The Relation of Reasons, Choice, and Character Traits Kevin Timpe Towards a Christian Positive Psychology conference Draft: Not for quotation or circulation without permission. Introduction Recent years have seen a plethora of interdisciplinary work (in part because a number of significant Templeton grants!). A number of psychologists (and some neuroscientists) are weighing in on the traditional philosophical topic of free will. There s also been a large body of work relating reflection on the virtues and moral character to relevant empirical studies; one, but certainly not the only, example here is the situationist s critique of traditional, Aristotelian approaches to moral character traits. My interest today is with an issue that spans both of these areas of development; and though I m going to approach this issue primarily as a philosopher, it s an area that input from positive psychologists would be not only helpful, but welcome. I want to explore the relationship between an agent s moral character and her reasons for acting, laying out a framework for how character traits constrain how a person freely chooses. I thus see my paper today as providing part of the needed conceptual and empirical tools 1 that the recent development of positive psychology seeks. 1 Introduction to a Manual of the Sanities, in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, ed. Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. page 1
I. Reasons and the (Perceived) Good I begin with the connection between an agent s exercise of free will and the good or, to be more accurate, what the agent perceives as good. The degree of overlap between what the agent perceives as good and what is actually good will depend, to a large degree, on the moral character of the agent in question. The view that we only freely or intentionally do what we perceive as good in some way is sometimes referred to as the Guise of the Good Thesis. 2 The vast majority of the medievals embraced the Guise of the Good thesis and rejected the normative neutrality that characterizes much of contemporary philosophical writing on the issue. For many medieval philosophers, it was clear that an agent s free will could only be exercised toward what the agent sees as good or desirable in some way. By good here, I do not mean specifically moral goodness; I mean good in the generic sense of the term, recognizing and accepting that goodness comes in many forms: intrinsic, instrumental, moral, pleasurable, etc. Using the language of Judith Jarvis Thomson who said that when people say about a thing That s good, what they mean is always that the thing is good in some way 3 the standard medieval claim should be understood as involving pluralism about the ways a thing can be good. While this loaded understanding of the will dominated medieval discussions, it fell out of favor during the modern period and was replaced with a neutral account of the will, a neutrality which has dominated even most contemporary philosophical work on free will. But this professed neutrality is being questioned on a number of fronts. 2 So far as I am aware, this specific name comes from J. David Velleman, "The Guise of the Good," Nous 26, no. 1 (1992)., but a medieval predecessor can be found in the common dictum: quidquid appetitur, appetitur sub specie boni. For a collection of worthwhile papers addressing the Guise of the Good Thesis, see Sergio Tenenbaum, ed. Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2010). 3 Judith Jarvis Thomson, Goodness and Advice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 17. page 2
Richard Swinburne, for instance, has argued that attributing a reason for doing a particular action while denying the agent sees any good in it is contradictory, 4 and I develop an account of this connection in a current book project. While I think this connection between the perceived good and one s reasons for actions is true, I shall not argue for it here. 5 Since at least Aristotle, it has been noted that action is teleological in nature and that the proper explanation for a morally responsible action will be a teleological explanation. The question Why did A freely X? is a request for a reason, but as Richard Taylor noted it is almost never a request for a recital of causes. It is rather a request for a statement of purpose or aim. 6 G. F. Schueler unpacks the intentionality of actions as follows: It seems clear enough that intentional actions are inherently purposive; indeed, intentional human actions are paradigm examples of purposive behavior. There is always some point, aim, or goal to any intentional action. It is equally clear that our everyday explanations of actions in terms of the agent s reasons ( reasons explanations for short) must always refer to that fact, that is to the purpose of the action, if only implicitly, on pain of not explaining the action at all. If I tell you that my reason for sprinting toward the bus stop is that the last bus leaves in five minutes, you will take this as an explanation of my action only if you assume that my purpose is to catch the last bus (or anyway that there is something involving my being there at the same time the bus is spray painting it with graffiti perhaps). Without some such addition, my reference to the time of the last bus simply won t connect in the right sort of way to what I am doing, i.e. sprinting toward the bust stop, and my action won t have been explained. 7 4 Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994), 66f. 5 I should confess that it s unclear to me the degree to which positive psychology aims to be normatively neutral. While the focus on good character traits and virtues that is at the heart of the movement might suggest that it doesn t, there also seems to be a desire to downplay prescriptions of the good life ( Introduction to a Manual of the Sanities, 10) in favor of a more neutral description. Let me indicate my suspicion that this cannot be done, given the central roles of the good life and flourishing in the movement. 6 Richard Taylor, Action and Purpose (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), 141. See also Goetz, Freedom, Teleology, and Evil 16. 7 Schueler, Reasons and Purposes: Human Rationality and the Teleological Explanation of Action, 1. page 3
