Teaching virtue

A famous Socratic question is whether virtue can be taught. This argument may seem to settle the question:

1. If vice can be taught, virtue can be taught.

2. Vice can be taught. (Clear empirical fact!)

3. So, virtue can be taught.

Well, except that what I labeled as a clear empirical fact is not something that Socrates would accept. I think Socrates reads “to teach” as a success verb, with a necessary condition for teaching being the conveyance of knowledge. In other words, it’s not possible to teach falsehood, since knowledge is always of the truth, and presumably in “teaching” vice one is “teaching” falsehoods such as that greed is good.

That said, if we understand “to teach” in a less Socratic way, as didactic conveyance of views, skills and behavioral traits, then (2) is a clear empirical fact, and (1) is plausible, and hence (3) is plausible.

That said, it would not be surprising if it were harder to teach virtue even in this non-Socratic sense than it is to teach vice. After all, it is surely harder to teach someone to swim well than to swim badly.

The impact of right action on virtue

One of Socrates’ great discoveries is that moral goodness is good for us.

Virtue ethicists think there are two ways that acting morally well is typically good for us:

1. The action itself is a constituent of our well-being, and

2. The action promotes our possession of virtue.

Now, (1) is not just typically present, but always: good actions are constituents of human well-being. But unless we can count on miracles, there is no guarantee that (2) is always there. We can easily imagine cases where if you don’t do something immoral, you will captured and made to live among people whose vice will rub off on you to a degree where you are likely to become more vicious than you would have been had you done that one immoral thing. But those cases involve highly unusual situations. You might think that (2) is true except in highly exceptional cases.

Are there more common cases where morally good action fails to promote virtue? Well, acting morally well sometimes puts one in a position of temptation. This is not at all uncommon. You take a paycut to work for a charitable organization. But this results in financial pressures and now you are tempted to embezzle from your employer. For the sake of justice you work as a judge. And now you may be offered bribes, or simply be tempted to pride because of your social position. You drive to the grocery store to buy a treat for your child, and then along the way you are tempted to unsafe driving practices.

In a number of such cases, if you fall to the temptation, you become morally worse than you would have been had you omitted the initial morally good action. It is better to work for Morally Neutral Conglomerate, Inc. than for a charitable organization if you would be embezzling from the latter but not from the former. And we empirically know that people do fall to such temptations.

Thus we know there are ordinary cases where an instance of acting morally well has led to moral downfall.

But whether these cases are also counterexamples to the universality of (2) depends on how we read the “promotes” in (2). If we read it purely causally, then, yes, these are cases where doing the right thing was an important causal factor in someone’s moral downfall. But likely we should read (2) in a probabilistic tendency way. Perhaps we have something like this:

3. The mathematical expectation of the level of virtue is higher upon doing the action than upon omitting it.

Again, in the highly exceptional cases this need not be true, unless you can expect a miracle. You may be in a position to be pretty confident that you will morally deteriorate unless you escape a corrupting environment but have no way to escape it except by doing something immoral.

But in typical ordinary cases, (3) seems pretty plausible. At least this is true: there are going to be few cases where the expected level of virtue is significantly lower upon doing the right action. For if that were the case, that would constitute a strong moral reason not to do the action, and hence except in a few cases where that strong moral reason gets overridden, the action won’t be right after all.

All that said, I wonder how good our empirical data is that (3) is true in the case of most ordinary actions.

Physicalism and vice

1. If physicalism is true, then vice is an instance of medium-to-long-term poor bodily function.

2. Instances of medium-to-long-term poor bodily function are illnesses.

3. Vice is not an illness.

4. So, physicalism is not true.

A value asymmetry in double effect reasoning

The Knobe effect is that people judge cases of good and bad foreseen effects differently with respect to intention: in cases of bad effects, they tend to attribute intention, but not so in cases of good effects.

