Our experience of ethical decision-making and character improvement conflicts with our theorizing. In our theories, the right and the good are unified by some summum bonum or essential and defining attribute, and character improvement is reduced to mastering “this one weird trick” which, when successfully deployed, will absolve us of any conflicted feelings we might have. Virtue ethics is not impervious to this idealizing bent and Aristotle’s thesis of the ‘reciprocity of virtue’ encourages it: although the virtues have different feelings, spheres, goals, and so on, they can be unified in the reasoning and behavior of the practically wise person.
Howard Curzer’s new work is a book-long attempt to resist the idealizing impulses that creep into our theorizing – including our interpretation of Aristotle’s virtue ethics – and our plans for improvement, and instead to build a virtue ethics in which the virtues have some independence, even in the reasoning of the practically wise person, and a program for character improvement that is partite and incremental. A central inspiration for such a program and an important constraint throughout is a close examination of the phenomenology of ethical life. Our experience of ethical situations and our attempts to become better people, unlike our ethical theories, are multi-faceted and messy. As Curzer puts it, “Fans of idealization struggle to show that despite appearances, virtues never endorse conflicting acts, virtuous people are never torn by dilemmas, people with even one virtue have all virtues, and people should do their utmost to resist temptation. By contrast, I simply accept that things are the way they seem to be. Virtues conflict; virtuous people are torn; most people have some, but not all virtues; and everything can be taken to excess as well as deficiency” (p. 12).
In what follows, I give an overview of the book’s major components before turning to Curzer’s rejection of Aristotle’s brief argument for reciprocal virtues and to his (Curzer’s) treatment of practical wisdom. In addition to its Aristotelian roots and engagements, the book also engages with the large literature in virtue ethics and (to a lesser extent) moral psychology. The scope of the work, along with its common-sense approach and fearlessness in the face of the wide assortment of virtues and virtue-parts, make it a must-read for scholars of virtue ethics.
There seem to be two types of idealization at play in this book: with respect to virtue, idealization holds that for a character trait to be a virtue it must function perfectly, while idealization in moral or ethical theorizing compels us to equate all moral notions — Curzer is particularly interested in the relationship between the virtuous, the right, and the dutiful. Since ethical life is occasionally complex and conflicted, in place of perfect virtue, Curzer employs a “Threshold Doctrine”, holding that a character trait is a virtue when its relevant components function adequately rather than perfectly (pp. 42-3). There are many cases, according to Curzer, which show that we can’t always carry out a virtuous impulse, such as in virtue-versus-virtue conflicts. And in these cases, rather than trying to deny that a virtue goes unrequited, it is better to acknowledge that not being able to satisfy both of them causes a bittersweet feeling in the agent. Similarly, in other cases we feel repugnance, when we find that we are duty-bound to set aside the edict of a virtue and do something that no virtue recommends. In the latter cases, Curzer explains, the intellectual component of a virtue adapts more quickly to the conflicted situation (and directs us to bite the bullet) while the emotional habit continues to respond as usual (pp. 82, 113).
Such cases also speak against reducing or equating the main moral notions. In the case of ‘the right’, the right action might not be a virtuous action because improvement might require an act that is not virtuous, or because the right action involves ignoring the edict of one virtue in favor of another (pp. 55-6). In defining these other notions, Curzer wants to explain them in virtue-ethical terms, of course, but they need not be explained as forms of ‘virtue’ understood as a singular item or in terms of some defining feature. There are various tools available from within virtue ethics; in the case of ‘the right’, the separable operation of practical wisdom is employed: right is what practical wisdom dictates when it makes a value judgment (p. 113).
In the third of the book devoted to character improvement, Curzer proposes a ‘medical’ analogy for working on character flaws and then divides each virtue into ten components, and works through two of these — passion and practical reason — in detail, describing ten parameters of passion and ten sub-components of practical reason, and four failure modes for each of the ten, yielding 40 total failure modes for each component. Curzer does not work through the other components — this is left for a hypothetical DSM-V (the reference is to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; “V” is variously for “vices”, as p. 199, or “virtues”, as p. 245); the point is that there is a very large number of points of intervention for character improvement. Beyond making this point, this part of the book loses its punch and devolves into “programmatic” talk about the work needing to be done. There is a chapter devoted to practical wisdom, which consists largely of an articulation of twelve different decision-making methods, three of which are practical reasoning, and the ten components of practical reasoning and the four failure modes of each of these. Again, this is somewhat helpful but also overwhelming. The immense exfoliation of the virtues, their components, their sub-components, and their failure modes, outstrips the way in which we think about virtue and its development. The book’s driving impulse is to take the phenomenology of ethical life as a guide to ethical theory and a similar guiding light, even within a medical model, would suggest positive practical advice in terms that border on how we ordinarily talk about improvement. Curzer wants to eradicate the mind-virus of idealization but as far as “Improving Character Without Idealization” (the book’s subtitle) goes, we have moved from a single summum bonum to (roughly) 4,000 “teeny tiny bits of virtue” (chapter 9).