Freely performed actions are thus done with the aim of a goal, and the achieving of that goal serves as a purpose or reason for why the agent did that action. 8 What is key to understanding an agent s choice is the fit between the agent s reasons-giving structure and the goal that she is trying to accomplish in making that choice. If Deanna freely chooses to go to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee, her choice and subsequent behavior were directed at the goal of drinking coffee. The action is performed by the agent for a reason, and the action cannot be fully explained without mention of both (a) the agent and (b) the goal to which she directed the choice and which served as the reason for her choosing to perform that particular action. As R. Jay Wallace points out: It is important to our conception of persons as rational agents that *their+ motivations and actions are guided by and responsive to their deliberative reflection about what they have reason to do. Unless this guidance condition (as we might call it) can be satisfied, we will not be able to make sense of the idea that persons are genuine agents, capable of determining what they shall do through the process of deliberation. 9 Marie Alvarez makes a related connection, describing how rational agency means we have the capacity to act for reasons: we have the capacity to recognize certain things as reasons to act, and to act motivated and guided by those reasons. Because of this, moreover, many human actions can be explained by reference to the agent s reasons for acting. 10 So, when choosing which of various alternatives for action to do, agents have in mind an end (or ends) that they want to achieve, and the purpose of the action, or the reason for which the action is done, is the achievement of that end. If, as I suggested above, an agent s reasons are a function of what 8 In what follows, I ll primarily use the language of choice since my general concern is with free will, and I take choices to be the primary locus of such freedom. Actions too can be free, if freely chosen. 9 R. Jay Wallace, Normativity and the Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 44. 10 Maria Alvarez, Kinds of Reasons: An Essay in the Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7. page 4
she perceives as good, then this purpose or reason that a choice is done for will be connected with agent s judgment that the end to be achieved by choice is good. In choosing, then, the agent chooses to act for the sake of some end which she perceives to be good in some way, and in so choosing aligns herself with the promotion of that good end. And here the Guise of the Good thesis connects with talk of reasons, for the belief that the end promoted by the choice is good, again in some way or other, gives the agent a reason for making that choice. 11 To have a purpose or reason to perform an action is, I take it, to have a motivation to work toward actualizing a particular state of affairs. To put the point a slightly different way, in being motivated to act in a certain way, the agent s motivation involves two elements: the state of affairs that she is working toward bringing about (which I will refer to as the motivation s content ), and the judgment that this content is good. 12 Choosing, in order to be explicable, necessarily involves this second element as well as the first, for the content apart from the judgment that the content is good does nothing to explain the agent s reason for choosing in this way. As Scott Sehon has claimed in his teleological account of action, explanations of action imply that the state of affairs toward which the agent directed her behavior had some apparent value [or, in my preferred terminology, goodness] 11 In fact, Kieran Setiya argues that the Guise of the Good thesis is fundamentally about reasons and only derivatively about desires: First: When the object of desire, an action or outcome, is good, there is always some respect in which it is good, which is a reason to perform or to pursue it. Second: If desires represent their objects as good, they represent them as being good in some respect say, in being F and the fact that the object is F is a reason why the agent wants to perform it (Setiya, "Sympathy for the Devil," 85.). According to Setiya, the exact connection between reasons for action and the perceived good is as follows: When someone wants to φ, or wants it to be the case that p, they want it for a reason, and reasons for desire must be respects in which the object of desire is seen as good (ibid., 86.). Although I am inclined to accept Setiya s argument as persuasive, all that I need for the present chapter is the weaker claim that reasons and perceived goodness go together. 12 For a similar account, see Christine Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 215f. page 5
from the perspective of the agent. 13 The explanation of why, for example, Tyler hid the television remote he broke under the couch involves both the content and the value the agent sees in achieving the content: the content includes his parents not finding out that the remote is broken, which is a state of affairs that he finds to be good as a way of avoiding getting in trouble. The previous paragraphs have made repeated reference to the agent s reasons. In general, a reason is a consideration that counts in favor of some course of action. It thus provides some degree of motivation for that action, though the motivation is certainly defeasible by other reasons. Also, agents need not actually be motivated, in the sense of acting on that reason, even if a reason provides a motivation for doing a particular action. Successful moral agency does depend on our capacity to recognize reasons. But, as Manuel Vargas points out, the capacity to detect reasons isn t sufficient for successful agency. Success also depends on the agent acting on that information in the right way, which is something we might call a volitional capacity, or a capacity for self governance. A squirrel that is an excellent acorn-detector but acornphobic will do badly at the business of acorn collection. So will a squirrel that is excellent at detecting acorns but completely apathetic about pursuing them. So, the ability to recognize reasons for action is of limited utility by itself it is absolutely crucial that it be connected to a further ability to act on the detected information in the right way. At least from the philosophical armchair, there is no reason to suppose that excellence in reason detection is necessarily coupled with excellence in being appropriately moved. 