Now, this is clearly a mistake about intention: there is no such asymmetry. However, I wonder if there isn’t a real asymmetry in the value of the actions. Simplify by considering actions that have exactly one unintended side-effect, which is either good or bad. My intuition says that an action’s having a foreseen bad side-effect, even when that side-effect is unintended and the action is justified by Double Effect, makes the action less valuable. But on the other hand, an action’s having a foreseen good side-effect, when that side-effect is unintended, doesn’t seem to make the action any better.

Let me try to think through this asymmetry intuition. I would be a worse person if I intended the bad side-effect. But I would be a better one if I intended the good side-effect. My not intending the good side-effect is a sign of vice in me (as is clear in the standard Knobe case, where the CEO’s indifference to the environmental benefits of his action is vicious). So not only does the presence of an unintended good side-effect not make the action better, it makes it worse. But so far there is no asymmetry: the not intending of the bad is good and the not intending of the good is bad. The presence of a good side-effect gives me an opportunity for virtue if I intend it and for vice if I fail to intend. The presence of a bad side-effect gives me an opportunity for vice if I intend it and for virtue if I fail to intend.

But maybe there still is an asymmetry. Here are two lines of thought that lead to an asymmetry. First, think about unforeseen, and even unforeseeable, effects. Let’s say that my writing this post causes an earthquake in ten years in Japan by a chaotic chain of events. I do feel that’s bad for me and bad for my action: it is unfortunate to be the cause of a bad, whether intentionally or not. But I don’t have a similar intuition on the good side. If my writing this post prevents an earthquake by a chaotic chain of events, I don’t feel like that’s good for me or my action. So perhaps that is all that is going on in my initial value asymmetry: there is a non-moral disvalue in an action whenever it unintentionally causes a bad effect, but no corresponding non-moral value when it unintentionally causes a good effect, and foresight is irrelevant. But my intuitions here are weak. Maybe there is nothing to the earthquake intuition.

Second, normally, when I perform an action that has an unintended bad side-effect, that is a defect of power in my action. I drop the bombs on the enemy headquarters, but I don’t have the power to prevent the innocents from being hit; I give my students a test, but I don’t have the power to prevent their being stressed. The action exhibits a defect of power and that makes it worse off, though not morally so. Symmetry here would say that when the action has an unintended good side-effect, then it exhibits positive power. But here exactly symmetry fails: for the power of an action qua action is exhibited precisely through its production of intended effects. The production of unintended effects does not redound to the power of the action qua action (though it may redound to its power qua event).

So, if I am right, an action is non-morally worse off, worse off as an exercise of power, for having an unintended bad effect, at least when that bad side-effect is unavoidable. What if it is avoidable, but I simply don’t care to avoid it? Then the action is morally worse off. Either way, it’s worse off. But this is asymmetric: an action isn’t better off as an exercise of power by having an unintended good effect, regardless of whether the good side-effect is avoidable or not, since power is exhibited by actions in fulfilling intentions.

Aristotle's optimism and pessimism

Aristotle seems to accept these three claims:

1. For the most part, things behave in a natural way.

2. Most people are bad.

3. To behave well is to behave in accordance with your nature.

I always thought there was a contradiction between (1) and (2) given (3). But actually whether there is a contradiction depends on the reference class of the “For the most part” operator in (1). Suppose the reference class is all behaviors of all things. Then it is quite likely that most of these behaviors are natural, bad human behaviors being far outnumbered by the natural behaviors of insects and elementary particles.

Back when I thought there was a contradiction, I assumed the reference class was the behaviors of a particular kind of thing, a sheep or a human, say. That may be correct exegetically, but even so it does not yield a contradiction. For morally significant activity is only a small fraction of the activity of a human being. Leibniz thought that about three quarters of the time we behaved as mere animals. That’s likely an underestimate. So even if all our morally significant activity is bad, it may be far outnumbered by non-moral activity, and hence it may well be that most activity of humans is good. But when we say that a human is good or bad, we only refer to their moral activity.

