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Alasdair MacIntyre, APA, Aristotle, Chenyang Li, Confucius, Julia Annas, Lorraine Besser-Jones, Michael Formichelli, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
What is the connection between virtue and pleasure? The question came up in my discussion with Elisa Freschi on the previous post, and is in some respects a central question in the early history of Western ethics. At December’s Eastern APA conference, Lorraine Besser-Jones gave a really interesting talk on Aristotle’s approach to this connection, informed by some discussions in contemporary psychology. For Aristotle, she claimed, pleasure is an intrinsic part of virtue: nobody would call a man generous who does not enjoy acting generously. Besser-Jones wished to dispute this claim, on the grounds that virtuous activity is often not pleasurable.
The key psychological distinction, for Besser-Jones, was between intrinsic motivation – when one engages in an activity for its own sake, because it is its own reward – and extrinsic motivation, when the activity is solely a means to another end. (This distinction is very close to Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the goods internal to and external to a practice, respectively.) The problem, she argued, is that while intrinsically motivating activities (basically by definition) are those we don’t engage in for their consequences, most virtuous activities we do engage in for their consequences. Even if we have a tendency to enjoy helping others, she said, the activities we do to help others are not themselves going to be enjoyable. Picking up a stranger’s wallet and running through the mud to give it to her is not enjoyable on its own, independent of the goal of helping others. It is therefore not intrinsically motivating.
Julia Annas had drawn a connection between Aristotle’s view and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s psychological conception of “flow,” a state in which one is so absorbed in a complex and challenging activity that one forgets time, fatigue, everything but the activity itself. A rock climber never loses sight of goal of attaining the summit, but that’s not what motivates her in the moment; it’s the challenge of finding footing on a difficult wall. For Annas, this is the best way to describe the experience of Aristotle’s virtuous person. But most virtuous actions, Besser-Jones said, are not like this. Perhaps the flow experience describes activities requiring courage, like those of a firefighter, but not more mundane activities requiring justice or compassion, like returning the wallet in the mud.
Others in the room took Besser-Jones to task, rightly I think, on a number of points. Her respondent, Michael Formichelli, objected primarily that Besser-Jones’s had relied too much on Annas’s interpretation of Aristotle. According to Formichelli, Aristotle doesn’t actually himself think the virtues are intrinsically motivating. Formichelli agreed with Besser-Jones that one couldn’t defend the version of Aristotle found in Annas, where the virtues are indeed intrinsically motivating; he offered an alternative interpretation of Aristotle, which he thought worked fine. I’m not going to take a side on what Aristotle actually meant. But unlike either Formichelli or Besser-Jones, I will defend the ideas that Annas and Besser-Jones attributed to Aristotle: that for the truly virtuous agent, virtue is indeed intrinsically motivating. Several others in the audience agreed with me.
One questioner, whose name I’ve regrettably forgotten, argued that the truly virtuous agent could find an intrinsically motivating flow experience in virtuous action itself, even an action like returning the wallet. She referred to Confucius’s self-description in Analects II.4, of having set his heart on learning at age 15, and by age 70 finally being “able to follow my heart without overstepping the line.” Sufficient training in virtue allowed Confucius to find it internally motivating; but it required great practice to be this skillful at it, as any other difficult craft does.
Chenyang Li, Besser-Jones’s fellow presenter, followed up this defence with a related important point: it matters how you characterize your activity. “I’m doing philosophy, which is intrinsically pleasurable,” he said, “but I’m also moving my mouth, which isn’t necessarily.” Returning to the example of running through the mud to return a stranger’s wallet: if the action is characterized as helping others rather than as running through the rain, it might very well be pleasurable. As MacIntyre rightly notes in After Virtue: “To the question ‘What is he doing?’ the answers may with equal truth and appropriateness be ‘Digging,’ ‘Gardening,’ ‘Taking exercise,’ ‘Preparing for winter’ or ‘Pleasing his wife.'” (206)
Besser-Jones responded that if you do characterize a virtuous activity like returning the wallet as helping others, it just means that helping others is the goal: it’s extrinsic motivation, it’s the consequence. But I argued in response: the key is whether you can take pleasure in running to give the wallet even if you fail. I don’t think I’m good enough to be able to do that. But our hypothetical 70-year-old Confucius might be. He could do his best to return the wallet, slip and fall in the puddle and miss the person as they round a corner, and still take pleasure in the activity because that activity was the right thing to do. (Even, perhaps, if his now-frail 70-year-old body broke a hip in the fall!)
