A rchive Date
[ 10-05-2004 ]
Category
[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Immanuel Kant ]
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[http://www.unlv.edu/Colleges/Liberal_Arts/Philosophy/mcdowell%20reading%201.htm
Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?
John McDowell
In "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives", Philippa Foot argues against the Kantian doctrine, and prevailing orthodoxy, that the requirements of morality are categorical imperatives. She notes that there is a distinction between a use of "should" in which a "should" statement needs withdrawing if the action in question cannot be shown to be ancillary to the agent's desires or interests, and one in which that is not so; and that moral uses of "should" are of the latter sort. She argues, however, that this latter use of "should" does not mark a categorical imperative in the sense intended in the orthodox doctrine; for it is found equally in expressions of the requirements of etiquette.
Defenders of the orthodoxy, she assumes, would deny that the requirements of etiquette are categorical imperatives, and would ground the denial on the thesis that it is possible, without irrationality, to question whether one has reason to conform to them. On this assumption, the orthodoxy amounts to the claim that such questioning is not possible with morality. But Mrs. Foot insists that the claim is false: there is no irrationality in questioning whether one has reason to act as morality is alleged to require.
On this construal of the orthodoxy, then, a categorical imperative is something that must, on pain of irrationality, be recognized as a reason for acting; and Mrs. Foot's thesis is that moral requirements are not categorical imperatives in that sense. She concludes that the requirements of morality exert a rational influence on the will only hypothetically; their influence is conditional on the presence of desires that are lacked by those who question whether they have reason to conform.
I want to agree that one need not manifest irrationality in failing to see that one has reason to act as morality requires, but I want to query whether it follows that moral requirements are only hypothetical imperatives.
The terminology calls for some preliminary comment. As Mrs. Foot notes, Kant's concern was not with imperatives on a strict grammatical construal of the classification. She concentrates on judgments expressible with the words "should" or "ought"; but I prefer to shift attention away from explicitly prescriptive or normative language altogether.
It seems plausible that if one accepts that one should do something, one accepts that one has a reason to do it. But the reason is not expressed by the "should" statement itself. The reason must involve some appropriate specific consideration that could in principle be cited in support of the "should" statement.
Thus, if one does something because one thinks one should, then unless the thought that one should is merely accepted on authority, a more illuminating account of one's reason will be available, citing the appropriate specific consideration that one takes to justify the view that one should act in that way. A formulation of the specific consideration will at least include a mention of what one takes to be relevant features of the circumstances in which the action is to be performed.
Now the fundamental difference that I think Kant was aiming at is one between different ways in which conceptions of circumstances influence the will; that is, between different ways in which they function in the explanation of behavior in terms of the agent's reasons. To a virtuous person, certain actions are presented as practically necessary - as Kant might have put it - by his view of certain situations in which he finds himself. The question is whether his conceptions of the relevant facts weigh with him only conditionally on his possession of a desire.
If we think of the requirements of morality as imposed by the circumstances of action, as they are viewed by agents, rather than by the associated "should" thoughts, we make it possible to defend the thesis that virtuous actions are dictated by non-hypothetical imperatives, without committing ourselves to the insane thesis that simply to say "You should . . ." to someone is enough to give him a reason acting; as if, when he protested "But why should I?", it was sufficient to reply "You just should, that's all".
When we explain an action in terms of the agent's reasons, we credit him with psychological states given which we can see how doing what he did, or attempted, would have appeared to him in some favorable light. A full specification of a reason must make clear how the reason was capable of motivating; it must contain enough to reveal the favorable light in which the agent saw his projected action. We tend to assume that this is effected, quite generally, by the inclusion of a desire. (Of course a reason that includes a desire can be specified elliptically, when the desire is obvious enough not to need mentioning; as when we explain someone's taking an umbrella in terms of his belief that it is likely to rain.) However, it seems to be false that the motivating power of all reasons derives from their including desires.