The only hope for a contradiction is to take the reference class of (1) to be all the activities of every subsystem type. Even so, I do not know that there is a contradiction. For to say that a person is bad is not to say that the majority of their morally significant actions are bad. Suppose that Monday in the morning Bob kicked a neighbor’s puppy. At noon, she sent a harsh and false email to a struggling student saying that he had never seen worse work than theirs. At three, he googled for articles in obscure Romanian journals that I could translate and plagiarize. And in the evening he cheated while playing chess with his daughter in order that she might never win. It would be fair to say that Bob am very bad person indeed, but that’s only on the strength of four morally significant actions. There were many other morally significant actions Bob engaged in. Each time he was asked a question, he had the possibility of lying. When driving, he had the possibility of murder. He did many things that were morally neutral and no doubt a number of things that were good. But the four bad things he did were enough to show that he was a bad person.

Our standards for moral okayness are much higher than the standards for a hard calculus exam where you just need to get more than half the questions right.

See also the quote from George MacDonald here.

There is no courage in acting contrary to justice

There is an old debate on whether one can exhibit courage when acting in an unjust cause. I used to think that one can. But now that seems obviously wrong, given that courage is a mean between defect and excess of daring:

1. Needlessly braving danger is not courageous.

2. Unjust actions are needless.

3. So, unjustly braving danger is not courageous.

Perhaps one might object to 2, on the grounds that unjust actions might be needed for some good. But one does need to do them, since no one needs to achieve the good at the expense of unjustice.

One can also vary the above argument into an a fortiori one: If braving danger pointlessly is not courageous, then a fortiori braving danger for the sake of an unjust goal is not courageous.

All that said suggests, however, that the traditional term “foolhardiness” for excess of daring isn’t quite right. For we wouldn’t call every unjust person who acts daringly for the unjust end “foolhardy”. I guess the person who acts daringly for an unjust end is worse than foolhardy: the foolhardy person’s end is good but not sufficient to justify braving the danger, while when the end is unjust, it is not only not sufficient to justify braving the danger, but it is sufficient to justify not braving the danger.

Lying is dishonest

I thought I posted this argument, but can’t find it, so I’m writing it up again.

1. If honesty is a virtue, dishonesty is a vice.

2. If dishonesty is a vice, then acting dishonestly is always vicious.

3. Acting viciously is always wrong.

4. Lying is always acting dishonestly.

5. So, lying is always acting viciously. (1, 2, 4)

6. So, lying is always wrong. (3, 5)

Natural hope

One of the striking things to me about Aristotle is the pessimism. For instance, in Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, we’re told that vicious persons shouldn’t even love themselves, and that when one friend sufficiently outstrips another in moral excellence—whether through the one improving or the other declining—the friendship must be dropped. I do not see the virtue of hope in Aristotle, say, hope that the vicious may improve, too. For the wicked, there is just despair. (Aristotle’s odious doctrine of “natural slavery” has some similarities.)

Christianity, on the hand, professes hope to be a virtue. But the hope that Christianity talks of is a supernatural infused virtue, a virtue that comes only as a gift of God’s grace. And Aristotle, of course, is interested in the natural virtues.

But grace builds on nature. So one would expect there to be a natural counterpart to the supernatural virtue of hope. Compare how there are natural loves that are a counterpart to the supernatural virtue of charity. There should be a natural virtue of hope, too.

But given the dark empirical facts about humanity, a habit of hope apart from grace would seem to be an irrational optimism rather than a virtue.

Perhaps, though, there is something in between irrational optimism and supernatural hope: perhaps there is room for a hope grounded in natural theology. Natural theology teaches that there is a perfectly good God. Yet there is so much that is awful in the world. But given theism there is good reason to think that the future will bring something better, and hence there is a natural justification for hope.

I am not sure I want to say that natural hope requires actual belief in God. But for that hope to be a virtue and (hence) a part of a rational state of mind, it may well require that the hoping individual be in an epistemic position to rationally believe. Thus, for natural hope to be a virtue seems to require that hopers be in a position to believe that there is a God.