I don’t understand the statement that an intrinsic motivation — engaging in a virtuous act for its own sake — requires, by definition, an indifference to the consequences of the act.
If the consequences of the action did matter, then you did not perform the action for its own sake. You did it because of the consequences.
If you returned a lost wallet to its rightful owner because you wanted to prevent certain results or consequences for the owner, then you did not return the wallet for its own sake.
Is it even plausible to think that someone could perform an intentional action, moral or immoral, for its own sake and with complete indifference to consequences or results, good or bad? I doubt it.
I doubt it as well.
As Besser-Jones explained it, I think the idea of internal motivation refers to the motivation while one is engaged in the action. One might enter a rock-climbing competition with the goal of enhancing one’s fame as a rock climber – external motivation – but while one is doing it, one has no thought to the fame involved, but only to the immediate task at hand, and that’s what makes it a flow experience.
Though now that I think about it, that should make for much less of a necessary (especially a definitional) contrast between internally and externally motivating acts: one should then be able to return the wallet for its consequences but still be absorbed in the flow of it at the moment. Besser-Jones in the talk had said that empirically, based on the psychological research, flow experiences have a specific structure which actions like returning the wallet would not provide. I’ll admit I haven’t read the research she’s been basing it on, but I am skeptical.
1. If I tell the truth knowing that it will deeply hurt a loved one’s feelings, am I not open to the charge of “moralistic sadism” if I add fuel to the fire and acknowledge that I enjoyed telling the truth in this context? Taking pleasure in the performance of certain virtuous actions could actually detract from or diminish the virtue of those actions.
2. If pleasure is indeed intrinsic to virtuous actions, what does this really add to our understanding of virtuous actions since pleasure is also intrinsic to wicked actions? (Would we consider someone “truly wicked” if he or she did not enjoy their vices or the performance of wicked actions?)
Both very interesting questions, Thill.
To 1 I would be tempted to say that the truly virtuous person – again this is a fairly exalted state and one I don’t claim to be in, though not nearly so high as nirvana, let alone buddhahood – is skillful enough to find a way around this sort of dichotomy. One learns the art of telling the truth gently, perhaps by making it implicit, in a way that provides the needed information while hurting as little as possible. I can certainly see there being pleasure in that, even if some hurt comes out of it in the end.
2 is particularly interesting. One derives pleasure from virtuous actions that one is very good at (according to Aristotle’s, or at least Annas’s, hypothesis). One also derives pleasure from the results of wicked actions. But does one also derive pleasure from the wicked actions themselves – if one is good at them, has become skilled at them? MacIntyre’s critics have raised this question as “the problem of evil practices,” which I discussed briefly in a post last year. I suspect it is a real problem. Still, it doesn’t mean that Annas’s approach is tautological or tells us nothing about virtuous practices: it tells us, rather, that they are skills and crafts, like rock-climbing or chess, things that we can become better or worse at – even if vicious practices might be the same way. It does not seem that, say, Bentham or Rawls or W.D. Ross think about virtue in this way: the idea of virtue is flattened there to refer simply to the sum of individual actions rather than to overall character as a mutually strengthening package, and can be derived solely from the individual act’s intended consequences and/or its conformity to an inviolable abstract principle.
“But does one also derive pleasure from the wicked actions themselves – if one is good at them, has become skilled at them?”
Amod, Why not? Isn’t it fairly obvious that there are sadistic torturers and killers who fit this bill? Even a skillful pickpocket fits the description of a person who “derives pleasure from the wicked actions themselves – if one is good at them, has become skilled at them”.
Could it be that the central difference between the virtuous and the wicked is that the virtuous perform morally good actions even if they don’t always take pleasure in performing those actions whereas the wicked always take pleasure in the performance of morally bad actions?
The concept of pleasure needs to be looked at closely. Whether a given act is virtuous depends on the motivation (whether the motivation is to benefit others or solely to benefit oneself).