14 Below, I ll argue that both excellence in reason detection and excellence in volitional sensitivity to reasons are necessary for the proper use of free will. But it is also worth noting, as Vargas 13 Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation, 149. See also Alvarez, Kinds of Reasons: An Essay in the Philosophy of Action, 173. and Schueler, Reasons and Purposes: Human Rationality and the Teleological Explanation of Action, 8. 14 Manuel Vargas, "Responsibility in a World of Causes," Philosophical Exchange (forthcoming): 8f in manuscript. page 6
does, that both of these aspects can vary not only among individuals, but also within the same individual across time. What is important, though, is that there can be moral reasons, and that agents can vary in their abilities to recognize such reasons and to respond to them accordingly. The variation operates along several dimensions, including recognitional and volitional sensitivity, but also in terms of how these things operate across contexts. And, of course, these variations hold across particular agents. 15 The ability to change both one s ability to recognize reasons and respond in light of them will be important below when I return to the issue of character formation. But beyond this, there are a number of different kinds of reasons, and it is important for purposes of this chapter to make a number of clarifications about my use of the term. I will be almost exclusively concerned with moral reasons, though there are certainly other kinds of reasons as well (e.g., prudential reasons, legal reasons, etc ). More important, however, are the following two distinctions. The first of these is between motivational reasons and normative reasons. 16 Motivational reasons are the reasons that an agent has for doing a particular action and are capable of explaining her choice if she were to perform that action. As Maria Alvarez correctly notes, What *motivating+ reasons a person has for acting and wanting things depends partly on who that person is and on her circumstances and values, because, in general, things are not good or right tout court but in some respect; and that respect may be more or less 15 Ibid., 11 in manuscript. 16 For more on this distinction, see Timothy O'Connor, "Reasons and Causes," in A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, ed. Timothy O'Connor and Constantine Sandis (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010). and Smith, Ethics and the a Priori, 1ff and 59ff. Motivational reasons are sometimes also referred to as explanatory reasons; see Alvarez, Kinds of Reasons: An Essay in the Philosophy of Action, 3 and 33ff. page 7
relevant to different people depending precisely on what their circumstances and values are. 17 In contrast, normative reasons are those reasons which would morally justify a particular choice by the agent at a particular time, regardless of whether the agent actually considers them or not. 18 Insofar as an action is morally good for the agent in question to do, there is a normative reason for her performing that action. Likewise, insofar as an action would be morally bad for an agent to perform, there is a normative reason for her not performing it. But if the agent is unaware of the moral goodness or badness of an action, or simply does not care about the morality of the action, then her motivational reasons will not track the normative reasons that there are. Which reasons we point to will depend on whether we are merely explaining or morally evaluating the agent s action. The claim that free choices are made for reasons should be taken to involve reasons in the motivational sense of the term. II. Reasons and Free Will Returning then to the connection between reasons and free will, we can now understand a bit more clearly just what is involved in the claim made earlier that an agent never freely chooses to do an action A when she has no reason for A-ing. 19 Peter van Inwagen has argued, convincingly in my view, that the following conditional C is true about human agents: 17 Alvarez, Kinds of Reasons: An Essay in the Philosophy of Action, 22. Even if aligning one s self to God is in fact always good tout court, it s not always recognized and such. I return to this issue in chapters 3 and 4. 18 There may be other sorts of normative reasons which are not explicitly moral in nature, such as pragmatic reasons. However, insofar as my general interest is with free will and its connection with moral responsibility, those need not concern me here. 19 In this paper, I focus almost exclusively on intellectual reasons, though I think many similar points could and should be made about affective reasons. page 8