Aristotle, of course, did believe in a God, or gods. But these gods were uninvolved with human affairs, and hence not a good ground for hope.

Reflecting on the above, it seems to me that to overcome the pessimism of Aristotle, one needs more than just a remote hope, but a seriously robust hope.

Being a bad person and doing wrong

Until recently, I assumed everyone agreed to something like this principle:

1. If performing an action constitutes you as a bad person, the action is morally wrong.

Virtue ethicists, of course, make this a biconditional that defines wrongness, but I would have assumed that just about everybody would agree that the conditional (1) is true.

But I am now thinking that (1) is not accepted as widely as I thought it is. What makes me think this is the way that Thomson’s violinist case resonates with so strongly with so many people, and presumably continues to do so even if one adds the necessary proviso that the violinist is one’s own minor child (otherwise it wouldn’t be applicable to typical cases of abortion). Yet it seems utterly obvious to me to that:

2. If the violinist is your own minor child, disconnecting from the violinist makes you a bad parent and a bad person.

But one cannot consistently accept (1) and (2) and think it is morally permissible to disconnect from the violinist when the violinist is one’s own child.

I would love to see empirical data on whether people who find the violinist case compelling deny (1) or deny (2). Thomson herself probably denies (2).

Loss of vice and growth of virtue

Here is a pattern in the moral life. People have a conversion experience and puts away “the gross sins of the flesh” like robbery, drug abuse, violence or fornication. And then they struggle for decades with faults sins like laziness, unkindliness, vanity, impatience or judgmentality. What’s going on? It seems like at the outset they put away the bigger moral faults, and then they were left with smaller ones. Why is it that it takes so much longer to fight off the smaller ones? Why doesn’t it get easier, given that the faults are smaller? This is frustrating!

Instead, the experience sometimes seems to be like when you take a piece of unstretchable rope by two ends and pull. It is easy to get the initial big sag out. But as the sag gets smaller, it gets harder and harder to get it out.

Here is a thought. There are two ways of quantifying one’s moral state: the degree of vice and the degree of virtue. And the two are not related in a simple way, with one being the negation of the other. In ordinary circumstances, it doesn’t take much virtue to exclude murder from one’s life. But it does take a lot of virtue to exclude vanity from one’s life. To cease murdering is to lose much vice but is not to gain much virtue. To cease being vain, though, is not to lose much vice but it is to gain much virtue (is this true if one is still murdering, though?).

The “ordinary decent person” is perhaps not much more vicious than St. Teresa of Calcutta or St. Francis. But the “ordinary decent person” is far less virtuous.

Note that this is true even if we limit the discussion to what one might call “obligatory virtue”, i.e., the virtue that is opposed to vice rather than supererogatory virtue. The virtue involved in eliminating vanity is an obligatory virtue, though the virtue involved in giving up property for the sake of God and the poor, as St. Teresa and St. Francis did, is supererogatory. Yet the ordinary person is far less obligatorily virtuous than St. Teresa or St. Francis.

There may be an inverse relationship between vice and obligatory virtue: the more you have of the one, the less you have of the other. But a small increase of vice can correspond to large losses of virtue, and vice versa. It’s be a bit like that between the amount of sag in the rope and the horizontal force you need to push the ends with to balance the rope. As the sag goes to zero, the horizontal force goes to infinity.

The frustration I mentioned in the first paragraph then may be misplaced. For while it may seem like the moral life stalls after an initial burst of energy, the stalling may only be there if we measure the progress by the amount of vice. But if we measure by the amount of virtue, there might be steady increase throughout, just as a rope may linearly increase in tension, even though the sag seems not to be changing much.

(But may God have mercy on us!)

(While pushing metaphors perhaps too far, note that on the other hand the sag can’t go to infinity if the rope is unstretchable, since eventually we run out of rope. Likewise, perhaps, there is a limit to our vice, set by our nature. This fits with the idea of evil as a privation of the good.)