One can imagine pleasure derived from an act of helping others that corrupts the virtue of the act. For example, if one gives money to a beggar in a flamboyant way in order to enhance one’s self image and reputation as a generous person, then the act could be a selfish act and not an act of generosity. In that way, the act could be seen as pleasurable in a selfish sense — in the same way that buying a fancy car to enhance one’s reputation is pleasurable.
However, there is also a joy connected with generosity and helping others that is not self-centered. Perhaps that joy could be defined as pleasure (it depends on how you define your terms) — but it is not pleasure in the same sense as self-indulgent pleasure. And the experience of this type of joy in generosity does not detract from the virtue of the act.
You are conflating pleasure and your favorite concept: intention or motive. Pleasure is just what it is. There is no such thing as “selfish pleasure” or “unselfish pleasure”. The former is simply pleasure in getting something you want for yourself and the latter is just pleasure at the fact that other people got what they wanted.
Recourse to the concept of joy won’t help in the face of the point that there is something morally objectionable in taking pleasure, or joy, in certain moral actions if they produce pain or suffering for others.
It is a delusion that moral actions always produce happiness. Have you heard of the legendary Indian king Harishchandra and the ordeals he and his family went through because of his commitment to truth? If Harishchandra had said that he enjoyed telling the truth despite the fact that it caused so much suffering for his family, I doubt whether he would retain his moral stature.
I disagree. What is ordinarily called pleasure is simply satisfaction of desire — scratching an itch. That is the selfish pleasure that I mentioned. It is a pleasure that viewed from a broader perspective is pain — like the pleasure of an addict getting his fix. We can see that in our own experience,if we are honest. If we are depressed clicking through the channels on the remote control or eating a quart of ice cream out of the box — is that experience pleasure or pain?
By contrast, the feeling of joy and well being that comes from helping others has none of that quality. It is freedom. You could call it pleasure if you like — but, if so, it is a distinctly different type of pleasure.
I appreciate that certain psychologists such as B.F. Skinner believe that there is no freedonm or dignity, humans are animals and all there is to life is patterns of behavior generated by satisfaction of desire and aversion to pain. And certain philosophers believe that the individual is all important, that maximization of pleasure is the pinnacle of philosophy and that altruism is explained by selfish motivations.
I could not disagree more.
If that’s the central difference, I pity the virtuous.
Jabali, it can’t be “the central difference”, but it is certainly an important difference between the virtuous and the wicked. (Let me hasten to add that there are contexts in which the lines of demarcation between the two are not so clear.)
The notion that the exercise of virtue, or the performance of virtuous actions, is always enjoyable to the agent is plainly at odds with the commonplace truth that in many contexts the exercise of virtue, or the performance of virtuous actions, involves struggle, torment, and agony for the agent, particularly so if the consequences include suffering for loved ones.
To be a little more precise, the problem is not with the sensory experience itself but with the attachment or aversion that comes with the habitual use of sensory experience as other to create a sense of self. That is the addictive quality of desire and aversion.
It is not necessary to reify our sense of other and self in this way — but the habit is so strong that it tends to overlay all of our sensory experience. The result is that we are rarely experiencing our world in a direct way. Instead, we relate to a world of symbols and concepts and our likes and dislikes are composites of memories, associations and projections.
“The notion that the exercise of virtue, or the performance of virtuous actions, is always enjoyable to the agent is plainly at odds with the commonplace truth that in many contexts the exercise of virtue, or the performance of virtuous actions, involves struggle, torment, and agony for the agent, particularly so if the consequences include suffering for loved ones.”
But see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 3.6, on courage.
Here’s a simple suggestion. Acting virtuously, on Aristotle’s view, has two relevant features: first, the agent wants to do what he is doing; second, the agent is performing the relevant action well in all other respects. Since Aristotle holds that pleasure is either just identical to unimpeded activity or supervenient on it, it should follow on his account that acting virtuously is always pleasant. After all, if an agent wants to do something, and is able to do it well, then, assuming nothing goes wrong, he will do it, and neither his own motivations nor any other incapacities on his part will impede his action.
