What
makes an action morally praiseworthy? The Aristotelian recipe tells us that a
virtuous action is performed intentionally and willingly, for its own sake, and
from a firmly virtuous character. The Kantian account claims that morally
praiseworthy actions are those guided by universalizable maxims of action (i.e.
principles which pass the Categorical Imperative’s test). In both cases, the
moral agent appears to be a deliberative and fully rational being, who stands
in an unproblematically transparent relationship to her actions and her reasons
for action. Throughout Unprincipled Virtue, Nomy Arpaly reminds us that
many, if not all, of our actions lack this kind of hyper-rationality, and that
moral praiseworthiness needn’t hinge on these oversimplified notions of moral
agency. Arpaly accomplishes much of her work through diverse examples which aim
to show that many of the current and classic accounts of moral praiseworthiness
are lacking, because they fail to appreciate the complexities of our moral
psychology. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce these issues with discussions of the
morality and rationality of complicated characters and cases.

Huckleberry
Finn is one of Arpaly’s favorite and most productive examples. Huck sees his
own failure to turn in Jim as precisely that: a moral failure. Jim is a slave,
and slaves are property. A good boy would report a runaway slave, not befriend
him. Arpaly points out that, at the end of the day, most of us will judge Huck
as having done a good and praiseworthy thing, even though Huck’s professed
beliefs contradict and condemn his actions toward Jim. Arpaly calls Huck’s case
one of "inverse akrasia": although he makes bad moral judgments, Huck
does the right thing. (The typical akratic is the weak-willed person who judges
correctly but fails to act on that judgment.) So, on this interpretation of the
story, Huck’s action seems to be morally praiseworthy, and he seems to
be morally praiseworthy. Arpaly takes these intuitive judgments to show, for
example, that it may be not only moral but also rational to act against
one’s "best" judgment (Chapter 2). (This seems to hold true when
one’s own best judgments are based on some kind of ignorance, bias, or other
factual or moral errors.) The moral of Huckleberry Finn’s story is that if he
is a praiseworthy character, his praiseworthiness does not seem to be captured
by the Aristotelian and Kantian formulations mentioned above. The conflict
between Huck’s stated racist beliefs and his benevolent treatment of Jim make
it unlikely that his action is guided by any explicit principle.

On
Arpaly’s account of moral worth (Chapter 3), Huck is praiseworthy because his
action demonstrates responsiveness to moral reasons. In this case the
moral consideration is that Jim is a person rather than a mere piece of
property, and deserves to be treated as a person. Even though Huck probably
couldn’t articulate this moral reason (and might even, given his other beliefs,
deny it), his actions seem to be guided by it and thus by a concern for Jim’s
personhood which overrides his stated racist convictions.

Arpaly
emphasizes the role depth of concern for moral considerations plays in the
attribution of moral praise. Recall Kant’s philanthropist, the one who doesn’t
really care about other people, but who sees that he is rationally and morally
required to do charity. Many have been chilled by the idea that such a
character is more praiseworthy than someone else who performs charitable acts
and happen to derive great pleasure from helping others or act out of a
sentimental rather than moral concern. Arpaly’s view suggests that, at least on
some interpretations of the philanthropist’s psychology, that his lack of deep
concern for other people (or, his merely ho-hum concern with doing the morally
right act) make him less praiseworthy (and perhaps deserving of some blame).
Responsiveness to moral reasons and our depth of concern for moral reasons are
tied together in the sense that a person who has one of these two things will
generally develop a capacity for the other; the cool philanthropist who remains
cool and detached and seemingly unconcerned with other people will not impress
us with his inability to develop a deeper concern for others. The person who is
deeply concerned with morality will tend to be someone who is more responsive
to moral reasons — will see moral reasons when others might not notice them.
(She compares the morally concerned person to someone who cares about keeping
the house clean — he will be more likely to notice dust on the windowsill than
someone who isn’t deeply concerned with domestic cleanliness.)

It
might be objected to such a view that it makes no sense to blame the
philanthropist for his cool demeanor if there is some sense in which this
character trait is beyond his control — perhaps he was raised by parents who
nurtured this attitude in him. Similarly, it seems odd to praise Huck Finn for
his benevolent actions when he himself sees his behavior as immoral. We can
imagine Huck saying that he doesn’t even want (or intend) to be
nice to Jim, but he just can’t help himself, can’t control himself. Arpaly
characterizes these objections as the worry that her account of moral worth
fails to appreciate the importance of autonomy (Chapters 4 and 5). How can
non-autonomous actions — those that aren’t under the control of the agent —
give rise to moral praise or blame?

