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The Virtues: Contemporary Essays on Moral Character by Robert B. Kruschwitz and Robert C. Roberts, editors

Too diffident? Too authentic? Too perfectionistic? Thomas E. Hill, Derek L. Phillips and Susan Wolf have essays for you, but none of those is the best essay here. Several individuals have argued that will power is partly a skill, but none of them I know of has covered the topic as well as Robert C. Roberts. In "Will Power and the Virtues" Roberts distinguishes a willful person, one who does whatever he wants or his impulses suggest, from a strong willed person. A strong willed person acts resolutely despite other inclinations. The virtues of will power--will, courage, industriousness and self-control--are necessary for goodness, he writes, but some evil people can possess them.

Among the fascinating ideas covered by Roberts is the problem of assigning moral credit. One school argues that someone who has struggled against their own immoral impulses deserves more credit. She deserves credit because she has overcome by her own will and decisions. A second school argues that the mere idea that a person is loaded with immoral impulses reflects badly on her. The second school argues that a person deserves credit for "purity" of heart, being full of impulses that are good so that she does not have to struggle. The pure hearted person may have won her struggles on the way to gaining purity of heart. A person, however, who has purity of heart and no prior history of struggling lacks something important for moral credit. Moral identity and autonomy are forged by struggle, whether currently or in the past.

Roberts argues that managing inclinations is an important matter and that doing so is learned. He argues that breaking habits, creating habits, deferring gratification and directing emotions are management skills. The more we practice these skills, the better we get at them. These skills are more similar to shooting a basketball than riding a bike. We can get extremely rusty. For practice, William James recommended that individuals do one thing a day they would rather not do.

Among the points he makes is that we should have the skill and willingness to act on the ideas that:

· Impulses often quickly pass

· Strong or vigorous actions can lesson or direct emotions

· Self-talk helps direct emotions, for example, "it will soon be over."

Roberts concludes by noting that self-efficacy and intense caring are important elements in the virtues of will power.

Susan Wolf's essay on moral saints suffers from bad execution. Wolf defines a moral saint as someone who is always as morally good as possible, never mind that such a person does not exist. And they "have to be very, very nice." Unfortunately, the relationship between niceness and morality is only slightly greater that the relationship between green socks and morality. The person Wolf describes is not a moral saint but an etiquette saint.

She distinguishes two types of moral saints, the loving saint and the rational saint. The loving saint does it all for love and the rational saint does it all for duty or other reasons. Moral saints vary in personality. Wolf writes that some are jovial and some are garrulous, but no matter his personality the saint spends all his time doing good. Wolf thinks moral saints are seriously flawed.

The moral saint, claims wolf, can not develop non-moral skills and interests. Tastes such as golf, musical instruments and Victorian novels are out. Saints are not well rounded. They are boring. Saints can not have sarcastic wit. They can not be cool like Paul Newman. Uh-oh... I feel straw person urges racing into my brain... go away urges... must... keep... writing... must... be... nice... must... ahhhhhhh. I can't take it any more. This argument stinks. Wolf conflates etiquette saints with moral individuals. What is morally wrong with sarcastic wit? What makes it morally different from being jovial? If sarcastic comedian Lewis Black changed his act to a moral point of view, reasoning that the greatest good he could do would be scathingly accurate moral commentary, how would that make him less moral than people who are very, very nice. Stepford people are very, very nice, not moral people.

Cool people are boring. Is there anything less interesting to a thoughtful person than a shallow hipster. The not-so-cool Paul Newman of recent movies is much more entertaining than the old Paul Newman who made dopey girls swoon. People impressed by cool are not much more developed or well-rounded than people impressed by Rambo movies. When I here individuals described as cool, I am tempted to assume they are moral himbos and bimbos. Actual moral saints, if they exist, would be fascinating, a change of pace, much more fascinating than people who think David Letterman is the pinnacle of civilization or philosophers who write tedious essays that merely excuse status quo intuitions.

The picture wolf paints conflicts with moral ideals. Someone who is unfailingly patient has serious character flaws. They are the everyday equivalent of a pacifist.

Wolf argues that the person she calls a moral saint, and I call an etiquette fiend, fails on utilitarian and deontological grounds, though I don't know how that could be if they are as morally good as possible. Morality is a hard enough sell without philosophers equating prigs, prudes and prissies with moral heroes. The best point Wolf makes is that a one-dimensional life of any kind is inadequate. Robert Adams replies that saints can be interesting people.

Derek L. Phillips contrasts the moral and therapeutic worlds. Robert B. Louden explores some of the flaws in virtue ethics. Most of the flaws fall into the categories of not giving enough consideration to rules and consequences. Virtue ethics:

· Does not put enough emphasis on actions.

· Offers poor guidance on practical moral problems and situations.

· Creates backsliding because it is not vigilant about acts and their consequences.

· Lacks tools for distinguishing good from bad characters and for determining when characters have changed.

· Lacks principles for dealing with a complex, modern world.

· Encourages self-deception about goodness. Consistent trivial goods are assumed to outweigh greater evils.

· Creates individuals who become useful idiots for evildoers.

· Gives too much weight to virtues related to niceness. Nice people do many major evils.

· Emphasizes image over substance.

The virtues provide some useful language to describe actions, but they are a poor excuse for a full-fledged ethical system.

James Rachels has noted elsewhere (I can't remember where) that virtue ethics is at best a supplement to consequentialist and deontological theories. Virtue ethics often degrades into determining rightness by following or applying buzzwords. It is too unclear, too unspecific and not very beneficial. Virtue ethics is like having a motivational speaker from a stone-age tribe that has yet to discover numbers above five handle the accounting for a large organization. Among the problems with virtue ethics is that it makes clarity and accuracy difficult. Instead of thorough arguments, it is easy to hastily label actions in buzzword virtue categories.

One essay in here contrasts right-wing retributive justice with left-wing distributive justice, but the essay is worthless. Both power market and lefty economic theories are distributive. Neither are meritarian and consequentialist. Who gets the distribution merely changes. Government intervention in fiscal and monetary policies have a greater impact on who gets what than welfare state interventions. If you inherit a billion dollars or earn a million dollars selling subsidized tobacco, that is not retribution. Worth skimming.

(C) 1986

—Book review article by J.T. Fournier

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