Suppose, for instance, that we explain a person's performance of a certain action by crediting him with awareness of some fact that makes it likely (in his view) that acting in that way will be conducive to his interest. Adverting to his view of the facts may suffice, on its own, to show us the favorable light in which his action appeared to him. No doubt we credit him with an appropriate desire, perhaps for his own future happiness. But the commitment to ascribe such a desire is simply consequential on our taking him to act as he does for the reason we cite; the desire does not function as an independent extra component in a full specification of his reason, hitherto omitted by an understandable ellipsis of the obvious, but strictly necessary in order to show how it is that the reason can motivate him. Properly understood, his belief does that on its own. Thomas Nagel (in The Possibility of Altruism, pp. 29-30) puts the point like this:
That I have the appropriate desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me; if the likelihood that an act will promote my future happiness motivates me to perform it now, then it is appropriate to ascribe to me a desire for my own future happiness. But nothing follows about the role of the desire as a condition contributing to the motivational efficacy of those considerations.
I want to agree that one need not manifest irrationality in failing to see that one has reason to act as morality requires, but I want to query whether it follows that moral requirements are only hypothetical imperatives.
Why should the reasons that move people to virtuous behavior not be similar to the reasons that move them to prudent behavior? To explain an action we regard as virtuous, we typically formulate a more or less complex characterization of the action's circumstances as we take the agent to have conceived them. Why should it not be the case, here too, that the agent's conception of the situation, properly understood, suffices to show us the favorable light in which his action appeared to him?
If we credit him with a suitable desire, then, as before, that need be no more than a consequence of the fact that we take his conception of the circumstances to have been his reason for acting as he did; the desire need not function as an independent component in the explanation, needed in order to account for the capacity of the cited reason to influence the agent's will.
There may seem to be a difficulty: might not another person have exactly the same conception of the circumstances, but see no reason to act as the virtuous person does? If so, adverting to that conception of the situation cannot, after all, suffice to show us the favorable light in which the virtuous person saw his action. Our specification of his reason must, after all, have been elliptical; a full specification would need to add an extra psychological state to account for the action's attractiveness to him in particular, namely and surely, a desire.
We can evade this argument by denying its premise: that is, by taking a special view of the virtuous person's conception of the circumstances, according to which it cannot be shared by someone who sees no reason to act as the virtuous person does.
This may seem problematic. But if one concedes that a conception of the facts can constitute the whole of a reason for prudent behavior, one is not at liberty to object to the very idea that a view of how things are might not need supplementing with a desire in order to reveal the favorable light in which someone saw some action; and a view with that property surely cannot be shared by someone who sees no reason to act in the way in question. If we allow this for prudence, why should we not allow it for morality too?
Suppose someone was incapable of seeing how a fact about the likely effect of an action on his own future could, on its own, constitute a reason for the action. On some suitable occasion, he might be unmoved by such a fact. It would not be wrong to say that an ordinarily prudent person, in parallel circumstances, would differ from him in having a certain desire. But according to the concession, the desire is not a further component, over and above the prudent person's conception of the likely effects of his action on his own future, in the explanation of his prudent behavior. It is not that the two people share a certain neutral conception of the facts, but differ in that one, but not the other, has an independent desire as well, which combines with that neutral conception of the facts to cast a favorable light on his acting in a certain way. The desire is ascribable to the prudent person simply in recognition of the fact that his conception of the likely effects of his action on his own future by itself casts a favorable light on his acting as he does. So the admitted difference in respect of desire should be explicable, like the difference in respect of action, in terms of a more fundamental difference in respect of how they conceive the facts.
It is not clear that we really can make sense of the idea of someone who is otherwise rational but cannot see how facts about his future can, by themselves, constitute reasons for him to act in various ways. But to the extent to which the idea does make sense, it seems to be on just the lines we should expect: we picture him as someone with an idiosyncratic view of what it is for a fact to concern his own future. Perhaps he thinks of the person involved in such a fact as some future person, connected with the one who is currently deliberating by links of continuity and resemblance that are too tenuous, in his view, for it to be anything but arbitrary for the current deliberator to pay special attention to that future person's welfare.
What is special about a prudent person is a different understanding of what it is for a fact to concern his own future. He sees things otherwise in the relevant area; and we comprehend his prudent behavior by comprehending the relevant fragment of his worldview, not by appealing to the desire that is admittedly ascribable to him. That is to be understood, no less than the behaviour is, in terms of the worldview.
Why should it not be similar with explanations of virtuous behavior in terms of the virtuous person's conceptions of situations in which he acts?
So far I have responded only ad hominem to qualms about the idea that a conception of how things are might constitute, on its own, a reason for virtuous action. That is how it was conceded to be with prudential reasons, and there is no obvious argument that the possibility, once granted, should be restricted to prudential considerations. But presumably someone with sufficiently strong doubts about the case of morality will be encouraged to doubt the whole idea, and suppose that it cannot be so even with prudential reasons; he will not be impressed by the thought that, if granted there, the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand for the case of morality.
