In Our Time - Virtue

Episode Date: February 28, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of virtue. When Socrates asked the question ‘How should man live?’ Plato and Aristotle answered that man should live a life of virtue. Plato claimed there were four great virtues - Temperance, Justice, Prudence and Courage and the Christian Church added three more - Faith, Hope and Love. But where does the motivation for virtue come from? Do we need rules to tell us how to behave or can we rely on our feelings of compassion and empathy towards other human beings? Shakespeare’s Iago says “Virtue! A fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners. ” So is virtue a character trait possessed by some but not others? Is it derived from reason? Or does it flow from the innate sympathies of the human heart? For the last two thousand years philosophers have grappled with these ideas, but now in the twenty first century a modern reappraisal of virtue is taking the argument back to basics with Aristotle. With Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading; Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Roger Crisp, Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, when Socrates asked the question, How should man live? Plato and Aristotle answered that man should live a life of virtue.

Plato claimed there were four great virtues, temperance, justice, prudence and courage. And the Christian church added three more, faith, hope and love. But where does the motivation for virtue come from? Do we need rules to tell us how to behave, or can we rely on our feelings of compassion and empathy towards other human beings? Shakespeare's Yago said, Virtue a fig. It is in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners. So is virtue a character trait possessed by some, but not others? Is it derived from reason? Or does it flow from the innate sympathies of the human heart? For the last 2,000 years, philosophers have grappled with these ideas, but now in the 21st century a modern reappraisal of virtue is taking the argument back to the Greeks with Aristotle. With me to discuss virtue are the philosophers Galen Strausson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Miranda Fricker, lecturer in

in philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Roger Crisp, Euchar, a Uyro, fellow and tutoring philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford. Roger Crisp, Plato, as I understand it, believed in a set of cardinal virtues. What were they, and where did they come from? Well, the name of the cardinal virtues comes from the Latin word cardo, which means hinge. So the idea is that the other virtues somehow hinge on those cardinal virtues, the ones you mentioned, justice, wisdom, temperance and courage. And there are various positions on why those central virtues are thought to be central. One is that they're necessary for having the other virtues. Another might be that those four virtues are somehow involved in the exercise of the others.

And I think more plausibly the idea might be that those four virtues are concerned with certain central spheres of human life, which require the governance of reason. So I guess the spheres that I have in mind might be one's own life, which would be perhaps the concern of wisdom or prudence, the lives of others, which might be the concern of justice, the control of fear, which obviously a key emotion in human life, which would be the concern of courage,

and finally temperance, of course, would be concerned with the control of the appetites. Did these, as I understand it, these weren't thought up, as it were, by Plato, but somehow received by him. Well, where did they come from? Well, for him, yes, for him, it's almost certain they came from the thought of Socrates.

He probably picked up the idea from, as it were, Greek common sense. and Plato really adopted the same attitude towards them that Socrates did. I mean, Socrates actually questioned this particular set of virtues and approached them in the following way. He was trying to find out whether there was a hierarchy. And in fact, he thought there was in a very extreme way. He thought that really there was only one virtue.

That was the virtue of wisdom or knowledge. So really, he collapsed the cardinal virtues and all the virtues into one. making wisdom prominent. And that's really a strategy that runs through Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers about the virtues right through to Aquinas. Aristotle's notion, can you develop Aristotle's notion of magnanimousness, the great-souled person? Yes, I mean, magnanimity is the usual translation,

but it is perhaps better described as great-souledness. And here the idea is that the key virtue is a virtue of character. it requires you're having all the other virtues. And he calls it the crown of the virtues. And what I think is particularly interesting about it is that the main concern of the magnanimous person, he says, is honour. So already we see the importance of reputation

and the way you appear to other people emerging in thinking about the virtues. Miranda Frigger, Aristotle was a pragmatist, and he said that the way to find virtue is to apply the rule of the golden mean to individual situations. Can you develop that? Yes, certainly.

