
For my part I can't imagine a world of zombies (in the philosophical sense) nor can I imagine anyone else imagining it. Perhaps they might say they can but then what would that entail? Perhaps an illusion of sorts with the imaginer confusing the Hollywood picture of swarms of automatons qua zombies operating in our world. But then Hollywood always gives us ourselves in that world, too, as victims or victors. So it is still a human world not a world of zombies per se.
The behaviors of creatures, especially those like us (and maybe this cannot be limited to humans) seems -- to me at least -- to imply mental life, i.e., an inner realm of experiences which all such creatures have and which consists of awareness and intentionality motivated by awareness. And this, our mental life, implies character which can vary in type, in terms of what we think about, what we want, what we decide to do.
So, for my part, I would say that moral assessment is inconceivable without a notion of character and, in fact, character is inconceivable without the possibility of moral assessment. The two are locked hand in glove into a single phenomenon, the world of subjectness, of creatures engaged with their world. And within that engagement, to the extent we are capable of deliberating with ourselves as elements in that world, recognition of character and the possibility of rating it, happens.
I think the idea of character is meant to mean something more than just having a mental life of some kind. The idea is that people have certain traits that are more or less stable and that, if you know what they are, help you predict what they will do in certain situations. Some people are brave, some are cowardly, some are honest, some are cruel, and so on. This might sound obviously true, but there are people who deny it. One reason they deny it is that small things seem to make a big difference to how people behave (I can't think of any specific examples, but there is a body of literature on this based on experiments by psychologists). Another reason (or another side of the same coin) some people deny that character exists is that circumstances can seem to dictate what people do. So perhaps alleged cowards are just behaving as anyone would do in the situation they find themselves in. Sartre's view, as I understand it, is that we are all always equally free to behave bravely or cruelly or whatever, even if some are tempted more to act in some ways than others. So we choose who we are rather than discovering who we are. This is not based on any psychological research but is more of an ethical commitment, I think. Anyway, this is the kind of thing that people debate and that I had in mind.
DeleteThanks replying. "Character" is an interesting concept. Denying it exists depends on what we take the term to denote. If we think things only "exist" when they're tangible via our sensory capacities or conceivable as having an entity like status (built on observations), then it makes sense to say the idea is a fiction, character doesn't exist. But we don't really think or speak this way about a whole host of things so why do it with character?
DeleteWe speak of ideas, beliefs, traditions -- even universities -- and no ordinary speaker of the language has any trouble for the most part in knowing what's being talked about despite the absence of observable entities answering to those terms. Do ideas exist? Beliefs? Universities? Of course they do. They are part of our world.
So the question is, rather, what do such things consist of? They can't be identifiable as trees or rocks are or even rivers (an odder case as Heraclitus pointed out a couple millennia ago). Thingness is a function of how we speak so why should character not be seen from this perspective? And, of course, it is in our daily lives, the way we typically speak and act.
The point I want to make is that the idea of the moral requires the concept of character (however disguised or named). To speak of things in a moral way is to invoke the idea (implicitly or explicitly) of persons and persons are not just bags of flesh and bone and lots of water ambulating about but entities with a subjective dimension.
What does it mean to be a subject? It's to have a certain kind of mental life, awareness of things and, at a certain level, awareness of self. When that level is reached, when selves are seen as part of the range of things in the world that surrounds us, the notion of character (or selfhood or personhood or, in some traditions, souls) becomes important. Moral judgment is only possible if the acts being assessed are acts of persons with the capacity to have done otherwise (since even persons may lack such a capacity at times or, if there is organic damage, all the time).
The question you raise, whether we can take the view that persons cannot be praised or blamed for what they do because their actions are entirely caused by forces beyond their control, that causation precludes reasoned choice, is an important one and has certainly been argued by many. But I wanted to make the point that that only works on a theoretical basis because, shoved into the hurly-burly of the real world, we can't help but recognize other agents making choices and that very recognition implies an ability to hold them accountable.
Sartre's view as you describe it (which accords with my own sense of this, by the way) leaves out the causal factors which DO affect us, treating the self as radically a-material. But those who take the opposite view and argue that there is no real free will because everything is ultimately caused by something else miss the dimension of our actual lives which makes us different from rocks, trees. etc., -- even from insects, fish and lizards and from most of the other mammalian life forms we share this planet with. These latter certainly have awareness which, at some point in evolutionary development becomes what we would recognize as a mental life. But that's not enough for the moral dimension to kick in.
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DeleteIt takes a certain complexity, not available to all sentient creatures, for self awareness to be present -- and even more complexity to have a world which goes beyond the immediate time and place in which one stands, one that includes both objects and subjects. When we get to the point of seeing and grappling with this subjectness, the condition in which our sense of selfhood arises, we cannot help but concern ourselves with character. And it is that focus where moral thought takes its stand, where moral judgment and belief arise.
I don't think this denies a claim, consistent with Sartre, that we finally "choose who we are," however. Isn't that capacity to choose in fact the best characterization of what we mean by moral thought?
And yes, this is a kind of ethical commitment, one which allows us to realize our own role in our future actions even if, contra Sartre, those choices are more constrained than he seems prepared to allow.
Duncan wrote: "Some people are brave, some are cowardly, some are honest, some are cruel, and so on. This might sound obviously true, but there are people who deny it. One reason they deny it is that small things seem to make a big difference to how people behave (I can't think of any specific examples, but there is a body of literature on this based on experiments by psychologists)."
DeleteI'm not sure what you have in mind by "small things" making a difference to how people behave. Certainly there are cases when small things matter, affect the range of our choices. But as long as the capacity to choose remains intact, how is the concept of character undermined?