I suppose the general doubt is on these lines. A view of how things are is a state or disposition of one's cognitive equipment. But the psychological states we are considering are to suffice, on their own, to show how certain actions appeared in a favorable light. That requires that their possession entails a disposition of the possessor's will. And will and belief - the appetitive and the cognitive - are distinct existences; so a state that presents itself as cognitive but entails an appetitive state must be, after all, only impurely cognitive, and contain the appetitive state as a part. If such a state strikes its possessor as cognitive, that is because he is projecting his states of will on to the world (a case of the mind's propensity to spread itself upon objects).
The appetitive state should be capable in principle of being analyzed out, leaving a neutrally cognitive residue. Thus where it appears that a conception of how things are exhausts an agent's reason for acting in a certain way, an analyzed and less misleading formulation of the reason will be bipartite: it will specify, first, a neutral conception of the facts, available equally to someone who sees no reason to act in the way in question, and second, a desire, which combines with that conception of the facts to make the action attractive to its possessor.
This paper is primarily addressed to those who are vulnerable to the ad hominem argument. In their view, since the line of thought I have just sketched falsifies the workings of prudential explanations of behavior, it simply cannot be generally right. In the rest of this section I shall make some remarks, not ad hominem, about the general issue; but a proper discussion is impossible here.
There is room for skepticism about whether it is acceptable to discount the appearances in the way the objection urges. Explanation of behavior by reasons purports to show the favorable light in which an agent saw his action. If it strikes an agent that his reason for acting as he does consists entirely in his conception of the circumstances in which he acts, then an explanation that insists on analyzing that seemingly cognitive state into a less problematically cognitive state combined with a separate desire, while it will show the action as attractive from the standpoint of the psychological states it cites, is not obviously guaranteed to get the favorable light right. If one accepts an explanation of the analyzing sort, one will not be baffled by inability to find any point one can take the agent to have seen in behaving as he did; but what leaves one unpuzzled is not thereby shown to be a correct explanation.
The analysis will nevertheless seem compulsory, if the objection seems irresistible. If the world is, in itself, motivationally inert, and is also the proper province of cognitive equipment, it is inescapable that a strictly cognitive state-a conception of how things are, properly so called--cannot constitute the whole of a reason for acting. But the idea of the world as motivationally inert is not an independent hard datum. It is simply the metaphysical counterpart of the thesis that states of will and cognitive states are distinct existences, which is exactly what is in question.
If a conception of a set of circumstances can suffice on its own to explain an action, then the world view it exemplifies is certainly not the kind of thing that could be established by the methods of the natural sciences. But the notion of the world, or how things are, that is appropriate in this context is a metaphysical notion, not a scientific one: worldviews richer than that of science are not scientific, but not on that account unscientific (a term of opprobrium for answers other than those of science to science's questions). To query their status as world views on the ground of their not being scientific is to be motivated not by science but by scientism.
It is not to be denied that behavior that is in fact virtuous can in some cases be found unsurprising through being what one would expect anyway, given an acceptably ascribed desire that is independently intelligible. That is why sheer bafflement at virtuous behavior in general is very difficult to imagine. At some points even the rankest outsider would be able to attain a measure of comprehension of virtuous actions in terms of desires that people just naturally have: for instance the desire that people related to them in various ways should not suffer. Such coincidences constitute possible points of entry for an outsider trying to work his way into appreciation of a moral outlook. Similarly, they perhaps partly explain how it is possible to acquire a moral outlook of one's own (not the same topic, since one can understand a moral outlook without sharing it).
What is questionable is whether there need always be an independently intelligible desire to whose fulfillment a virtuous action; if rational at all, can be seen as conducive.
Charitable behavior aims at an end, namely the good of others. (See "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives", p. 165.) It does not follow that a full specification of the agent's reason for a charitable act would need to add a desire to his conception of the circumstances in which he acted. For prudent behavior equally aims at an end, namely one's own future happiness. The desire for the good of others is related to charity as the desire for one's own future happiness is related to prudence; not, then, as a needed extra ingredient in formulations of reasons for acting. Rather, the desire is ascribed, as in the prudential case, simply in recognition of the fact that a charitable person's special way of conceiving situations by itself casts a favorable light on charitable actions. Of course a desire ascribed in this purely consequential way is not independently intelligible.