C: If X regards A as an indefensible act, given the totality of relevant information available to him, and if he has no way of getting further relevant information, and if he lacks any positive desire to do A, and if he sees no objection to not doing A (again, given the totality of relevant information available to him), then X is not going to do A. 20 First, it is worth noting that van Inwagen intends C to be not only a statement regarding what X will (or will not) do, but about what X is capable (or incapable) of doing: The general lesson is: if I regard a certain act as indefensible, then it follows not only that I shall not perform that act but that I can't perform it. 21 Finally, while van Inwagen s formulation of the conditional here doesn t explicitly mention free will, the context of his discussion makes it clear that in saying that X is not going to do A, he has in mind those cases where X s doing A is a free act. Putting these elements together, the truth of van Inwagen s conditional C leads to the following claim, which I shall call the reasons-constraint on free choice. Reasons-constraint on free choice: If, at time t, A has neither no reasons for X-ing, then A is incapable, at t, of freely choosing to X. The incapability here should be understood in a strong sense: necessarily, given her lack of reasons for X-ing, A will not freely choose to X. Jonathan Dancy gives an example which purports to show that an agent could desire to perform a particular action and yet have no reason at all to perform it. Dancy s example is as follow: I hesitate to give an example of this, but the sort of one that springs to mind is some shameful act that would immediately bring my career and marriage to an end, but which I still 20 Peter van Inwagen, "When Is the Will Free?," Philosophical Perspectives 3, no. Mind and Action Theory (1989): 407. 21 Ibid., 409. page 9
have some desire to do. All agree that I have no reason to do this, and every reason not to do it. 22 The example is somewhat opaque, but it s pretty clear that he has in mind a case of an adulterous sexual encounter with one of his students, which he has every reason not to do. But Dancy s description is misleading, and I think that it is pretty easy to how this objection to the reasons-constraint on free choice misses its mark. In Dancy s example, it is stipulated that the agent has no reason for pursing this course of action. But the fact that he still desires to do it shows that he has some reason for doing so presumably, the pleasure of the sexual satisfaction involved. Now there is one sense in which the agent has no reason for doing the action in question insofar as he presumably has no normative reason for engaging in a sexual relationship with one of his students, and every normative reason not to. But the fact that he nevertheless desires to do so requires that he have some motivational reason for the behavior. Insofar as sexual satisfaction is pleasurable, it is something that he sees as good in some way, which then provides him with a reason for engaging in the affair. The agent thus, contrary to Dancy s description, does in fact have a motivational reason for the action, even if he has no normative reason for it. His example thus fails to be a counterexample to the present account of motivation. Van Inwagen argues from the considerations related to his conditional C, and thus also related to the reasons-constraint on free choice, to the claim that we have precious little free will 23 insofar as there are few occasions in life on which at least after a little reflection and perhaps some investigation into the facts it isn't absolutely clear what to do. 24 Although I m 22 Jonathan Dancy, Practical Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37. 23 van Inwagen, "When Is the Will Free?," 414. 24 Ibid., 415. page 10
inclined to think that we have free will more frequently than does van Inwagen (and here it will be helpful to remember van Inwagen s specific definition of free will), not much hangs on this for present purposes, for van Inwagen goes on to agree that it does not, however, follow that moral accountability is a less common phenomenon than one might have thought. 25 He continues: The inability to prevent or to refrain from causing a state of affairs does not logically preclude being to blame for that state of affairs. An agent cannot be blamed for a state of affairs unless there was a time at which he could so have arranged matters that that state of affairs not obtain. It is an old, and very plausible, philosophical idea that, by our acts, we make ourselves into the sorts of people we eventually become. Or, at least, it is plausible to suppose that our acts are among the factors that determine what we eventually become. If one is now unable to behave in certain ways this may be because of a long history of choices one has made. 26 And here we directly encounter issues of moral character and habituation. There are important issues here that I am unable to address in the present context. Perhaps most pressing of these is giving an account of how a young child who has no choice about her initial character traits, her environment, or upbringing can over time come to make free choices. That is, how do we develop from agents who are not free and responsible into free and responsible agents? It is not my goal here to present such a developmental account. Instead, in what follows I will focus on agents who are already moral agents. III. Moral Character and Agency In this section I want to explore some ways in which our moral character affects our exercise of free will. Character traits are typically understood as dispositions to have thoughts 25 Ibid., 418. 26 Ibid., 419f. page 11
and feelings of a certain sort, and thus to act in certain ways 27 in particular kinds of circumstances; in this general respect, philosophers and psychologists alike tend to use the term character trait along these lines. But this similarity often masks differences in how the two groups understand such traits more fully, and these differences are crucial. It is thus advisable to differentiate those traits that are morally relevant from those that are not. The psychologist Lawrence Pervin, for example, defines a character trait as a disposition to behave expressing itself in consistent patterns of functioning across a range of situations. 