I suspect there are two issues leading some people here to find this view counter-intuitive. So we should note, first, that Aristotle’s account of the virtues has a paradigmatic structure; the picture he gives us is of the full-blown case, not the cases that we can expect to find very often in the world. Second, Aristotle’s account commits him only to maintaining that acting virtuously must be pleasant in some respect, not that it can never involve anything unpleasant. So running through the mud to return a wallet, to keep with the example, can involve all sorts of unpleasantness. But insofar as the agent is acting justly, and wants to act justly, and isn’t impeded in acting justly, then Aristotle gets everything he wants.
In short, I think much of this discussion involves confusions about Aristotle’s conception of pleasure. I also happen to think that he understands pleasure better than most of us do, but that’s a different story.
“first, the agent wants to do what he is doing; second, the agent is performing the relevant action well in all other respects. Since Aristotle holds that pleasure is either just identical to unimpeded activity or supervenient on it, it should follow on his account that acting virtuously is always pleasant.”
1. Aren’t you familiar with conflicting wants or desires? This is a feature of cases of moral decision in which the agent is torn between conflicting wants or desires and conflicting values. You will admit that these are hardly cases of “having a good time in doing the good”!
2. Even if you want to kill a dog or a horse in order to put it out of misery and you do it skillfully, it would still be a gross distortion to describe this act as one which gives pleasure to the agent.
3. There are so many cases in which the moral and the tragic are interwoven. How could one possibly ignore these glaring examples and still continue to hold that one always has a good time doing good?
The issue of whether the pursuit of morality is always pleasurable to the agent is an empirical issue and cannot be settled by mere definition. The counterexamples to the Aristotelian account point to a serious flaw in it.
It is plainly false that a person who wants to tell the truth and is not impeded in doing so automatically takes pleasure in telling the truth if that truth is going to make the person he loves suffer deeply.
What more do you need to see the falsity of the claim the that the ethical action is always a source of pleasure?
Thanks very much for this, Bob, and welcome to the blog! What do you think about the problem of evil practices, as discussed above? Does being a good liar, a good torturer, a good assassin have the same structure as being a good archer or being courageous – does pleasure supervene on (or is it identical with) their unimpeded performance? (In Aristotle’s view or in your own?)
Correction: Aristotle holds either that pleasure is just identical to unimpeded activity, or that it is supervenient on unimpeded activity. Or both, if he’s inconsistent.
“first, the agent wants to do what he is doing; second, the agent is performing the relevant action well in all other respects. Since Aristotle holds that pleasure is either just identical to unimpeded activity or supervenient on it, it should follow on his account that acting virtuously is always pleasant.”
The conclusion follows only if you assume that in cases of virtuous actions:
a) the agent always wants to perform those actions, and
b) the agent always perform those actions well “in all other respects”.
I don’t think (a) is always true. There are cases in which an agent could perform a moral action simply because it is an unavoidable means to an end without really wanting to do that action.
Even if (a) were always true, this does not guarantee the truth of (b). There is no necessary link between wanting to do the good and doing or accomplishing the good skillfully.
Note that one could also construct an argument along the same lines and assumptions for the conclusion that acting wickedly is always pleasant, but then it would suffer from the same flaw.
An agent may perform a wicked action simply because it is an unavoidable means to an end without really wanting to do that action. And, again, there is no necessary link between wanting to do a wicked action and accomplishing or doing the wicked thing skillfully.
So, the conclusion that the wicked always take pleasure in wicked actions does not follow from those Aristotelian premises pertaining to wanting to perform a wicked action and the unimpeded or skillful nature of the activity.
Therefore, I think there is a serious flaw in the very form or structure of Aristotle’s argument.
“So, the conclusion that the wicked always take pleasure in wicked actions does not follow from those Aristotelian premises pertaining to wanting to perform a wicked action and the unimpeded or skillful nature of the activity.”
I meant to say that the conclusion is not supported by those sorts of premises since they are not always true.
“nobody would call a man generous who does not enjoy acting generously.”
Yes, but this does not imply that the agent must always enjoy acting generously for his or her actions to count as generous actions. The criteria for ascribing dispositions of character are not necessarily the same for identifying actions.
An action is generous if it is supererogatory in quality and quantity. If I donated $ 100 to a cause when I had no obligation to do it or when I could have just given $ 25, then my action is generous.