It does not seem plausible that any purely natural fellow-feeling or benevolence, unmediated by the special ways of seeing situations that are characteristic of charity as it is thought of above, would issue in behavior that exactly matched that of a charitable person; the objects of a purely natural benevolence could not be guaranteed to coincide in all cases with the good of others as a possessor of the virtue would conceive it. It seems still less plausible that virtuous behavior in general could be duplicated by means of the outcomes of independently intelligible desires.
Mrs. Foot sometimes seems to suggest that if someone acts in a way he takes to be morally required, and his behavior cannot be shown to be rational as a case of conformity to a hypothetical imperative, then he must be blindly obeying an inculcated code. (See "Reasons for Action and Desires", p. 155: "Perhaps we have been bewitched by the idea that we just do have reason to obey this part of our moral code". She does not endorse this thought, which is about honesty; but she seems to put it forward as the sole alternative to the thought that we should explain honest behavior in terms of desires.)
But if we deny that virtuous behavior can always be explained as the outcome of independently intelligible desires, we do not thereby commit ourselves to its being mere obedience to a code. There need be no possibility of reducing virtuous behavior to rules. In moral upbringing what one learns is not to behave in conformity with rules of conduct, but to see situations in a special light, as constituting reasons for acting; this perceptual capacity, once acquired, can be exercised in complex novel circumstances, not necessarily capable of being foreseen and legislated for by a codifier of the conduct required by virtue, however wise and thoughtful he might be.
On this view, independently intelligible desires will take an outsider only some of the distance towards full understanding of virtuous behavior. In the first place, there will be some actions that simply cannot be explained as the outcomes of such desires. Second, if one sticks with explanations in terms of independently intelligible desires at the points of entry, where such explanations do make actions nuzzling, one will not have the full picture even of those actions: if they manifest a virtuous person's distinctive way of seeing things, they must be explicable also in terms of exercises of that perceptual capacity, which need no supplementing with desires to yield full specifications of reasons. (This need not imply that the initial explanations, at the points of entry, were wrong. Someone can have two separate reasons for what he does; perhaps he can do it for both of them. If so, we need not suppose-as Kant perhaps did-that an action's being the outcome of a natural desire disqualifies it as a manifestation of virtue.)
S4 suggests that if someone could not see the force of prudential considerations, one might appropriately protest: "You don't know what it means for a fact to concern your future." Rather similarly, in urging behavior one takes to be morally required, one finds oneself saying things like this: "You don't know what it means that someone is shy and sensitive." Conveying what a circumstance means, in this loaded sense, is getting someone to see it in the special way in which a virtuous person would see it.
In the attempt to do so, one exploits contrivances similar to those one exploits in other areas where the task is to back up the injunction "See it like this": helpful juxtapositions of cases, descriptions with carefully chosen terms and carefully placed emphasis, and the like. (Compare, for instance, what one might do and say to someone who says "Jazz sounds to me like a mess, a mere welter of uncoordinated noise".) No such contrivances can be guaranteed success, in the sense that failure would show irrationality on the part of the audience. That, together with the importance of rhetorical skills to their successful deployment, sets them apart from the sorts of thing we typically regard as paradigms of argument. But these seem insufficient grounds for concluding that they are appeals to passion as opposed to reason: for concluding that "See it like this" is really a covert invitation to feel, quite over and above one's view of the facts, a desire that will combine with one's belief to recommend acting in the appropriate way.
Failure to see what a circumstance means, in the loaded sense, is of course compatible with competence, by all ordinary tests, with the language used to describe the circumstance; that brings out how loaded the notion of meaning involved in the protest is. Notice that, as the example of "shy and sensitive" illustrates, the language used to express a special reason-constituting conception of a situation need not be explicitly evaluative.
The question "Why should I conform to the dictates of morality?" is most naturally understood as asking for an extra-moral motivation that will be gratified by virtuous behavior. So understood, the question has no answer. What may happen is that someone is brought to see things as a virtuous person does, and so stops feeling the need to ask it. Situation by situation, he knows why he should behave in the relevant ways; but what he now has is a set of answers to a different interpretation of the question
We have, then, an apparent contrast between two ways in which an agent's view of how things are can function in explaining his actions. In one, exemplified by the case of taking one's umbrella (53), the agent's belief about how things are combines with an independently intelligible desire to represent the action as a good thing from the agent's point of view. In the other, a conception of how things are suffices on its own to show us the favourable light in which the action appeared. Beliefs about one's future well-being standardly operate in the second way, according to the concession of S3; so, according to the suggestion I am making in this paper, do moral reasons.