Two ways of being vicious

Many of the times when Hitler made a wrong decision, his character thereby deteriorated and he became more vicious. Let’s imagine that Hitler was a decent young man at age 19. Now imagine Schmitler, who lived a life externally just like Hitler’s, but on Twin Earth. Until age 19, Schmitler’s life was just like Hitler. But from then on, each time Schmitler made a wrong choice, aliens or angels or God intervened and made sure that the moral deterioration that normally follows upon wrong action never occurred. As it happens, however, Schmitler still made the same choices Hitler did, and made them with freedom and clear understanding of their wickedness.

Thus, presumably unlike Hitler, Schmitler did not morally fall, one wrong action at a time, to the point of a genocidal character. Instead, he committed a series of wrong actions, culminating in genocide, but each action was committed from the same base level of virtue and vice, the same level that both he and Hitler had at age 19. This is improbable, but in a large enough universe all sorts of improbable things will happen.

So, now, here is the oddity. Since Schmitler’s level of virtue and vice at the depth of his moral depradations was the same as at age 19, and at age 19 both he and Hitler were decent young men (or so I assume), it seems we cannot say that Schmitler was a vicious man even while he was committing genocidal atrocities. And yet Schmitler was fully responsible for these atrocities, perhaps more so than Hitler.

I want to say that Schmitler is spectacularly vicious without having much in the way of vices, indeed while having more virtue than vice (he was, I assume, a decent young man), even though that sounds like a contradiction. Schmitler is spectacularly vicious because of what he has done.

This doesn’t sound right, though. Actions are episodic. Being vicious is a state. Hitler was a vicious man while innocently walking his dog on a nice spring day in 1944, even when not doing any wrongs. And we can explain why Hitler was vicious then: he had a character with very nasty vices, even while he was not exercising the vices. But how can we say that Schmitler was vicious then?

Here’s my best answer. Even on that seemingly innocent walk, Schmitler and Hitler were both failing to repent of their evil deeds, failing to set out on the road of reconciliation with their victims. A continuing failure to repent is not something episodic, but something more like a state.

If this is right, then there are two ways of being vicious: by having vices and by being an unrepentant evildoer.

(A difficult question Robert Garcia once asked me is relevant, though: What should we say about people who have done bad things but suffered amnesia?)

Russian roulette

Intuitively, imposing a game of Russian roulette on an innocent victim is constitutive of twice as much moral depravity when there are two bullets in the six-shooter as when there is only one. If so, then a one-bullet game of Russian roulette will carry about a sixth of the moral depravity of a six-bullet game, and hence about a sixth of the depravity of plain murder.

I am not so sure, though. The person imposing the game of Russian roulette is, I shall suppose, intending a conditional:

1. If the bullet ends up in the barrel, the victim will die.

And then the above intuition suggests that the moral depravity in intending such a conditional is proportional to the probability of the antencedent. But consider other impositions of conditionals. Take, for instance, the mob boss who orders:

2. If you can't pay the mayor off, get rid of him.

The amount of moral depravity that this order constitutes does not appear to be proportional to the probability of the mayor's rectitude (either in actual fact or as judged by the boss). If the underling is unable to bribe the mayor and kills him, the mob boss seems to be guilty of murder. But moral depravity should not depend on what happens after one's action--that would give too much scope for moral luck. So the depravity in giving the order is tantamount to murder, plus an additional dollop of depravity in corrupting public officials.

Perhaps, though, this judgment about the moral depravity of issuing order (2) is based on the thought that the kind of person who issues this order doesn't care much if the probability of integrity is 0.001 or 0.1 or 1. But the person who intends (1) may well care about the probability that the bullet ends up in the barrel. So perhaps the mob boss response doesn't quite do the job.

Here's another thought. It is gravely wrong to play Russian roulette with a single-bullet and a revolver with six thousand chambers. It doesn't seem that the moral depravity of this is a thousandth of the moral depravity of "standard" Russian roulette. And it sure doesn't sound like the moral depravity goes down by a factor of ten as the number of chambers goes up by a factor of ten.