It is a difficult balance to strike, as much of the particular work must be done by the individual concerning their specific character traits (and, concerning actions, under specific circumstances). The chapter in defense of the much-maligned Doctrine of the Mean, for example, is based on and fortifies common-sense thinking about virtue, though it can go only so far in terms of practical advice. It is positioned as a chapter against an idealistic “corrective” view of virtues according to which we must continually resist falling into vice. Curzer presents the Doctrine of the Mean as a sensible three-threshold doctrine, with the first and second thresholds separating virtue from vice at either extreme and a third, central, threshold on either side of which we start to move away from maximal virtue, “the tipping point between improvement and degeneration of character” (p. 156). These thresholds correspond to the intuitions that moderate character traits, between excess and deficiency, are helpful at some level and that (for example) to always refuse pleasure — as the corrective view encourages — would be a pathological extreme. But there will be a gap between the generalities provided by theory and their application to specific cases, and we must also resist the idealization that in each case there is one and only one correct course of action.
The only place where Curzer is explicitly at odds with Aristotle is in the treatment of practical wisdom. Curzer assumes (p. 124) that a part of practical wisdom corresponds to each (ethical) virtue rather than thinking that the virtues can drive behavior by themselves or that practical wisdom is an all-purpose trait. This assumption contributes to a rejection of Aristotle’s “reciprocity of virtue” thesis, according to which unqualified virtue involves reasoning informed by all of the (well-functioning) emotions. In general, this is an odd fight to pick — Curzer might have been satisfied to make his theses (including the thesis of ‘unevenly virtuous people’) be about virtue in some ordinary sense and leave Aristotle’s reciprocity thesis for some exalted sense.
Practical wisdom is commonly thought to be required in situations where virtues clash but Curzer’s thesis is that practical wisdom plays no decision-making role in dilemmas involving multiple virtues. Curzer’s argument against reciprocity is that in many dilemmatic cases an individual virtue’s practical wisdom does fine on its own. This argumentative strategy, he admits, does not disprove that multiplicity is involved (p. 130) though he does not offer more. In the stand-alone chapter on practical wisdom, where we hope it will be made clear how practical wisdom is (or is not) involved in dilemmatic situations, the claim is simply that one virtue’s perspective makes more sense than another’s, but the example given in order to explain ‘makes more sense’ is a case where one perspective is operating excellently and the other is not. The positive description of what happens is that theoretical wisdom — which here makes a brief and unheralded appearance — compares the perspective presented on by each virtue to paradigm cases (p. 220).
Part of the issue here is that for Curzer a situation is only a dilemma when all possibilities for resolving the situation have been exhausted (p. 65). This stipulation sweeps away the attempts that might be made to deal with what initially appear to be competing virtues and all that remains is perhaps, as Curzer holds, to see which of the two competing virtues provides a better perspective on the situation. Without this stipulation, one might instead hold that clashes of virtue provoke practical wisdom to try to find an action that will satisfy both virtues. This activity of practical reason does not involve a total knowledge of all values or of some overall good, or denying that (ordinary) virtues are independent of one another and provide perspectives that fit situations more or less well, or, which is Curzer’s primary target (p. 218), the weighing of commensurable values. We might subsequently be able to make a link to the reciprocity of virtue thesis: when a person, being of ordinary virtue, fails to find a way to satisfy clashing virtues, we might be tempted to say that neither virtue was complete. If generosity recommends a simple action that leaves another virtue begging but another action would satisfy them both, we might be tempted to say that the person’s generosity is incomplete or undeveloped.
In sum, then, this book is a thorough and wide-ranging contribution to ethical theorizing in the Aristotelian virtue-ethical tradition, and makes a beginning on a ‘medical’ model of working on various virtues in various conditions. It is not exactly a book about improving character without idealization but rather about how to think about character improvement without idealization. Its negative argument shows the various ways in which idealization creeps into our theorizing and how aiming at an ideal is unhelpful and even harmful in our attempts to improve. When these idealizations are removed, space opens up for recasting our understanding of virtue and the virtues, as well as the other core notions of morality. As for character development, idealization’s removal means a multitude of virtues with a multitude of components with multiple modes of failure. Each person must (somehow) map their current personality against this scaffold and (somehow) decide where to make a start and how to intervene.