With reasons that function in the second way, it is not false that they weigh with people only if they have a certain desire. But that is just because the ascription of the desire in question follows from the fact that the reasons weigh as they do. It would be wrong to infer that the conceptions of situations that constitute the reasons are available equally to people who are not swayed by them, and weigh with those who are swayed only contingently on their possession of an independent desire. That would be to assimilate the second kind of reason to the first. To preserve the distinction, we should say that the relevant conceptions are not so much as possessed except by those whose wills are influenced appropriately. Their status as reasons is hypothetical only in this truistic sense: they sway only those who have them.
When we envisaged a person immune to the force of prudential considerations, we supposed that he might have an idiosyncratic understanding of what it was for a fact to concern his own future (S4). Particular facts about his own future, by themselves, would leave him cold. Now we might imagine equipping him with a separate desire, for the welfare of the future person he takes to be involved in the relevant facts. Then his conception of those facts might move him to action, with their influence conditional on his possession of that extra desire. But the resulting behavior, only hypothetically called for by his conception of the facts, would match ordinary prudent behavior only externally. It would be wrong to conclude that ordinary prudent behavior is likewise only hypothetically commanded.
Similarly, someone who lacks a virtuous person's distinctive view of a situation might perhaps be artificially induced into a simulacrum of a virtuous action by equipping him with an independent desire. His conception of the situation would then be influencing his will hypothetically. But it would be wrong to conclude that a virtuous person's actions are likewise only hypothetically commanded by his conceptions of such situations. (S6 suggests, anyway, a special difficulty about the idea that virtuous behavior might be thus artificially duplicated across the board.)
According to this position, then, a failure to see reason to act virtuously stems, not from the lack of a desire on which the rational influence of moral requirements is conditional, but from the lack of a distinctive way of seeing situations. If that perceptual capacity is possessed and exercised, it yields non-hypothetical reasons for acting. Now the lack of a perceptual capacity, or failure to exercise it, need show no irrationality. (It might be argued that not to have the relevant conception of one's own future, in the prudential case, would be irrational; but a parallel argument in the moral case would lack plausibility.) Thus we can grant Mrs. Foot's premise-that it is possible without irrationality to fail to see reason to act as morality requires-without granting her conclusion-that moral requirements exert a rational influence on the will only hypothetically.
The gap opens because we have undermined the assumption that a consideration can exert a rational influence on a will otherwise than hypothetically only if it is recognizable as a requirement by all rational people.
Mrs. Foot thought her opponents would differentiate moral requirements from those of etiquette by claiming that moral requirements, unlike those of etiquette, are recognizable as requirements by all rational people; that is, that they are categorical imperatives in the sense stipulated by the assumption we have undermined. Obviously I am not here conforming to that expectation. In respect of not necessarily impressing any rational person, moral requirements and the requirements of etiquette are alike, and it is not my intention here to discuss in detail what makes them different. (Many actions performed for reasons of etiquette can be explained, in terms of bewitchment by a code. There may be a residue of actions not explicable in that way. It does not seem to me to be obviously absurd, or destructive of the point of any distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives, to suppose that such residual actions might be most revealingly explained in terms of non-hypothetically reason constituting conceptions of circumstances. One can attribute such conceptions to others without being compelled oneself; for one can appreciate how someone might see things a certain way without seeing them that way oneself.)
I have said nothing about where the line is to be drawn between hypothetical and non-hypothetical reasons for action. For purposes of exposition, I have assumed that when one explains taking an umbrella in terms of the agent's belief that it will probably rain, the reason specified needs supplementing with a desire. But it would not matter if someone insisted that what appears as a desire, in the most natural filling out of the reason, is actually better regarded as a cognitive state, a coloring of the agent's view of the world. If it is admitted that we can make sense of the idea of a reason of the second sort that I distinguished above, then there is content to the thesis that moral reasons are of that sort, even if it turns out that there are no reasons of the first sort.
