Virtue as ‘Being for the Good’

Not uncommonly do people beginning their life journeys make the accumulation of fortune a central priority. Their aims in so doing are varied and typically include purchasing a house or land, retiring early, taking exotic vacations, enjoying a privileged lifestyle, and providing for their loved ones. Since accumulating a fortune is difficult, they often spend many years of labor and diligence amassing their nest egg.

By contrast, the aim of becoming a good person and of living a life of moderation or altruism is a goal at which far fewer persons aim.Perhaps this fact owes to people being comfortable with their existing personal character, or perhaps they do not think that there is any one definition of goodness, or perhaps they do not conceive of goodness as being something that requires work to achieve.

Interest in this second life goal (becoming a good person) and in the way in which people can develop traits of moral goodness has revived in recent years in professional ethics. Many of our professional ethicists have concluded that a life of upright thoughts and actions is not a goal that is achievable in a day, a month, or even a few years; it only comes to be achieved over many years’ time, after persons have matured their characters largely by responding, in ways that are judicious, to the influences in their surroundings.

Robert Adams has been one scholar in the vanguard of this recent revival. One of his better known books is A Theory of Virtue, in which Adams explores the ethics of human character. The book was published in 2006 and its purpose is to develop an account of human virtue of a kind that can show persons how it might be possible to live a life of moral goodness. Central to Adams’s vision is the idea that in order to live such a life one must be committed to the cultivation of virtues. “Virtues,” Adams argues in the first section of Theory, “… are not simply patterns of action. They are in large part dispositions, or states that give rise to dispositions, to act in certain ways or from certain motives, views, or commitments” (p. 161). Adams’s practical definition of virtues is as forms of “persisting excellence in being for the good” (p. 14).

For Adams, to ‘be for’ an object is to intend it or to have an enduring psychological orientation toward it. This intention shapes one’s attitudes and actions over a long period of time. There are a variety of goods and a variety of ways in which agents are capable of ‘being for’ these goods. Adams’ rationale for this diversity is that philosophers “… can treat more accurately the complex and subtle relations among our interests in diverse goods if we do not allow our theories of virtue to depend heavily on where a line is drawn between moral and other types of value” (p. 19). For Adams, for instance, one such good is the artistic taste that it is possible for us to exercise in aesthetic enjoyment and realization.

For Adams, virtuous agents must strive to ‘be for’ the good over a long period of time in a manner that is excellent in order to live a life of moral goodness. “To say that virtue must be excellent,” Adams argues, “is to insist that it must be worth prizing for its own sake … Excellence is the objective and non-instrumental goodness of that which is worthy to be honored, loved, admired, or (in the extreme case) worshiped, for its own sake” (p. 20). Excellence, for Adams, is intrinsically valuable and thus a pursuit-worthy ideal for all agents.

Adams’s claim that virtue is a ‘persisting excellence in being for the good’ is an understanding similar to those of other contemporary ethicists. For instance, Adams emphasizes ‘being excellently for the good’ because he is intent on demonstrating that virtuous behavior is valuable for its own sake, and not merely for the sake of its consequences. Consider, by comparison, the practice-based accounts of the virtues that have become popular in the wake of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. MacIntyre portrays the virtues as skills that enable their practitioners to achieve the goods of social practices. What is the status of MacIntyre’s practice-based account on Adams’s criterion of ‘being excellently for the good?’ It is, in short, an intrinsic-value view of the virtues because it depicts these goals as being valuable for their own sake. The goals of practices are valuable for reasons that are internal to those practices and they would still be valuable even if they ceased to be beneficial to the surrounding community.

Adams applies his theory of virtue to social affairs in the second section of Theory. He defines altruism, for instance, as “… any motive that takes as its end or goal the good or well-being of one or more or all persons other than oneself” (p. 65). In Adams’s view, altruism is a virtue that it is desirable for its own sake—and not merely for the sake of its consequences. Adams also attempts in the second section to dispel some misconceptions about the relationship between virtue and the realm of practical affairs.

The first such misconception is a misunderstanding of the reasons why it is valuable for persons, as citizens, to participate in projects alongside each other. When persons are engaged in common projects, they ought in Adams’s view to be expected to care about those projects in a way that is different from their care for the persons who are benefited by the projects. Their care ought to be for the sake of the common projects: “…caring, in an appropriate way, about good common projects for their own sake is morally virtuous” (p. 86). Adams’ target in this analysis is the widespread misconception that people who are involved in common projects ought to be concerned only with the consequences of those projects, and not also with the projects themselves. In his view it is virtuous as such to participate in projects alongside others, since doing so is a way of ‘being excellently’ for the good.

The second misconception that Adams attempts to dispel is a misunderstanding of the psychological dichotomy between selfishness and selflessness. The mistake in his view is to think that “… moral excellence or virtue must be altruistic in such a way that there cannot be any place in it for self-love” (p. 95). For Adams, certain forms of self-love are reconcilable with altruistic concern. It is perfectly possible for agents to be concerned for their own welfare, as well as for the welfare of others, without becoming so concerned for their own welfare that they fall into vicious and destructive behavioral patterns. Self-love is virtuous when it contributes to the care that we ought to exert on behalf of our own good.

In part three, Adams anticipates some objections to his theory of virtue. The fact, after all, is that human beings do not always achieve the moral ideals that they set for themselves. Some psychologists have taken this fact to be an indication that dispositional traits do not exist, or at least that they do not exist in the way in which we might like to think that they do. Indeed, the data to which these psychologists appeal sometimes seems to indicate that different instantiations of ‘virtues’ are in fact products of situations, and are largely unrelated to the motivational patterns that occur in other, different situations.

Adams’ response to this critique, which is commonly known as the ‘situationist’ challenge, is that traits are not necessarily the direct behavioral dispositions that some psychologists have believed them to be. Rather, in Adams’s view, traits are probabilistic or modular things. Adam means by probabilistic those traits that are similar across different situations; he means by modular those traits that are the independent but related components of a common character.

It might also be objected of Adams’s account that it is not at the end of the day possible for humans to live morally upright lives because they are so hopelessly compromised by their own frailty. Often, for instance, the influences of our situations overpower our ability to practice the character traits that we know to be right. Adams’s response to this objection is to admit that it sometimes is not possible for virtuous dispositions to be able to withstand the pressure of adverse circumstances (as, for example, the famous Milgram experiments seem to indicate). However, he also thinks that while frailty of will and intellect can compromise our moral posture, they don’t necessary exert domination over it. Moreover, there are numerous examples of moral situations in which individuals have successfully and heroically withstood adversity and pursued the right course of behavior. The case of holocaust heroes like Oscar Schindler is one such example of this kind of moral heroism.

Additionally human beings are typically only comfortable behaving as they do in a narrow range of situations. Whenever their circumstances place them outside of this narrow range of situations, they often end up being mistaken in their choice of a course of action. Thus, for Adams, the fact that situational variables do sometimes overpower our character traits is not in any way a refutation of the existence of moral virtues. In arguing that it is a refutation, situationist psychologists have committed themselves to an overly narrow interpretation of the relation between the theory and practice of virtue.

So how does one become a good person and live a life of moderation or altruism? The answer for Adams is to devote oneself to the day-to-day practice of virtues: to ‘be for’ the good in an excellent manner. And, when situational difficulties arise, one must not grow discouraged by one’s mistakes or by the fragility of one’s own character state. Instead, the point is to pick oneself up again and to strive again the next day to cultivate in oneself the virtues that one knows to be right.