How Do We Get Things Wrong? Let Us Count The Ways
understanding our moral failures should be central to any virtue ethics
(this post was previously published in my Medium publication Practical Rationality)
One central aspect to virtue ethics that gets less discussion or examination than it deserves involves examining and exploring our own failures. This isn’t often taught explicitly in ethics courses, even if virtue ethics is. It also seems rarely touched upon in substantive ways by popular virtue ethics-based sites, videos, courses, and the like.
I’ve given a few talks myself on failure in relation to Stoic virtue ethics, for example these two:
But for the most part, you don’t see this topic explored anywhere near enough. What we really need to do, over and over, is to determine what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons we have gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.
All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices. To be sure, this emphasis indeed something good and needed. Virtue ethics provides a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life, than those oriented by other moral theories that tend to confine evaluation to motives, actions, consequences, or social arrangements.
But whether our goal is to fully understand the rich intellectual resources contained in the classic texts of Virtue Ethics, or to progressively develop and employ a coherent practical approach adequate to the complexities and demands of concrete moral life as we actually live it out, what is required is a well-differentiated grasp of how we go wrong, how we get things wrong, the range, differing seriousness, and types of moral failures.
Why is this necessary? Let’s look at what one ancient virtue ethicist and at one contemporary virtue ethicist — both of them of the highest caliber — have to say in response, starting with the present-day one. Alasdair MacIntyre is perhaps one of the most celebrated figures in the “revival” of Virtue Ethics in the late 20th century (I set “revival” in quotes because it really is such only from a certain common but provincial history of philosophy — but that’s a topic for another, later post).
Judging Our Successes and Failures
In his book After Virtue, MacIntyre stresses a point which he approaches and elaborates throughout his work: To progress as a person, towards one’s own flourishing, requires recognition that one not only has not progressed as far as one ought to have in moral life, in one’s actions, emotions, patterns and tendencies — along the practical axis, we might say. One’s very understanding of these matters is also likely skewed, underdeveloped, corrupted in certain ways — introducing the theoretical axis. And so, one needs other people to model virtuous behavior, to tell one what virtue is or requires, to guide or compel one towards behavior in accordance with virtue and away from behavior in accordance with vice.
One needs others, in ways all too rarely acknowledged or realized by modern moral theorists, to guide, to be fellow-travellers and enquirers on the path to the good. Guidebooks are all right, but don’t provide everything needed or desirable for the moral life. But, there’s another aspect as well. MacIntyre notes that engaging in practices or traditions by which virtues are learned, practiced, refined, understood involves
… accept[ance of] the authority of those standards [of excellence] and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences, and tastes to the standards… .
An integral, and (at least for someone like me, likely irreplaceable) component of moral life and development is the realization (and the attempted remedy) of just how many flaws one possesses and displays. These appear when one encounters and employs a genuine rule, a proper standard, a justly strict interpretation of what a human life ought to look like, and what a human being ought to do, feel, think, and will.
If the goal is in fact to move towards flourishing, towards the realization of the potential inherent in human beings, towards balancing goodnesses to enjoy, produce, embody, and share with others, well then, there’s no point in sugar-coating matters, in taking it easy on oneself as a matter of course. It is a mistake to not face and take a good hard look at oneself in whatever mirror might be less darkened and warped. This might be one’s own reflection or conscience, perhaps. Or it could take the form of verdicts of others people who avoid flattery out of genuine regard or love for another human. It could also be measures provided by evaluations or examples of those one respects.
When for instance, MacIntyre reasons that:
We have to accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage, and honesty.
that of course challenges one to discern several things:
whether they do in fact possess those virtues
to what degree they possess those virtues
in which ways they have developed them fully, and in what manners imperfectly
In another essay, which I like to assign my students, “Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy,” MacIntyre suggests two other virtues are needed in moral inquiry: temperance and prudence.
He also, even more importantly, points out that moral inquiry involves narrative self-understanding. This requires being able to tell and understand a story about one’s own successes, failures, choices, insights, misconceptions, commitments, waverings, sacrifices, relationships, disputes, agreements, and outcomes. This is a story that can be compared with or against stories of others, and — even when this remains merely implicit — also mapped onto explicitly articulated moral theories.
To begin in medias res — as we always do once we begin to think explicitly in terms of what we are doing, whether it is right or not, what we want and desire, what the costs and consequences are or could be (and this may be still only implicitly thinking in terms of any articulated moral theory, to begin from where we are), is to take up the mid-point in a history of some successes but also many moral failures, some of them formed as fateful choices, some consolidated and embodied in our difficult-to-change settled dispositions.
For many if not most of us, becoming good or progressing towards the better involves, requires, and is spurred at last by recognition at least to some tangible degree of how bad one is, has been, and will likely remain unless something(s) changes. Each of us has to take stock of factors that include:
just how badly off one actually is
what vices one suspects that one remains in the grip of
what virtues need to be understood and then deliberately cultivated
what instincts or appetites too long unchecked or indulged need to be examined and curbed
what relationships with others need to be restored or repaired
So, it’s necessary to learn and discern how one ought to see things, evaluate matters, scrutinize oneself and others. One must examine, so as to know rightly, the ranges and types not only of goodnesses but badnesses as well. One needs to distinguish, as does for example Aristotle, between modalities of wrongdoing, for instance, between behavior that is vicious and behavior that is not vicious but in accordance with vice (because it is out of accordance with virtue)
Why is this needed? Why some sort of complex differential scheme? Precisely because good and bad, right and wrong is not so simple as many would like it, and often wish-fulfill-fantasize them to be.