Note that consequentially ascribed desires are indeed desires. Construing obedience to a categorical imperative as acting for a certain sort of reason, we can see the obedience as a case of doing what one wants. So subjection to categorical imperatives, even without the coincidences with natural desires that I mentioned in S6, need not be pictured as a grim servitude.
The strategy of this paper must raise the question whether I am treating prudential considerations as categorical imperatives. (It would be pleasant if Mrs. Foot could be represented as holding that prudential imperatives are categorical and moral imperatives hypothetical.) The answer depends on which of Kant's characterizations of hypothetical imperatives we have in mind.
On the one hand, I interpret the concession of S3 as implying this: a prudent person's conception of facts about his own future exerts an influence on his will in its own right, not contingently upon his possession of an independent desire.
On the other hand, Kant's hypothetical imperatives are supposed to "declare a possible action to be practically necessary as a means to the attainment of something else that one wills (or that one may will)".' And it is certainly true that prudential considerations typically recommend actions as means to ends distinct from themselves.
Are not moral imperatives sometimes equally hypothetical in the second sense? Kant was committed to denying that moral considerations can recommend an action as a means to an end distinct from itself, but the denial seems desperately implausible. Perhaps the idea that one has to exclude means-end reasons from the sphere of virtue can be explained on the following lines. From the concession of S3, we can see that if an action's rationality consists in its conduciveness to an end distinct from itself (the agent's future happiness, say), it does not follow that the willing of the distinct end is a desire intelligible independently of understanding the reason-constituting character of facts about such conduciveness. But though it does not follow, it would be natural to suppose it does. Kant's fundamental aim was to deny that the motivating capacity of moral considerations needs explaining from outside, in terms of desires that are not intrinsically moral-that is, to deny that moral requirements are hypothetical imperatives in the first sense. Given the natural error, he would think he had to deny that virtuous behavior is ever rational as a means to a distinct end-that is, to deny that moral requirements are ever hypothetical imperatives in the second sense.
My suggestion, so far, has been this: one cannot share a virtuous person's view of a situation in which it seems to him that virtue requires some action, but see no reason to act in that way. The following possibility is still open: one sees reason to act in that way, but takes the reason to be outweighed by a reason for acting in some other way. But part of the point of claiming that the requirements of virtue are categorical imperatives may lie in a rejection of that possibility.
The rejection might stem from the idea that the dictates of virtue always outweigh reasons for acting otherwise. But I believe a more interesting ground for it is the idea that the dictates of virtue, if properly appreciated, are not weighed with other reasons at all, not even on a scale that always tips on their side. If a situation in which virtue imposes a requirement is genuinely conceived as such, according to this view, then considerations that, in the absence of the requirement, would have constituted reasons for acting otherwise are silenced altogether-not overridden-by the requirement.
"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?" Obviously we are not meant to answer, "The profits are outweighed by counterbalancing losses". The intended answer is "Nothing". At that price, whatever one might achieve does not count as profit. Or, in the terminology of reasons: the attractions of whatever wickedness might bring do not constitute some reason for wickedness, which is, however, overridden by the reasons against it; rather, given that they are achieved by wickedness, those attractive outcomes do not count as reasons at all.
Aristotle's thoughts about continence, incontinence, and virtue involve thinking of the status of the requirements of virtue on those lines. Perhaps the requirements are not exactly moral requirements, since Aristotle's notion of virtue is perhaps not exactly a moral notion. But his view may nevertheless usefully illustrate the structure of the position that I described in S9, and help to explain the distinction between silencing and overriding.
For Aristotle, if one needs to overcome an inclination to act otherwise, in getting oneself to act temperately, then one's action manifests continence rather than the virtue of temperance. Readers are apt to be puzzled about how they are meant to think of the virtue. Is the temperate person's libido somehow peculiarly undemanding? Does his inclination to sleep with someone he ought not to sleep with evaporate under the impact of the thought that he would not enjoy it at all (why ever not, unless he is not quite human?); or under the impact of the thought that his enjoyment would be counterbalanced by pangs of remorse?
In fact the idea is on these lines. The temperate person need be no less prone to enjoy physical pleasure than anyone else. In suitable circumstances it will be true that he would enjoy some intemperate action that is available to him. In the absence of a requirement, the prospective enjoyment would constitute a reason for going ahead. But his clear perception of the requirement insulates the prospective enjoyment-of which, for a satisfying conception of the virtue, we should want him to have a vivid appreciation-from engaging his inclinations at all. Here and now, it does not count for him as any reason for acting in that way.