28 But even among such traits, some do not appear to be morally relevant. For instance, Sam s disposition to eat pizza rather than spaghetti, or her disposition to play with Riley rather than Sandy, will not be morally relevant in most cases. Philosophers, in contrast, typically think that character traits, unlike other personality or psychological traits, have an irreducibly evaluative dimension; that is, they involve a normative judgment. The evaluative dimension is directly related to the idea that the agent is morally responsible for having the trait itself or for the outcome of that trait. Thus, a specifically moral character trait is a character trait for which the agent is morally responsible and for which it is appropriate to hold the agent morally responsible. Exactly how these traits are understood depends upon the larger normative theory that they are wed to; a consequentialist view will differ in numerous ways from a virtue-theoretic approach. In what follows, I will assume a roughly Aristotelian approach that I think is correct, though I will not 27 Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 141. More fully, Goldie takes character traits to refer, not to a single disposition, but to a complex network of dispositions which interlock and dynamically interrelate in ways that enable the agent both to recognize and to respond to a situation as embedded in a complex narrative which includes the agent, and his thoughts, feelings, and action (157). 28 Lawrence Pervin, "A Critical Analysis of Current Trait Theory," Psychological Inquiry 5(1994): 108. page 12
defend this assumption in the present volume. Despite this assumption, I think that much of what I say could also be accepted by someone who preferred a different normative theory. 29 In what follows, I will assume a roughly Aristotelian approach, though I will not defend this assumption. As a result of this assumption, I tend to view moral character traits primarily as a function of whether the agent has or lacks various moral virtues and vices. A trait for which the agent is deserving of a positive reactive attitude, such as praise or gratitude, is a virtue, and a vice is a trait for which the agent is deserving of a negative reactive attitude, such as resentment or blame. Furthermore, though this understanding of such traits has come under considerable pressure from Situationist approaches in recent years, I shall also assume that moral character traits are relatively stable, fixed and reliable dispositions of action and affect that ought to be rationally informed. 30 It is widely accepted that our moral character influences our choices. John Kronen and Eric Reitan write, for example, that moral character influences, often decisively, what one does or does not do. In other words, one s moral character gives fries to motives for actions, the totality of which excludes some actions, permits others, and necessitates still others. 31 I agree 29 Niall Connolly has objected that there are certain deontological approaches that may be incompatible with my assumption of reasons externalism (see note?? above). If this is fact the case, then perhaps some of what I say will not be as neutral with respect to normative theory as I would like. 30 For the challenge posed by Situationism, see John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). and Maria Merritt, John Doris, and Gilbert Harman, "Character," in Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. John Doris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For virtue based replies to Situationism, see Christian Miller, "Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics," The Journal of Ethics 7(2003). and Robert Merrihew Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), particularly chapters 8 and 9. I think my assumptions here regarding the nature of the virtues is in line with that of positive psychology. See Introduction to a Manual of the Sanities, 12f. I m willing to grant, as does positive psychology, that the expression of character traits and virtues is situationally dependent, even though I do not focus on this element in the present paper. It should also be pointed out that Aristotle granted as much as well. 31 John Kronen and Eric Reitan, "Species of Hell," in The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology, ed. Joel Buenting (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 201. page 13
with this, though, as I see it, there are at least two different ways in which an agent s various moral character traits can shape what she freely chooses to do. One s character directs one s choices both by influencing what one sees as reasons for actions and influencing how one weighs her reasons, in the sense of rank-ordering the various reasons she has. To put this point a slightly different way: in making free decisions, one s character traits affect not only the weights, they also affect the scales. Both of these aspects can be seen as follows. First, suppose that I foster the virtue (or character trait) of kindness, such that I become committed to working toward and promoting the good of others. I will then have reason for, say, loaning you my car so that you can make an important meeting you would otherwise miss. Furthermore, when I weigh the good of helping you out by loaning you my car against the good of not putting miles on my car, I will easily and clearly see that the good you will experience by making the meeting exceeds the good of no one driving my car. My character is involved insofar as if I were more selfish, I might find the good of not driving my car as a good reason to ignore your request. Similarly, if I were less empathetic, I may weigh my own perceived good more heavily than I do against the good of helping you. Since we freely choose to do only things that we think we have some reason to do, our character affects our free choices by affecting both the weight or strength we assign to reasons, and by affecting the scale by which we compare a reason or set of reasons for acting one way against a reason or set of reasons for acting another. Given this fact, as well as the fact that our moral character is diachronically pliable, an agent may develop her moral character in such a way that, given how that agent evaluates and compares her reasons, there may be actions which she no longer sees as reasonable in any way page 14
