Habitual action

Alice has lived a long and reasonable life. She developed a lot of good habits. Every morning, she goes on a walk. On her walk, she looks at the lovely views, she smells the flowers in season, she gathers mushrooms, she listens to the birds chirping, she climbs a tree, and so on. Some of these things she does for their own sake and some she does instrumentally. For instance, she climbs a tree because she saw research that daily exercise promotes health, but she smells the flowers for the sake of the smelling itself.

She figured all this out when she was in her 30s, but now she is 60. One day, she realizes that for a while now she had forgotten the reasoning that led to her habits. In particular, she no longer knows which of her daily activities have innate value and which ones are merely instrumental.

So what can we say about her habitual activities?

One option is that they retain the teleology with which they were established. Although Alice no longer remembers that she climbs a tree solely for the sake of health, that is indeed what she climbs the tree for. On this picture, when we perform actions from habit, they retain the teleology they had when the habit was established. In particular, it follows that agential teleology need not be grounded in occurrent mental states of the agent. This is a difficult bullet to bite.

The other option is that they have lost their teleological characterization. This implies, interestingly, that there is no fact about whether the actions are being done for their own sake or instrumentally. In particular, it follows that the standard diviion of actions into those done for their own sake and those done instrumentally is not exhaustive. That is also a difficult bullet to bite.

I am not sure what to say. I suspect one lesson is that action is more complicated than we philosophers think, and our simple characterizations of it miss the complexity.

An important use for virtue

It’s obvious that virtues are morally instrumentally useful: possessing them makes it more probable that one will act morally well. Many of my friends think virtues are much more important than that.

Here is one thing that has occurred to me along those lines. Pretty much any action can be morally ruined by a bad intention. But in some specific cases, an action will be ruined by the lack of a specific kind of reason, intention or end. Here are some potential examples, not all of which will be plausible to everyone (the first two reasons should be plausible to everyone; the remaining ones will have narrower appeal):

• The wrongness of BS and lying shows that it is (at least normally) wrong to make an assertion if the (believed) truth of the content is not among the reasons for making it.

• It is wrong to intentionally kill someone except for the sake of a very small number of clearly delineated reasons (justice, defense of the innocent, etc.)

• Since we are to love God with all our hearts, every action should be done at least in part for the sake of God.

• If a married couple engages in sexual union for reasons that do not include their being married to each other, then their act is internally too much like an act of fornication.

• It is sacrilegious to attend Mass without doing so at least in part for some religious reason.

But practically speaking, it is hard to include an explicit intention each time one engages in an act of a certain type, especially if the act is moderately frequent (as assertion is, and as killing in wartime can be).

Here virtue can come in: an act’s flowing from a virtue allows the act to inherit the intentions and reasons that are attached to the virtue, and virtue is a habit, so this mechanism is perfectly suited to attaching the right intention to each act of a given type.

Let's not exaggerate the centrality of virtue to ethics

Virtues are important. They are useful: they internalize the moral law and allow us to make the right decision quickly, which we often need to do. They aren’t just time-savers: they shine light on the issues we deliberate over. And the development of virtue allows our freedom to include the two valuable poles that are otherwise in tension: (a) self-origination (via alternate possibilities available when we are developing virtue) and (b) reliable rightness of action. This in turn allows our development of virtue reflect the self-origination and perfect reliability in divine freedom.

But while virtues are important, they are not essential to ethics. We can imagine beings that only ever make a single, but truly momentous, decision. They come into existence with a clear understanding of the issues involved, and they make their decision, without any habituation before or after. That decision could be a moral one, with a wrong option, a merely permissible option, and a supererogatory option. They would be somewhat like Aquinas’ angels.

We could even imagine beings that make frequent moral choices, like we do, but whose nature does not lead them too habituate in the direction of virtue or vice. Perhaps throughout his life whenever Bill decides whether to keep an onerous promise or not, there is a 90% chance that he will freely decide rightly and a 10% chance that he will freely decide wrongly, a chance he is born and dies with. A society of such beings would be rather alien in many practices. For instance, members of that society could not be held responsible for their character, but only for their choices. Punishment could still be retributive and motivational (for the chance of wrong action might go down when there are extrinsic reasons against wrongdoing). I think such beings would tend to have lower culpability for wrongdoing than we do. For typically when I do wrong as a middle-aged adult, I am doubly guilty for the wrong: (a) I am guilty for the particular wrong choice that I made, and (b) I am guilty for not having yet transformed my character to the point where that choice was not an option. (There are two reasons we hold children less responsible: first, their understanding is less developed, and, second, they haven’t had much time to grow in virtue.)

Nonetheless, while such virtue-less beings woould be less responsible, and we wouldn’t want to be them or live among them, they would still have some responsibility, and moral concepts could apply to them.

Morality without virtue

Habits induces correlations between choices in similar epistemic circumstances. A person who has behaved courageously in the face of physical danger on ten past occasions is more likely to be a physically courageous person, and therefore is more likely to behave courageously now when again facing physical danger, even when we control for the considerations on the basis of which we are deciding, unlike a fair coin which is not more likely to land hands just because on the ten past occasions it has done so. Our choices, moreover, modify our habits thereby even further increasing these correlations.

Now imagine persons that do not have habits in this sense. They make their choices based on the considerations present in each case, on a case by case basis. The fact that they have braved physical danger ten times does not make it more likely that they will brave it now, as long as one controls for the considerations present in the cases. Moreover, I will suppose that the motivational strength of the considerations they are deciding on the basis of does not change over time. They always find duty to have a certain pull and they always find convenience to have a certain pull, and the degree of pull does not change.

Such persons would not have character in the way we understand character. They would have neither virtues nor vices. They would have much less control over the shape of their lives. For we can shape our futures by inducing in ourselves a certain character. They could, however, influence the shape of their lives through rational means, by gaining new beliefs or by creating reasons to act.

It would be difficult for such beings to live in community. But we could imagine that one of their very clever engineers builds a mechanical sovereign who enforces basic rules for harmonious living through harsh punishment. For although there are no correlations between choices made in similar circumstances, one could change the circumstances to increase the weight of considerations in favor of actions that conduce to harmonious living. Or a prophet could convince the people that great rewards for virtue and harsh punishments for vice follow in an afterlife, and that, too, would conduce to harmony. But that still wouldn't be virtue.

The lives of such beings would be less storied. They would not exhibit the good of making a certain kind of person out of oneself. There are, indeed, many goods that they would lack.

But without any virtues or vices, these beings could still could have morally significant freedom. They could freely choose, on a case-by-case basis, whether to follow duty or some other consideration. Many of the familiar moral norms that bind us could apply to them. It would be no more permissible for them to kill the innocent or build palaces on the backs of the suffering poor than it is for us. They would have one fewer reason in favor of doing the right thing, though. If I build a palace on the backs of the suffering poor, I become a more vicious person. That wouldn't happen to them. But they would still have the simple reason that it's wrong to do this, together with extrinsic considerations coming from hope of reward or fear of punishment. And that I will become a more vicious person is only an extrinsic consideration against committing an action, anyway.

Virtue ethicists will probably disagree with me that such beings couldn't have morality. So much worse for virtue ethics. Virtues are an important component of human moral life, but I think they are not a component of moral life in general as such, just as physical interaction is an important component of human moral life, but isn't a component of moral life in general (angels have a moral life but as far as we know they have no physical interaction).