Virtues such as temperance and courage involve steadfastness in the face of characteristic sorts of temptation, and it can seem impossible to register that fact without regarding them as cases of continence. Insisting nevertheless on the distinction between virtue and continence yields a view of these virtues that has a certain sublimity. Their proper manifestation is renouncing, without struggle something that in the abstract one would value highly (physical pleasure, security of life and limb). The lack of struggle is ensured by keeping the attention firmly fixed on what Aristotle calls "the noble"; not by a weighing of attractions that leads to the conclusion that on balance the virtuous course is more desirable. (It is true that the competing course could not really satisfy a virtuous person. But that is not to say that he judges it on balance less desirable; it records a consequence of his conviction that in these circumstances the attractions of the competing course count for nothing.) Genuinely courageous behavior, on this view, combines a lively awareness of risk, and a normal valuation of life and health (see Nicomachean Ethics 3.9), with a sort of serenity; taking harm to be, by definition, what one has reason to avoid, we can see the serenity as based on the belief, paradoxical in juxtaposition with the valuing of life and health, that no harm can come to one by acting thus.
This view of virtue obviously involves a high degree of idealization; the best we usually encounter is to some degree tainted with continence. But in a view of what genuine virtue is, idealization is not something to be avoided or apologized for.
It is evident that this view of virtue makes incontinence problematic. The weak incontinent person must conceive the circumstances of his action in a way that, in some sense, matches the way a virtuous person would conceive them, since he knows he is not acting as virtue demands. But the virtuous person conceives the relevant sorts of situation in such a way that considerations that would otherwise be reasons for acting differently are silenced by the recognized requirement. If the incontinent person has such a conception, how can those considerations make themselves heard by his will, as they do? Obviously continence poses a parallel difficulty.
The way out is to attenuate the degree to which the continent or incontinent person's conception of a situation matches that of a virtuous person. Their inclinations are aroused, as the virtuous person's are not, by their awareness of competing attractions: a lively desire clouds or blurs the focus of their attention on "the noble".
Curiously enough, if we approach incontinence on these lines, we entirely disarm one difficulty that threatens it on other approaches. (I owe this thought to David Wiggins.) Suppose we think of the incontinent person as failing to act on a judgment "all things considered", in which the motivating potential of alternative actions is registered by his counting their attractions, suitably weighted, as reasons for acting in those ways. The judgment will have to be that those reasons are outweighed by the force of the reason for the virtuous action. But now it seems mysterious how one of those alternative motivations can take charge. Why is its ability to move one not exhausted by the weight it is pictured as bringing to the scale?
On the view I am describing, by contrast, the motivating potential of the competing attractions has not exerted any influence in forming the judgment that the person should have acted on-so that, as above, it might be expected to have used itself up there, and it is mysterious how it can still have energy to inject after it has been outweighed. The virtuous view of what should be done does not so much as take those attractions into account. So we can think of them as a potential source of motivating energy, not used up in the formation of the judgment. There can be a risk that the potential will be actualized, if the attractions are not insulated, by the clear perception of a silencing requirement, from engaging the inclinations.
A caveat. notice that the position is not that clear perception of any moral reason, however weak, silences any reasons of other sorts, however strong. The reasons that silence are those that mark out actions as required by virtue. There can be less exigent moral reasons, and as far as this position goes, they may be overridden.
In S 8 I left moral and prudential considerations not sharply distinguished in the manner of their influence on the will. But the view that those moral reasons that count as imposing requirements are special, in the way I described in S9 and illustrated in 510, restores a distinction. On this view, to conceive some relevant fact about one's future as an ordinarily prudent person would is not, after all, eo ipso to take oneself to have a reason for the prudent behavior that would normally be recommended by such a fact. If one is clearly aware of a moral requirement to behave differently, one will not take the prudential consideration as the reason it would otherwise be. (It is not plausible to suppose that perception of the moral requirement effects this by tampering with one's understanding of what it is for a fact to concern one's own future.) So prudential considerations, on this view, are hypothetical imperatives in a new sense: their rational influence on the will is conditional, not on a desire, but on the absence of a clearly grasped moral requirement to do something else. Moral requirements, by contrast, are not conditional at all: neither on desires nor on the absence of other reasons.
 Glossary]
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