Perhaps, I didn’t really want to make that donation and did it only to satisfy my spouse’s expectation or wish. Perhaps, I just wanted to impress the person asking for the donation.
If either of these were true, one could argue, plausibly or implausibly, that I performed the generous action for the wrong reasons, but this does not show that my action was not a generous action.
I disagree. Generosity can only be measured based on intent and motivation. A gift made with bad or selfish intent is not generous (by definition).
This is not to say that the giver always has to feel entirely good about the gift. If a gift is made with intent to benefit another but the giver is a miser and finds it hard and painful to make the gift — the act is still generous and virtuous.
The fruition of generosity as a virtue may include joyous delight in helping others. But for all of the rest of us on the path of cultivating virtue, we work with our habits and cultivate generosity — and sometimes that requires a painful stretching out of our comfort zone.
Your position faces serious problems. If you claim that intention or motive is essential to identifying or ascribing generous actions, how on earth are you going to identify generous actions in cases in which you have no way of ascertaining what the motive or intention is?
If you hear that Bill gates made a big donation to a charitable institution in India, how on earth are you going to ascertain what his motive was? And do we really need to ascertain his motive before we deem his action generous?
Ascertaining motive or intention is difficult even in the case of people you are acquainted with. So, how are you going to do that with people you are not acquainted with?
What about the actions of historical figures? How are you going to ascertain their motives?
The fact that your criterion based on ascertaining motive or intention leads to the conclusion that we cannot identify or ascribe moral actions, e.g., generosity and other forms of benevolence, in a majority of cases is a conclusive reduction ad absurdum against it.
We do not have direct access to motive or intention. We can ascribe intentions or motives only on the basis of verbal and/or non-verbal behavior.
The nature of the action, its constitutive features, provide the basis for ascribing motive or intention. To argue that the motive or intention provides the basis for determining the nature of the action is to put the cart in front of the horse.
Thus, if Bill Gates made a donation of a million dollars to a home for the destitute in India, and there is no evidence of any action or behavior which suggests an ulterior motive in making the donation, we are justified in describing his action as a generous one.
Of course it is possible to determine motivation drectly! Anyone but a person lacking in any self-awareness understands her motivations (if she is honest with herself).
What others think of the virtue of the action is largely irrelevant — the act is virtuous if the motivation is pure even if others don’t understand the motivation. However, it is also not all that difficult to understand motivations in other people as well. Lawsuits all the time turn on assessment of motivation. From fraud claims to bribery to embezzlement — the acts are often subject to more than one interpretation with culpability for the act depending on a determination of motivation.
But the main point is that virtue is assessed based on an internal compass — not an external code of behavior or social norms.
I was talking about the lack of direct access to another person’s motives or intentions.
If you are talking about knowing your own motives or intentions, what about self-deception? Even here isn’t it the case that one learns from one’s own actions or behaviors what one’s motives truly are?
Self-deception is a problem, of course. That is the problem that all of the great traditions (including classical philosophy) work to solve. The methods differ, with schools of philosophy preferring contemplative investigation and Eastern philosphies and religions typically mixing contemplative investigation with direct experience of the working of the mind through meditation.
Since intention always precedes action, it can be understood directly without a need to analyze it after the fact — although reflection back can be useful as a method for cultivating virtue.
Part of the problem is that our minds move very quickly and change moment to moment. So, for example, as I pass a beggar on the street I may have a rapid series of thoughts: (i) an inclination to avoid a confrontation, (ii) a desire to hold onto the money in my pocket, (iii) a refection on a code of conduct that recommends generosity as a virtue, (iv) a thought that others perhaps would see me being generous and think well of me, (v) a curiosity about who the beggar is, (vi) a thought that maybe he might use the money to buy alcohol and that my gift may not be helpful, (vii) a thought about how the previous thought is based on steretypes of beggars and may not be accurate. In some sense, all of this is mental chatter and doesn’t carry much weight. However, at the end, one of these intentions prevails and is carried forward into action. I may say, “f . . . you, get a job.” Or I may look the beggar in the eyes and hand him a $5 bill with the thought that “there but for the grace of god, go I — may you enjoy this.” Or I may hand him a $5 bill because it is the “right thing to do.” Or I may avoid his eyes out of fear of confrontation and hand him a $1 bill. Or I may hand him a $20 bill intending to impress my girlfriend and maybe get laid tonight. All of these actions have consequences. Some are more generous than others — and the primary determining factor is motivation.
