What It Takes? Or Not

By exercising the virtue of perseverance, I managed to “sleep in” until 7 o’clock this morning, postponing the awful moment of going out into yet another cold morning with—yes!—new snow on the ground. Sigh. Fortunately, the morning’s e-mail brought me this link from Walt (thanks, Walt!) and a reason to smile. Then there was a message from dmarks, who’s been writing about castles in his blog (“Throwaway” in links list to the right). He knew about Curwood Castle in Owosso but not about Kalamazoo’s beloved Henderson Castle. (I Googled the latter and found that it is now a B&B. Wouldn’t that be a great place to stay? Probably don’t take dogs, though.) And as you can see, I got all but the last two (missing!) pieces of the jigsaw puzzle properly placed this morning, though four days ago I was ready to throw in the towel. I’d like to think that perseverance is a virtue, but Kwame Anthony Appiah’s new book, EXPERIMENTS IN ETHICS, casts doubt on virtues in general, at least as philosophy has traditionally defined them.

Appiah’s overall question in the book is “Can moral philosophy be naturalized?” That is, can the study of ethics be advanced by looking across disciplinary borders into such fields as psychology and behavioral economics? Appiah notes in his first chapter that the partition separating philosophy from other studies is of fairly recent origin and short duration, historically speaking. Aristotle would never have accepted such narrow boundaries, while relative moderns Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill were equally at home in philosophy, psychology and economics. In our own day, more and more philosophers are rebelling against the arbitrary, confining and self-defeating disciplinary limits that would deny us the use of the experimental sciences.

It’s Appiah’s second chapter that calls virtues and character into doubt. We ascribe virtues to individuals, and we attribute motivation for their actions to what we fondly imagine as their character. The best novelists have always known, however, that reality is far more complex and less clearly drawn. Do I “persevere” only when I have nothing better, i.e., more tempting, to do? Is it perseverance or merely inertia? Am I motivated to act or suspended in action?

Appiah cites studies in which individuals were observed to respond more kindly to strangers if they (the responders) had just previously found a dime in a pay phone coin return tray or if they were, at the time someone asked for help, simultaneously exposed to delicious fresh bakery odors. When asked why we performed a certain act, we will come up with reasons, he notes, but the truth is that we are often completely unaware of our own motivation, and what moves us to act may have nothing to do with reason. Even poor Kant (who took took quite a beating in the first chapter of EXPERIMENTS IN ETHICS) was aware of the dark, closed nature of the human heart, its secrets known only to God. The idea of hidden, confused or unknown motivation is not new. What’s happening now is that carefully designed experimental situations are revealing some of our own secrets to us.

Well, I succeeded in getting a good night’s sleep and in completing a jigsaw puzzle, so now, rather than writing any more today, I will return to my reading.