Aristotle's view of how we acquire the virtues was one that I think is still very plausible today. The thought is really that you learn to be good or learn to have a particular virtue, such as courage, through doing it. And he makes a comparison with the craft. So, for instance, if you're a carpenter, the way you learn to be a good carpenter

is by, so to speak, practicing being a good carpenter. you won't wind up as a good carpenter if you keep on practicing banging nails in wonkily, as it were. The way to cultivate a habit in you of banging nails in straight is by practicing doing just that. Certainly anyone who's learned a musical instrument knows that they mustn't practice the mistake, so to speak. In that sense, it remains very plausible. So here we have this notion of a sort of practical training or habituation into being virtuous and one or another kind. Now, his conception of what the virtuous characteristic was, and here, as always in speaking about the Greeks, one has to be a little careful.

We have a translation of virtue and no doubt that will do fine, but the Greek words areate, and very often it's thought that the better interpretation of translation of that is excellence and excellence of character and a well-entrenched excellence of character, so that it doesn't have any moralistic overtones that perhaps in the modern period it's come to have. So in the example of courage, which is, I think, an important one, One has the idea that courage is placed between two extreme entrenched characteristics. One will be cowardice at the one end and the other extreme will be something like foolhardiness.

And the mean or golden mean, as it's sometimes called, is where the virtue is situated. And in this case, we name that virtue courage. So the courageous person, as it were, may well go into battle and do some things which involve his being in great danger and so on. But he won't just go in willy-nilly in a fool-hardy manner, nor will he cower behind the rank. so to speak. So that's the idea of the mean. It's the midway point between two extremes of the characteristic. But one person's midway point would be another person's extreme, wouldn't it? Well, I mean, some people, like myself, would think it would be very foolhard, that a courageous man would think, well, this is mere courage. Well, it may be that people, there's room for

disagreement about exactly what sort of behaviours demonstrate the mean. But certainly for Aristotle, I think, the idea of... is that we have a common understanding of what the two extremes are and we have to locate the mean through the operation of a general notion of wisdom, as the notion that Roger pointed out. So for Aristotle too, wisdom is a very important factor in how we behave

and how we locate the means between different extremes. Where did Aristotle think that these judgments about how to behave came from? Did you think you were born with them? You've talked about habituation, practicing being good, practicing birds, you're like practicing the piano or practicing to be a carpenter?

Do you think they came from? To some extent they're in our nature, for sure, but his emphasis is always on training and habituation. So he thought they were for sure in our nature. You threw that away, but you think Aristotle thought that? Yes, yes. I think that would be a fair interpretation. Others may disagree,

but certainly one more reads the Nicomachean ethics, for instance, one finds there a great element, emphasis on the training of dispositions, so to speak, so presumably the dispositions were, as it were not conjured out of the ether. Galantz Rosson, there was this idea also of the unity of the virtues. Can you describe what that is and whether you think it holds? Can I sort of preface that with something else? The first thing I really want to say is that the word virtue nowadays has this sort of negative connotation as in, oh, she's really virtuous. I think it's very important just we have to completely put that aside

because it's seen as a clearly as a totally positive thing in the philosophical tradition that we're talking about now. Now, the unity of virtues, I'm inclined to defer that to Roger because that's a matter of ancient Greek thought. But one, well, here's an illustration. The four cardinal virtues, temperate justice, practical wisdom and courage, a lot of people thought that you either had all of them or you couldn't have any one without having the others

so that, for example, a bad man cannot be courageous. So that's the sense in which they thought to hang together necessarily. I disagree with that. It seems to be quite clear that a very wicked man could be very brave indeed. But I think people who believe in the unity of the virtues will say, well, no, courage and it just isn't courage in him, and what this apparent bravery. And so they hang together in that sense.

I'm sorry to take a huge jump. Do you want to come back on that for a second, Roger? Before I jump ahead with Gal and to the... Well, just briefly, I think there are really two conceptions of the unity of the virtues. The strong conception is the Socratic conception that I mentioned, according to which there really is only one virtue, and that's knowledge. A weaker version is the version which says, if you have any one virtue, you must have the lot.

and that's what you find in Aristotle. And I'm with Galen, really, that it doesn't seem that plausible, but there is an argument for it. And it relies on the idea that if you have a virtue, you must get it right. If it looks as if you have, say, the virtue of generosity because you go around giving away, you know, lots of money to the right people at the right times and so on. And then you come into a situation where to exercise that virtue

requires the exercise of courage. If you don't have courage, you're not going to do it. So for Aristotle, as for Plato, virtue requires getting it right. And that really requires having all the virtues. Can we move to the way that the Greek ideas clashed with, the Christian ideas? Is there anything that the Christians and the Greeks had in common about what constituted virtue of Garland? Well, yes, there is. I guess there's two main things to say.