Here, then, is an alternate suggestion. The person playing Russian roulette, like the mob boss, sets her heart on the death of an innocent person under certain circumstances. This setting of one's heart on someone's death is constitutive of a grave moral depravity, regardless of how likely the circumstances are. It could even be that this is wrong even when I know the circumstances won't obtain. For instance, it would be morally depraved to set one's heart on killing the Tooth Fairy if she turns out to exist, even when one knows that she doesn't exist. There is then an additional dollop of depravity proportional to the subjective probability that the circumstances obtain. That additional dollop comes from the risk one takes that someone will die and the risk one takes that one will become an actual murder. As a result, very roughly (in the end, the numerical evaluations are very much a toy model), the moral depravity in willing a conditional like (1) and (2) is something like:

• A + pB

where p is the probability of the antecedent, and both A and B are large.

Punctured vanity

I noticed that my Principle of Sufficient Reason book was 52nd in Metaphysics on Amazon. That sounded kind of nice, though not amazing, until I noticed that it was right behind We Are Our Ancestors, a book on reincarnation. Great title, though. :-)

Hope and afterlife

The following argument is valid, and is sound if we take the conditional in (2) to be material.

1. (Premise) In despairing, one engages in a vice.
2. (Premise) If there is no afterlife, it is sometimes appropriate to despair.
3. (Premise) It is never appropriate to engage in a vice.
4. So, there is an afterlife.

Let me say a little about (2). Despair is appropriate in situations of objective hopelessness. But if there is no afterlife, then when one has misspent one's life in wickedness, and is now facing death with no opportunity to make things up to those whom one has mistreated, then despair is appropriate.

If there is an afterlife, then one can hope for mercy or justice.

Do riches lead to vice?

This is a fascinating piece on social class and vice. Apparently, either being of a higher socioeconomic class, or seeing oneself as of a higher socioeconomic class, leads to vicious behavior. The article itself says in the abstract: "Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed." So the love of money is a root of at least some other evils, science says.

Insurance

Suppose you are insuring yourself against some event type E with an insurance company with claims ratio, say, 0.75. This means that the company pays out 75% of the net premiums in claims. On its face, this seems even more irrational than gambling at a casino—as far as I can determine with a bit of internet "research" (see for instance here), a casino tends to pay out a larger percentage of what is paid in than 75%. It seems irrational because unless you have special information about your case (in which case there are some integrity questions that might be raised), you can expect to get back 60% of what you put in.

But there is a crucial difference. One typically insures oneself against adverse circumstances. In adverse circumstances, money may well have higher utility than it does in normal circumstances. For instance, if your car is stolen and your employment depends on having a car, the value of having an amount of money sufficient to purchase a car is significantly greater than the value of having that amount of money in normal circumstances where you already have a car.

This suggests a rough heuristic: it is rational to insure yourself against E with a company whose claims ratio is r for a claim amount c only if the utility to you of receiving c in case of E is equal to the utility of receiving c/r in case of non-E. (For a better estimate, one would have to take into account potential investment returns on the money that would have gone out in premiums.) For an egregious example, extended warranties (a species of insurance) have a 0.43 claim ratio (UK data). Thus it makes sense to get an extended warranty for a $400 TV only if getting $400 in the event of the TV's breaking down has as much utility to you as getting $400/0.43=$930 under ordinary circumstances, which is unlikely to be the case. (Though it might be if you expected to be low on cash and your well-being is strongly enough tied to having a TV of the relevant price-level.) But in the case of, say, car theft coverage it might be worth it if you would be unlikely to be able to pay for a new car of sufficient quality and your well-being strongly depends on having a car of that quality.

Interestingly, I think it follows that it shouldn't be worthwhile insuring luxury items, unless (a) you wouldn't be able to afford replacing them otherwise and (b) your well-being is tied to them to a high degree. But it is probably vicious to have your well-being be so tied to luxury items.