I guess my argument is that character (or some equivalent notion or term) is essential to a moral dimension in how we behave. If there was no mental life (if we were all just zombies) then there would be no point to making moral claims. But the fact that there is a place for moral claims in our lives and, more, that we can't really seem to avoid thinking in such terms, seems to me to imply the idea that there is character in the mix.
We don't hold beasts accountable for their actions (though we may be pleased or displeased with what they do), nor to we hold infants or very young children accountable (at least not in the way we hold older children and adults accountable. But accountability is incoherent without a notion of character (the state and type of the person) in the mix.
The kind of small thing I have in mind, although I'm making this example up, is this. Imagine an experiment based on the story of the Good Samaritan. Someone lies down and pretends to need help, then someone else counts the number of passersby who stop to help, as well as the number who just pass by. Now imagine that the number who stop is significantly different if the sun is out, or if the local football team won its last game, or if the person in need of help is wearing a yellow t-shirt. That's the kind of small thing that, I believe, has been found to make a difference in behavior. And it suggests that whether one helps is not determined by whether one is just that kind of person. (I don't think this kind of evidence proves that moral character is not real, but it is interesting.)
DeleteOkay, I see what you meant. Not sure, though, how much bearing that has on moral choice as such. THAT there are always ancillary factors strikes me, at least, as a given. How could there not be. But the decision making we engage in happens in just such contexts. The decision to stop and help or not help might show to what extent moral considerations like helping those in need to different subjects. But that any of them should think they HAVE a reason to stop and help is a different question. It's a matter of paying attention but also of the weighting we apply, either from having been taught or having observed others or from having practiced such behaviors when people are in need.
DeleteThe moral question then is whether we have a reason that overrides the other kinds of considerations you mentioned to stop and help. But such an experiment as this doesn't seem to me to get at that question.
To be moral or not to be, assuming being moral means showing concern for the other (his or her plight or interests), must rest on something internal to the choosing process. We don't, after all,think a mother bird that sits on its eggs, feeds its chicks, distracts predators or fights them off, rather than just going about her business or saving herself is doing so for moral considerations. The bird has no choice, acts on instinct. In some cases, at least, we do have the ability to choose what we will do next.
Oops, that should have read "might show to what extent moral considerations like helping those in need MATTER to different subjects." Sorry for that!
DeleteThe moral question then is whether we have a reason that overrides the other kinds of considerations you mentioned to stop and help. But such an experiment as this doesn't seem to me to get at that question.
DeleteRight, it's not meant to get at that question.
Thanks, Duncan. So, on your view, the psychological inquiry (what makes or causes us to act this way rather than that?) is a different question. Agreed. But isn't the philosophical question vis a vis moral judgments of goodness still to be answered then?
DeleteOr is it your view that there is no such question to answer, that we all know very well what it is to make moral judgments because it's part of what we happen to do as human beings of the type we are in the milieu we are in?
If that, then why do philosophers bother with the moral at all? If it's just about applied ethics, then we all do that just because we all make decisions with a moral slant all the time (not, that is "moral" as some particular morality or code of ethics but just that we think about what's right or wrong to do, what's good or bad before deciding to act, or retrospectively when thinking about past acts).
This goes back, I guess, to your earlier question of whether ethics is a subject. By that I took you to mean whether it's a fit subject for philosophical inquiry or something just to be lived, that we do but have little or no need to question or inquire about it.
My own answer is ethics is a subject fit for philosophy just as anything we do or believe is. I think Reshef argued earlier that the philosophical inquiry into ethics isn't about answering the question of what we ought to do (normative ethics), though he left me unclear as to what he then thought it was about (since so much of his own work addresses ethical matters). If doing ethics is not the focus of philosophical inquiry what shall we suppose is?
Is philosophy in ethics to be limited to metaethics then (to what ethical ideas and claims amount to in a cognitive sense)?
Yet metaethics must surely be relevant to the choices we actually make (and our reasons for them, too), since that inquiry addresses the cognitive status of the reasons we give for those choices.
If I am faced with a moral question in life I think about what it is I can do in response and about what I, given that I can, should do. And then I want to know why is the "should" in my considerations a should at all? Why not some other "should"?
Thus metaethics melds into ethical decision-making, the normative, just as the normative eases into applied ethics for that is where this all began. Are these distinctions, while helpful, in the end too arbitrary? And what is the point of applying philosophical thinking to the matter of ethics at all if it is not, at some point, to enable us to answer the questions we confront when ethics must be applied?
But isn't the philosophical question vis a vis moral judgments of goodness still to be answered then?
DeleteYes, but it isn't what I was talking about in this post.
As for the point of ethics or moral philosophy, that's a big question. Perhaps I'll have more to say about it soon.
The thing that scares me about an overly determinist picture is what it does to the system. I might not blame certain of my cells for metastasizing, the way I do not complain of gravity. But the system here is not "humans being more forgiving"; it is rather a system that itself is "dead." It is only in life that character, and thus blame, can emerge.
ReplyDeleteThere is also an important connection here to Wittgenstein. If you believe that meaning is use, and that words are deeds, you will have no choice but to see character as the emergence of behavior-pattern. It is no coincidence (wart) that in Wittgenstein's life he was derisive of people's thinking (intellectual missteps), but then also remorseful in other respects when reflecting upon his overall behaviors toward others. People leave a signature that shows itself (emerges). And this is why sincerity and having no pretense had to be the only way out of not being disgusting.
Three is a link here between meaning being use and character showing itself through behavior. I mention this briefly on note 38 on page 63 in New Critical Thinking, when dealing with the grammar of insincere belief states.
Yes, too much determinism is a bad thing. And Wittgenstein can help with that.
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