One is that they had a different list, not that overlapping, but significantly different lists of what were the virtues. And the other thing is that they had completely different reasons were given for being virtuous. So the question, well, I'm going to indulge slightly in caricature, but let's imagine the question, why should I be virtuous? Here's the Aristotelian caricature. I don't know how much of a character it is, but one of the things at least that Aristotle might say is that you should be. virtuous because it's in your interest to be. Because if you are, then you will flourish. You have a happy life, a flourishing life in the sense of eudaimonia, which is the Greek term for

flourishing. He might, I think the other thing you'll do is you will be a good example of a human being. And I think there's even a slight, an aesthetic element in that, the project of trying to be a very good example of a human being. Obviously, if you are virtuous, this will mean that you have, you treat other people well as well, so that it will also affect your relations with others, but there is a fundamental sense in which it's a project of self-improvement and self-perfection. And if you ask, so that's the Greek aristotelian idea

of why you should be virtuous. If you ask a Christian why one should be virtuous, I think it has to, the first answer has to be to do with serving God or something like that. and the second thing to say about the Christian list as opposed to the Greek list is it's much more other-directed. You're thinking it's much more concerned with your relations with others. So you have kindness and benevolence, neither of which feature on the Greek list,

mercy, forgiveness, and so on. Self-sacrifice, for instance, as well. Yes. And another way perhaps of getting a strong contrast is to say, One of the virtues on the Christian list is sadness in the old sense, which the Torsarian sense, which means constancy, patience, resignation, submission, submission to the will of God, and so on. And that would have been completely alien, I think, to Aristotle and, in fact, all the Greeks.

Aquinas, as I understand it, in the 13th century, attempted to synthesize these two philosophers in his summer theology. How successful was that? What I'd like to say first is that sometimes it's thought that he was the first to do that, and that isn't the case, because I believe that St. Ambrose in the 4th century AD was already trying to do something like that. How successful was he? Well, he made a very good job of it. One thing you might say is that he internalised the four cardinal virtues.

So, for example, courage, which really was partly to do with. with physical valor in the Greek time. Courage becomes reasons perseverance in the face of contrary, irascible passions. So it's really your internal struggle against your passions. Practical wisdom turns into the word prudence, which somehow seems to diminish it in my view. But I guess prudence is meant to have a pretty wide reading there.

Practical wisdom for him is just a life in accordance with reason. So I suppose in a way that's cognitive and connects up with the Socratic notion. So it's knowledge that's virtue. Let me just quickly say the other two. Temperance, that again is reasons restraint of your self-serving passions. And which is what I missed out. Oh, yes, justice. That would be reasons, governance of your relations with others in spite of your selfish impulses.

So it's all sort of internalized. and moralized. Do you get a feeling that he set up a situation which went on for many centuries but was fundamentally, as Nietzsche said much later, there's a complete opposition between Greek and Christian ideas of morality and despite his extraordinary cleverness and so on and so forth, the opposition remained, and it was a false attempt.

It was never going to succeed. Yes, I don't know how influential he was, but also I think there are just too many strands in Christianity for to say that he tried to, that this thing failed and it sort of, well, as you know, Alastair McIntyre thinks that we now, we inherited this completely contradictory tradition. But you can also find in the Christian tradition ideals of virtue, and I'm thinking of St. Augustine,

who famously said, only love and then do what you will. So he had the idea that. that if you had this, if you had the virtue of love, then you could just, everything could just flow from your character, and you wouldn't have to be obeying rules and principles and commands at all. So there's this tradition which has quite separate from Aquinas. Briefly, Roger Chris, what do you think about, flowed from Aquinas? Well, I think I'd really go along with everything that Galen has said there.

There's a further aspect of Aquinas, which is rather interesting, which links up with what Miranda said about how Aristotle thought that we acquired the virtues. He did think that we acquired the virtues through training and habituation. But when Aquinas bolts on the three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity, so that we now have, as it were, seven cardinal virtues, it turns out that you don't get those through training, you get them through grace, which raises all sorts of questions about how reasonability is to blame somebody for not having those virtues.