OK, except for the thing about luxury and vice, this is stuff that's no doubt obvious to every economics student, but it wasn't obvious to me, and the heuristic is kind of handy.

Theft

Common sense says that if you leave a more valuable item out, it is ceteris paribus more likely to be stolen. If we're asked why, I think we'd say: "The temptation is bigger." But this can't be the whole story. For while the reason for stealing is proportional to the item's value v_t to the potential thief, the moral reason not to steal seems proportional to the value v_o to the owner (after all, surely it's about equally bad to steal two items that are worth 50 thalers each than to steal one that's worth a hundred). Moreover, roughly, v_t is proportional to v_o (with a convex tapering off at the high end of v_o as very valuable things are hard to fence). So we might expect that as we double v_o, we roughly double the strength of the potential thief's reason to steal and roughly double the strength of the moral reason not to steal, and we might expect the two effects to cancel out, leaving the chance of theft unchanged. Compare theft to bribery. One has no greater a moral reason to refuse a large bribe than to refuse a small one, at least if the briber can afford it. In the bribery case, there is nothing surprising about people being more likely to take greater bribes.

The above analysis, however, neglects the fact that one also has a non-moral reason not to steal from the chance of getting caught and punished. And the punishment is not directly proportional in intensity to v_o: one doesn't go to jail for ten thousand times as long for stealing ten million dollars as for stealing a thousand dollars, I assume. Moreover, there is an initial non-proportional disvalue just in getting caught, dealing with the legal system, etc.

However, I do not think the lack of exact proportionality in punishment fully accounts for our intuition here. For, I think, we may also have the intuition that more valuable items are more likely to be stolen in the case of thefts where the thief thinks he can't get caught. We just see the more valuable items as "more corrupting". (Actually, maybe, the function is somewhat more complex. Items of very low value may get stolen more easily "because it doesn't do any harm", and items of very high value may get stolen more easily "because they corrupt", while items of middle value might be less likely to be stolen. I will ignore the extreme low end of value.)

The "more corrupting" intuition can, I think, be accounted for in this way. We recognize an intrinsic disvalue in acting viciously or becoming a vicious person. But the disvalue is more binary: being a thief versus being a non-thief; committing this theft versus not committing this theft; being a criminal versus being innocent. Catholics might make a ternary distinction: acting rightly versus sinning venially versus sinning mortally. But still there is a lack of proportionality.

It may be quite beneficial to have such a lack of proportionality—it keeps us from first stepping over the threshold of a new kind of moral evil, such as theft. If we were willing to commit small thefts on the grounds that they are not really morally all that wicked, we would be likely to slide towards greater ones. So it makes sense for there to be a bar against embarking on a new kind of wickedness. And then the greater temptation helps overcome that initial bar. If so, then the felt disvalue of committing a theft when one has not done so as yet is: B+cv_o, where B is the initial bar against "becoming a thief" and c is some proportionality constant. If that is the right story, then we might predict that people who see themselves as thieves are as likely to steal small amounts as great when they do not expect to get caught, while people who do not see themselves as thieves are more likely to fall for a greater amount.

Horrendous evil and moral development

Suppose I end up at a concentration camp for a significant amount of time. Here are some possible moral development outcomes:

1. becoming really bad (e.g., informer, kapo)
2. becoming heroically good (e.g., Viktor Frankl, Maximilian Kolbe)
3. becoming bitter
4. remaining non-bitter

Obviously there can be overlap—you can become really bad and stay non-bitter. And they're not exhaustive because you might come in bitter. But nevermind all that. The above will be a classification of the most common cases of the most notable aspects of resultant moral development. (Thus, for the person who remains non-bitter but becomes really bad, we classify them just as becoming really bad, because that's more notable than remaining non-bitter.)