On
the one hand, we can spin examples which support the claim that people can’t be
held morally responsible for non-autonomous actions: hypnotized or sleepwalking
people who kill others, or people with mental disorders. How can people whose
actions are determined by outside forces, or compelled by their disorders, be
praised or blamed? Such considerations seem to suggest that it is only
autonomous actions that can be praiseworthy or blameworthy. In Chapter 4,
Arpaly distinguishes eight different senses in which autonomy is used,
and argues that the sense in which it is used in the above objection — she
calls it agent-autonomy — is not an essential element in determining
moral worth. Agent-autonomy is autonomy in the sense of self-control over one’s
own actions, and is something that the hypnotized person clearly lacks. Arpaly
argues that if self-control is necessary for an act to have moral value (or
disvalue), then far too few of our actions would have any moral worth. We can,
for example, feel alienated from our own actions, and yet still be responsible
for them: "no murderer has ever pleaded insanity simply on the ground that
he experienced the deed as if his arm did it rather than he himself"
(131). Arpaly also cites the case of Patty Hearst, who was ultimately held
blameworthy for her terrorist activities, even though her
"conversion" may have consisted in brainwashing. There are even more
mundane cases of conversion in which our arriving at some choice is not a fully
self-controlled venture — consider many beliefs learned in childhood, or the
manner in which many decide to vote for one candidate or another. These
processes need not be rational or exhibit self-control in order for us
to be held responsible for what we believe and how these beliefs influence our
actions.

Arpaly
speculates that the objections to her view are motivated by a desire to
minimize the role constitutive moral luck plays in our lives. Constitutive
moral luck is the idea that much of who we are is determined by past factors
beyond our control: our environment, our parents, heredity, etc. Who we are,
and how we will succeed or fail morally, is largely a matter of luck. Many have
lamented that if such claims are true, then the moral project of constructing
systems of praise and blame seems ineffectual and absurd. It makes no sense to
praise or blame people for actions (or character traits) over which they have
no control.

Arpaly
responds to this problem in two ways. First, she simply rejects the conclusion
that it makes no sense to praise or blame people for actions that can be
explained away by constitutive moral luck. For example, even if there is a
story about why Sam is a bad businessman (because of the way his family treated
him), Sam’s boss may nevertheless reply, "Too bad. Sam’s still a lousy
businessman" (see 172). Arpaly (like Thomas Nagel in his treatment of
moral luck) holds that we can take the same approach in moral cases: even if
Ted the Serial Killer’s mother abused him, that’s too bad, because Ted the
Abused Boy became Ted the Serial Killer, and it is the latter person we hold
responsible and blame for his terrible behavior. (Of course, in some cases we
might feel compelled to spread the blame around.)

The
second move Arpaly makes here is to distinguish blame and punishment.
To morally blame a person, she says, is not the same thing as punishing a
person for having done something wrong. Moral blame doesn’t imply any
particular punishment, and there may be cases, she suggests, where we hold a
person morally blameworthy without punishment (or without the usual
punishment). Perhaps all that Arpaly means is that if someone is morally
blameworthy, then we are justified in some further handling of the
wrongdoer. Although how we deal with various wrongdoers may vary case by case
— as we assess their particular motives and characters — we will still
morally blame them, if they have all done the same bad deed, equally.

Arpaly’s
view provides interesting solutions to the problems in moral agency that arise
when one reflects on the consequences of determinism (or moral luck) and on the
flatness of traditional approaches to morality, in which only the most
autonomous of agents seem to deserve any credit. Her notion of responsiveness
to moral reasons seems to presuppose some kind of moral realism — that moral
reasons are in some sense out in the world to be detected — and some
philosophers will probably want more than Arpaly’s analogies about
dust-conscious housekeepers to support the idea of seeing moral reasons.
However, such analogies are a fair starting point, and for Arpaly’s purposes in
this book, are sufficient. A lingering question, however, is that of what the
moral enterprise is for: if non-autonomous people can be blamed, if inversely
akratic people like Huck Finn can be praised, and if by hypothesis our praise
and blame wouldn’t change anything in a deterministic world, then why praise
and blame? The answer, it seems, is that the praise and blame is just as much
for us — it is the practice of morally organizing the world — as it is for
those we praise and blame, in the hope that everything is not completely
determined and that our evaluations will make a difference, for ourselves and
others.

Unprincipled
Virtue will be of great
interest to those working in moral philosophy or moral psychology.

© 2005 Matthew Pianalto

Matthew Pianalto
is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Arkansas, where he has
also taught logic and introduction to philosophy. He holds a B.A. in English,
and an M.A. in Philosophy. His master’s thesis, "Suicide & The
Self," attempts to reinvest in the philosophical nature of the problem of
suicide. More info at his website: http://comp.uark.edu/~mpianal.
(See "Suicide & Philosophy" link for resources on suicide.)

Categories: Ethics, Philosophical