Those are interesting observations, but they don’t address the central question: how do you determine intention or motive of other persons without examining their actions or behaviors?
If you were watching someone give money to a beggar, what can you possibly say about that person’s motives?
Thill would probably say that it was nice of that person to give money to the beggar and who cares what his motives were. The money probably helps the beggar in some way. That’s all we need to know and can possibly know in this case.
You, on the other hand, would probably say “We can’t tell if the action is good or not until we ascertain what the person’s motives were in giving the money.”
But then you are on a slippery slope here and what you are looking down at is the inability to make any judgments at all on the moral status of the actions of others, an outcome at variance with common sense practice of morality.
Why is the moral status of others the central question?
I do think it is possible to tell a great deal about a person’s intentions or motives by observing their speech and behavior. This exercise is usually based on an understanding of our own minds — and using that to have insight into others based on their behavior. But what is the point? I think this is where we may be talking past each other. To quote a maxim on the common sense practice of morality: “Virtue is its own reward”. Why the need for recognition from others — or the need to identify virtue in others?
I actually think that Thill and I don’t disagree that much on this question. Here is where I think our disagreement is: I believe Thill would say that a gift (for example) made with a non-virtuous motive where the motive is imperceptible to the recipient of the gift or to others is an equivalent good to a gift of the same amount to the same recipient at the same time made with a generous motive. I would disagree with this because non-virtuous acts have adverse effects on the actor (and in most cases, unlike our hypothetical, are perceptible by others and have adverse consequences for society as well).
“Why is the moral status of others the central question? I do think it is possible to tell a great deal about a person’s intentions or motives by observing their speech and behavior. This exercise is usually based on an understanding of our own minds — and using that to have insight into others based on their behavior. But what is the point?”
It’s about the moral status of the actions of others. As you know, moral education also involves reflection on model examples of good and bad actions performed by others. We identify and respond to the moral status of actions by others. This is just the warp and woof of human social life.
“I believe Thill would say that a gift (for example) made with a non-virtuous motive where the motive is imperceptible to the recipient of the gift or to others is an equivalent good to a gift of the same amount to the same recipient at the same time made with a generous motive.”
No, Thill wouldn’t say that! lol As a matter of fact, in a comment weeks or months ago, I pointed out that the intention or motive shapes the character or disposition of the agent, but does not determine the skillfulness or consequences of the action.
If A gives food to a starving man with the sole motive of gaining a reputation as a charitable person and B gives food to that man with the sole motive of alleviating the man’s suffering, I would say that the actions of A and B are “equivalent” in terms of their consequences.
Their respective motives have no impact on the consequence of their action, i.e., the alleviation of the man’s hunger, but those motives and their recurrence in other similar contexts will shape or alter A and B’s character and dispositions in the long run.
Thanks for clarifying. I think we agree! I would probably include shaping of the actor’s character among the consequences of the action — but that is quibbling.
Whether or not the action shapes or leaves an influence on the character of the agent (there’s self or person performing the action!) depends on the action and the agent. I suppose the same thing could be said of the motive for the action. But all this is irrelevant to the point that a starving person is helped by a gift of food regardless of the motive for that gift. Actions have consequences by virtue of causal relations in nature and motives have no bearing on those causal relations. It is but a superstition that the universe accommodates itself to benevolent motives.
Jim, you and Thill seem to be addressing different issues.
Thill is addressing the issue of how, in accordance with your criterion of motive or intention, you can identify moral actions performed by others if you have no way of ascertaining their intention or motive.
You seem to be talking about the issue of how an agent can know that he or she performed a moral action and you invoke knowledge of one’s own intention or motive as the determinant of the moral status of the action.
Another difference is that Thill is emphasizing the primacy of action or behavior whereas you are emphasizing the primacy of intention or motive.
The question you need to answer is: how do you determine intention or motive of other persons without examining their actions or behaviors?
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