Differentiating Types of Moral Failures
Why is it important to think about and attempt to puzzle out different modalities of moral failures? Isn’t it enough just to say: “This is right,” “this is wrong”, “that is good”, “that is bad?” You can do this by setting out sets of rules, trying to cover each possible case and contingency. Or you can set out a plethora of examples, perhaps supplemented by proverbial adages passed down as well as coined through culture. Or you can derive, distill, describe, then promulgate more general (and thus hopefully more powerful) principles.
Why bother distinguishing all these varied manners of determining whether one is going wrong? Isn’t it enough just to know something is wrong, bad, off the mark?
For Aristotle, the answer is clearly No. And, this is not only because virtue and vice are basic, essential concepts in his moral theory, concepts that are not themselves readily reducible to other moral concepts (as virtues and vices are in, e.g. Utilitarian, Kantian, or Humean moral theories). The centrality and irreducibility of virtue and vice means that actions are evaluated as good or bad, right or wrong, by reference to what the appropriate virtues and vices are, that is, habitual and complex patterns of action, intention, attitude and affectivity.
In order to understand a vice, it isn’t enough to simply grasp it as something bad or wrong. One must know how and why it is bad or wrong. And practically speaking, one must grasp this not only in general and in the abstract, but in the concrete situations, actualities, choices, acts, partial successes and failures of the moral life and environment in which one lives and moves. One must dig a character open, so to speak, vivisect it (without killing it of course!), examine it not only on the surface but from the inside, scrutinizing the connections of its tissues and sinews, determine which parts are hale and healthy, which parts corrupted and in need of remedy or incision.
In the Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics Aristotle argues the importance of distinguishing between substantively different sorts of moral failings. No surprise there. What might be surprising at first, however, is that he explores these distinctions in other texts as well, particularly the Politics and the Politics. The statesperson or the political scientist ideally needs to have a full grasp of human nature, including all of its positive and negative dimensions and possibilities, as does the rhetor, the communicator, the wordsmith, the producer of persuasion — as do the producer of narratives and the critic as well, we discover in the Poetics.
Vice, Brutality, Error, and Mischance
What are the main categories of moral failures, the modes of bad or wrong actions, that Aristotle addresses? One of the consistent distinctions he makes between them differentiates these categories:
unjust, vicious actions (adikema)
wrong actions or moral errors (hamartemata)
and mistakes or unfortunate results (atukhemata).
Unjust actions, or vicious actions considered more broadly (since Aristotle considers justice to in some sense comprise all the virtues — a topic to address in another post) are in one sense the worst type of moral failure. Vices (kakiai, moktheriai) become rooted in the very character, the personality, of the one who has it, or in some sense becomes possessed by it. Vices not only establish habitual structures of action and emotion, vectors of desire and motivation, or ruts into which one easily, even unconsciously slips and travels, They also distort the very outlook, attitudes, and assessments of the person.
Another state similar to vice, in some ways yet worse, in others not as bad, is what Aristotle called “brutality” (theriotes), sometimes rather misleadingly translated as “bestiality,” in which some sort of damage to the human person incapacitates the distinctively human dimension of rationality, leaving behind only animality. In the vicious person, Aristotle says, the highest part has become corrupted, functioning poorly and contrary to how it should, but in the brutal person, it is lacking or not functioning at all.
In one way, the vicious person is worse than the brutal person, since they are still responsible for their character and actions, whereas the brutal person does not bear moral responsibility. But for that reason, as Aristotle says, their actions are in some sense even more disturbing, wrong in a different way, or even terrifying.
At the entire opposite end of the scale from actions stemming from vice are what we might translate as “mischances” or “things coming out badly.” These are cases where one’s action goes astray, with bad consequences. These consequences are perhaps foreseeable, but perhaps not. They are likely due to ignorance of some of the particulars of the situation.
It is significant that Aristotle does not simply write these mischances off, and demand they be forgiven as matter of course, removing any moral significance from them. He does consider them the least serious from a moral perspective, and would class them as involuntary.
Wrong actions of this sort are not the expression of a vice established within the acting person — although if one keeps doing such actions, one will inevitably render oneself vicious. They are, however, actions in accordance with vice — or actions contrary to what virtue would require. They are against — or deviating from — what, in all of its particulars, a fully functioning practical reason would indicate one should do.
Wrong actions in this restricted, non-vicious sense, will often be the product of what Aristotle calls “incontinence”, “weakness of will,” “lack of self-control” (akrasia), a state in which one does know what one ought to do, but finds oneself nevertheless doing what one ought not. Alternately, one might have a deficient understanding of, as well as affective attitude towards, what fully functioning practical reason would dictate.
From an Aristotelian Virtue Ethics perspective, each of these distinct types of moral failure require different moral evaluations, different courses of treatment, different approaches and policies, even fundamentally different artistic depictions. Later Virtue Ethics, developing as alternate (at times rival, at others overlapping) traditions would add yet more complexity of analysis and description of moral life. But I suspect it would constitute a significant advance for many in our time simply to learn and shift to a robust perspective on moral failures like that sketched out here.