Now, I think we have no reason to think that A's outnumber B's. (It would be great to have empirical data.) Moreover, the average A is less morally bad than the average B is morally good. The reason is that there is an asymmetry here: the pressures that A's and B's are under in the camp decrease the culpability of typical A's but increase the praiseworthiness of typical B's. (There will be partial exceptions, like maybe the person who becomes needlessly cruel or the person who becomes virtuous because he's St Maximilian's cellmate. But even these exceptions are not going to be complete exceptions.) Furthermore—and again data would help—I suspect that some of the A's repent of their badness afterwards (some never do, and for some there is no afterwards), while few of the B's repent of their goodness afterwards. So, if all we know about x is that he is going to be an A or a B, the expected value of x's moral development hange will be positive.

What about the C's and D's? This is, I think, the really important case, as they'll probably be a larger group than the A's and B's. Now, it is a much greater virtue to remain non-bitter through a concentration camp than it is a vice to become bitter through the concentration camp. Part of the reason is the culpability point from the previous paragraph. Making one bitter is the "natural" tendency of horrors, and it is not a great vice to fall into that. So, unless there are way more C's than D's, we have positive expected value of moral development.

Now, add the following thesis: In terms of value, a moderate amount of positive moral development trumps a very large amount of suffering. (Socrates would say—and I think he'd be right—that any amount of positive moral development trumps any amount of suffering.) If this thesis is right, even when we add the amount of suffering, we may still have positive expected value for a random individual who suffers horrors like those of a concentration camp.

The real problem of evil, I think, is not about expected values, utilities and the like, however. The real problem is deontological. Does God have the right to allow someone to suffer so much given the expected value of moral development? I think the answer is positive. Suppose I knew that by preventing a great suffering to myself I would be losing an opportunity for significant positive moral development. Would prudence permit me to refrain from preventing the suffering? I think it would. Nor would such a refraining from prevention be morally wrong. But God is closer to me than I myself am, in some relevant sense. If I would not be imprudent or immoral to permit a suffering to myself, it would likewise not be wrong of God to permit it to me.

Hedonism

Here is an argument:

1. A character trait aimed at producing what is always intrinsically good is not a vice. (Premise)
2. A tendency to Schadenfreude is a character trait aimed at producing pleasure (at the sufferings of others). (Premise)
3. A tendency to Schadenfreude is a vice. (Premise)
4. Therefore, pleasure is not always intrinsically good.

Wrongness and vice

Consider these two cases:

1. Martha hears Patrick utter an insult against her husband. Incensed by the insult, she fights Patrick with her fists, trying to kill him in a "fair" way (Patrick is not weaker than she is, she is not sneaking up on him, etc.). She succeeds in winning the fight, and has, thus, deliberately killed Patrick.
2. Constantine tortures a small reptile, knowing the reptile to be entirely harmless.

What Martha has done is, intuitively, morally worse than what Constantine did. Martha killed a person, a creature in the image and likeness of God, a being endowed with dignity. She was provoked, but nonetheless acted deliberately to cause the death of a juridically innocent human being. On the other hand, Constantine caused wanton and inexcusable pain, but he did this to a being quite low down on the scale of moral concern. (If you disagree with my comparison between the two actions, then change the reptile into a ladybug.)

However, Constantine's action is the one that is more expressive of a vicious character: a character that is cruel, cowardly and irrational. Martha's action, while admittedly exhibiting disproportionate wrath, also exhibited loyalty and courage, albeit of a misguided sort. We wouldn't want to have Constantine among our friends. On the other hand, having Martha as one's friend would be an asset, as long as we were careful in our behavior around her.

If this is right, then there is a distinction between how wrong an action is and how expressive it is of a vicious character. This distinction has some interesting consequences. An obvious one is that it makes implausible Hume's account of punishment. Hume thought we punished actions insofar as they were evidence of a vicious character. But we would rightly punish Martha more severely than we would Constantine.

But a more important consequence is that it puts into question the virtue ethics project of grounding moral permissibility and impermissibility in virtue and vice. For, surely, if impermissibility is to be grounded in virtue and vice, then an action is more impermissible—more wrong—if it is more expressive of vice. But the above examples show that this is not so.