at a particular time, even though another agent may see good reason to perform that same action at that time and the agent herself may have had similar reasons at an earlier time. Our characters can be such that we are simply no longer capable of freely choosing certain courses of action without our character first changing from what it is given the role that our character has in shaping our reasons for action. Why this is will be related to the reasons-constraint on free choice introduced earlier. Over time, an agent s performance of certain actions, and the lack of performance of others, will become more and more natural for her to do (or not to do) given her character. As a person s moral character develops even further, she may come to no longer have either intellectual or affective reasons for doing certain actions. In these cases, she will be incapable of freely choosing to perform those actions. In these cases, an agent need no longer consciously consider at the time of action what is good for her to do since her character makes that determination automatically. I have argued that an agent s reasons 32 affect her free choices by influencing both the weight or strength she assign to reasons, and by affecting the scale by which she compares a set of reasons for acting one way against a reason or set of reasons for acting another. Given this fact, as well as the fact that our moral character can change over time, an agent may develop her moral character in such a way that, given how that agent evaluates and compares her reasons, there may be actions which she no longer sees as reasonable in any way at a particular time, even though another agent may see good reason to perform that same action at that time and the agent herself may have had similar reasons at an earlier time. Our characters can be such that we are simply no longer capable of freely choosing certain courses 32 Both intellectual and affective. page 15
of action without our character first changing from what it is given the role that our character has in shaping our reasons for action. Why this is will be related to the reasons-constraint on free choice introduced earlier. Over time, an agent s performance of certain actions, and the lack of performance of others, will become more and more natural for her to do (or not to do) given her character. As a person s moral character develops even further, she may come to no longer have either intellectual or affective reasons for doing certain actions. In these cases, she will be incapable of freely choosing to perform those actions. In these cases, an agent need no longer consciously consider at the time of action what is good for her to do since her character makes that determination automatically. Furthermore, if we understand the agent s moral character along Aristotelian lines, as I am here assuming, then such instances will be examples of what Bill Pollard has referred to as habit explanations : cases of explain*ing+ by referring to a pattern of a particular kind of behavior which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition. 33 Now, Pollard s class of habit explanations is broader than the use I m putting it to here in reference to moral character; for Pollard thinks that actions like biting one s nails or missing a turn while driving along a road because one normally goes straight are examples of habit explanations. And Pollard has no truck with what he takes to be the over-intellectualized nature of much philosophy of action. But keep in mind that the reasons-constraint on action condition, as well as the larger account of moral character that I m situating it within, takes account not only of intellectual reasons, but affective reasons as well. 33 Bill Pollard, "Explaining Actions with Habits," American Philosophical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2006): 57. page 16
Pollard also has a stronger account of what it means to be a habit than I m appealing to in the present discussion. For him, the test of whether Φ-ing has become a habit is not only that Φ-ing has become part of her history, but also for Φ-ing (in these circumstances) to be automatic. 34 There are numerous ways for an action to be automatic for an individual, only one of which is that it s a natural result of the agent s moral character such that not performing that action (in the right circumstance) isn t compatible with said character. It is only this latter group that I m interested in here. Actions that are habitual in this way seem to be teleological, even if the habit itself need not be. 35 But if, as Aristotle claims, an action must be done for the right reason (as well as at the right time and to the right degree, etc ) in order to be virtuous, then the forming of a virtuous moral character will require us to consider the goal not only of our individual actions, but also the larger pattern of behavior that those actions are a part of. The exact degree to which we can expect that a person s moral character will become developed in such a way will depend on a variety of factors related to the actual psychology of individuals, the time involved in fortifying habits, the degree to which their motivational reasons line up with normative reasons, how attuned their passions are to the demands of virtue, etc. But all of these seem to me to be issues where philosophical reflection should be influenced by empirical work from other disciplines. That is one reason why I m very excited by the kind of dialogues that this conference is promoting. And I hope that positive psychologists 34 Ibid., 61. 35 It should be noted that Pollard does not think all habits are to be explained teleologically. Given his wide use of habit, that is certainly right. But that does not diminish the teleological nature of free action under consideration here. page 17
continue to allow philosophers, theologians, and others to help work toward the domain of moral excellence that so many of us think is important. 36 36 Introduction to a Manual of the Sanities, 8. page 18