And those virtues clearly are relevant to life as a pilgrimage on earth towards heavenly bliss. Moranica, I'm sorry about these leaps, but there you go. A hume said that morality is determined by sentiment. So how did he perceive virtue? What is he saying there? Yes. Could I just say one brief thing to supplement, something Galen said.

I agree absolutely with the contrast that he drew between ancient and Christian thought. Just the point about the motivation for being good is a very interesting one. And of course the thought that, as well, there's a somehow distal motivation, or overriding motivation for being good that is flourishing in the distance, as it were,

doesn't mean as sometimes people think it does when they first read this stuff, that there must be as a way, immediate motivation. Certainly when you teach undergraduates, people often think that you're being good in order to be happy, which would be a different idea. And I think Galen's point is that, as it were, the overriding explanation for why it's good to be virtuous is that, as it were, ultimately, it leads to a flourishing and happy life. But that doesn't mean that in the process of habituation that I was describing, what you're learning is, as it were, how best to make yourself happy in some more

immediate sense, what you're learning is how to enjoy being good. So as it were, the fully virtuous person who's fully internalised these attitudes will find that he or she is made happy by acting that way and enjoys them. Whereas a less than fully virtuous person, some who's on the road to having had the full training, so to speak, is doing their best to emulate the virtues but won't yet have this feeling of fully enjoying them. So it's part of the Aristelian idea of habituation or training that you're learning to enjoy, learning to gain happiness from being good. So I know it's just as it were supplementing what Galen said on that score.

Yes, so you work pretty hard and you may not be enjoying yourself very much, but then the phrase is, virtue is its own reward. It's actually good for you too. It makes you happy in your life. Did Hume take the argument on in a different direction then? Yes, well, in Hume, I mean... How did he perceive virtue of it? He had a very specific theory of virtues in a certain sense.

He made a distinction between natural virtues and artificial virtues. Now, for Hume, natural virtues are those dispositions or sort of praiseworthy character traits, which we human beings naturally have. It was a sort of quasi-anthropological claim, as it were. So in particular, the love of children, sympathy with one's fellow man, pity for the unfortunate. These things he thought that other things being equal were built into human nature, so to speak. The artificial virtues, on the other hand, are more an artifact of social life. So the artificial virtues that he mentions, for instance, are respect for promises and respect for private property.

And clearly those are semi-institutional virtues. I mean, you could have a society where promise keeping wasn't quite the institution as we know it and where there wasn't private property in the sense that capitalist societies are used to there being, private property. So they're more contingent, if you like, and more, as I'd like to say, though, this isn't a very humian way of putting it more constructed. So that was his view and his idea was that at the bottom of one's ethical outlook and what it takes to be virtuous is a fundamental human capacity for sympathy, sympathy with one's fellow man and especially fellow man's suffering. And from that flow, yes, then from that flows our capacity for these other virtues. And in particular,

I mean, picking up on the Aristotelian notion of training, it's rather different in Hume, but Hume has got a social conception of the virtues, it seems to me, and what it takes to learn to be good, in that he cites, for instance, how one person cares about getting respect from another person and that these relations of caring for the other's respect are reciprocal. And so through these social relations, so to speak,

we all come to care about being regarded as virtuous. And the whole sort of system pulls itself up by its boots, straps from this initial starting point of sympathy. Which is given approbation in a way? Yes. Yes. Though I wouldn't like to present that as a just definition, as it were.

I think that's absolutely dead right because, I mean, Hume's, Hume really had the first secular modern ethics of virtue, and I think it does come exactly out of that idea of approbation. Approbation, which one finds in Shafsbury. I mean, Shafsbury said the virtuous action

is the one that's done from a motive we approve of. Hutchison then goes on to say, well, the motive we approve of is benevolence. And Hume just takes that and runs with it. And what's particularly interesting about it, I think, is that Hume was really beginning there the modern tradition of utilitarianism, the idea that we should produce the greatest good, which is these days seen very much as in opposition to an ethics of virtue. So in fact we see there the tradition of utilitarianism coming out of a virtue, the virtue of benevolence. Can we, as it were, take a sidestep here, Gaelus, wasn't it? Hume believe in unselfish behaviour.

Can we, is it any way that we can put a, bring Darwin into that argument? Because did Darwin distort that idea so massively? That's a large issue, but... They all are, I'm afraid. Yes. One of the problems I've gone on this programme. We battle on Using the four guns

Yeah I mean I think the first thing to do is The first thing to do would be You need to put human context to some extent And the crucial context is that His predecessor Hobbs Because Hobbs held that human beings I thought I was hopping Hobbs

Because I was looking at the clock It's all right And brilliant Hobbs You can go from Hobbs to Darwin and lost lastly We can because Hobbs thought that we were all Only acted in our self-interest A war with each other, really. I mean, I sometimes think that he was clinically paranoid,

Hobbes, because he had this view of the war of every man against every man. And basically, all that Hume and another contemporary Bishop Butler did was to say that's just empirically false. Human beings do have these feelings of sympathy for others and benevolence. Just a fact about how we are that Hobbs completely got wrong. Now, you asked about Darwin. You could say that Darwinism was a, originally seen as it were the proof of that Hobbes was right after all

because, you know, it's a theory about how there's a struggle of survival for survival and everybody's out for themselves. But actually you can show how moral motives arise even within the framework of theory of evolution. I don't know if you want me to try to do that. Take a bit of time. Well, if it gets to be too long, I'll wave my hands. It's clearly a real problem.

problem since it seems that the best thing to do in order to survive and reproduce is to be totally out for yourself all the time. But there is a story which shows how sort of real virtue or niceness can arise even in those circumstances. And it arises, if you like, from self-interest and deception. I'll try and I could try and tell one of those just so stories that you probably heard of this. People like to tell. So here's a brief story. Suppose that the potential advantages of cooperation with others are great, which they are for us. So it seems that your best bet from the point of view of self-interest is to cooperate with others when it benefits you and to cheat on them when they call in the favour.

So that's fine. You should be doing very well, getting the benefits of other people's cooperation and they're not repaying them. It's fine until those you exploit get good at detecting cheats. This is what it's called an arms race. For now they can and they will. will aim to enter into cooperative relations only with those whom they consent not to be cheats. So they'll shut you out from the benefits of cooperation. So you need to deceive them into thinking you're honest in order to continue to participate in the benefits of cooperation. But they're increasingly hard to fool. And in the end, the most reliable and economical way to deceive them is to deceive yourself.

But by far the most reliable and economical way to deceive yourself is actually to have the feeling of commitment to honest, operation, but then it's a real feeling. But you cheated yourself into a real feeling. Yeah, no, but this, yes, exactly. It is a kind of self-deception. The self-deception turns into sincerity, if you self-deceiving up. I think our first reaction to that is to think, well, then it isn't a real moral motive. But I think that's wrong.

It isn't less valuable or real because it grew originally out of self-interest and deception. That would be like saying that diamonds are really coal, or, you know, that a rose that grows on a dung, isn't as beautiful as a rose that grows in a golden pot. They really are genuinely felt desire to cooperate, loyalty, fidelity and so on. They have this curious ancestry, but it doesn't mean they aren't what they seem to be. They really are. It's a very interesting question, though, how far the origins of something can be undermining to it when you discover them. I mean, it may not be that, as it were, the mere fact of it's having this kind of dunghill history

or history of self-deception is enough to somehow do. you value it. And yet when the person who has these feelings discovers that she's only got them because of this original self-deception, what's her response, is a rational response to then rethink or just to stay with them. And this is something we find in Nietzsche. I don't want to jump

ahead too much. I think you must jump where you want now. All rules are off. I'll jump to Nietzsche. I mean, one place to jump is back to Hume. Because Hume has a very similar story, particularly about the artificial virtue of justice. It really

arises out of self-interest. And what happens is it arises out of self-interest, but because you're naturally benevolent, you start to see the social value in justice and takes on a beauty of its own. And I think that's not an implausible psychology, actually. Yes, absolutely. And not one that you'd have thought really ought to undermine the current psychology. One could perfectly well discover that that was the origin of one's benevolent feelings without, as it were, feeling one ought to then discard them. But I think in the Nietzsche in case, I mean the story, usually thought to be a debunking story that Nietzsche tells. It's not meant to be not evolutionary for sure, and it's not clear whether it's exactly strictly historical,

but he calls it a genealogy of morals. So one's looking at the origin of moral concepts, particularly Christian moral concepts, are good and evil, and so on. And he says there that, as it were, at the heart of Christian morality, there's a great big, big, fat life. which is that, roughly speaking, the Christian idea is one of rejecting the will to power and in favour of an idea of justice and, as it were, the idea that meekness and gentleness is laudable. And they, according to nature, fabricate the idea of an afterlife where those who have been meek in this world, willers who are gained their just deserts in heaven, etc. And the idea is that all this is owing to a rejection of the will to power

and an embracing of some other kind of justice, whereas Nietzsche thinks that actually the true motivation is itself a will to power on the part of those who peddle the Christian doctrine, because really the motivation is just frustration at powerlessness and a kind of will therefore to find some consoling myth in the notion of justice and the afterlife and so on, to make them feel better while they're here. So in fact, they've outwilled to power,

even those who would otherwise have embraced the idea that you can just be out for what you can get. So in a strange sense, he comes to admire Christian morality for outdoing its opponents, even on their own terms. But there it does seem to me that if a Christian or someone dedicated to Christian-style notions of good and evil came to believe this Nietzschean story, it would shake one somewhat if you came to believe.

You would start to think, well, actually, that's quite a dutchian. young hill we're looking out there, as it were. The rose isn't looking so good now. Can I switch you again. Roger Chris, Kant's position on virtue seems to me to be, in contrast to Hugh, because he believed sentiment should be removed

and moral decisions should be based strictly on reason and what he ended up with the idea of the categorical imperative. Could you develop that for us or unravel that of it? Well, I mean, as I see it, Kant's ethics really came out of his metaphysics, that is, out of the way he saw the world. and he saw the world, the world that surrounds us, essentially is determined. In other words, all our passions and sentiments are not our responsibility. They just arise in us.

So they can't have any moral value. If you perform some benevolence action, well, that might be nice, but you don't deserve any moral credit because it's something that just happened. We do know, he says, that people can do morally valuable things. So that means that there must be another aspect to our nature, what he calls the numinal self, which in some way can enable us to act freely, rationally and morally in this world, in a sense,

so there's in a sense of fundamental contradiction which will never understand between determinism and freedom at the heart of Kentian metaphysics. But essentially the idea is that the sentiments really can't have any genuine moral value because they're not our responsibility. So what was his categorical imperative then? Well, the categorical imperative is a law that binds all rational beings.

If you're a rational being, you want to live according to the laws of reason. So when you construct an argument, you want to follow the laws of logic. When you act, you want to follow the laws of practice. And the categorical imperative for Kant is, in a sense, a purely formal notion. And it says that what you've got to do is act only on principles that any rational being would act upon in the same situation that you're in. And in a sense, it's rather coming out of the idea of the golden rule, the idea that you have to put yourself into other people's positions

and see whether they can accept what you're doing. Goelless Rosson, does this mean that if you do something because you want to do it, just if you give some money to somebody who looks at if they need some money or act in a friendly manner to someone, because you feel like it. This has got no value. The value is if you do it because you know it is your duty to do it. I'm hesitant. I mean, I believe that's my understanding of Kant,

but I believe some people are trying to prove that it's not that simple. Yes, the idea is that if you do a very kind act, just because it flows out of your virtuous disposition, your natural benevolence, it has no moral worth at all, as Roger said. It only has moral worth if you do it because it's your duty. It must be duties for duty. for duty's sake is the only thing that has moral worth. That doesn't mean, of course, that it has no value at all,

but it doesn't have this distinctive kind of value that Kant's on about in, as a were, morality, this special thing that he thinks can be isolated off from other sorts of motivations we may have that may have a valuable part in human lives in friendship and so on. It's not that Kant, as it were, didn't value friendship, but he didn't think that, for instance, a motivation of Frenchable love could lead to an act which had this distinctive kind of value, moral value.

And there's a real contrast there between Aristotle and Kant, For Aristotle, the best kind of person to be is the moral saint. That is the person who has the right sentiments, the right passions, the right desires, and just enjoys doing the right thing. There's no struggle. Whereas for Kant, the ideal moral agent is the moral hero. The person who's really tempted to do something nasty, but manages to resist because it's their duty.

Yes, that's what Kant says that the value of the act shines forth more brightly in those circumstances where the agent is as it were torn, that succeeds in doing the right dutiful thing after all. Right. I mean, there are these two completely opposed models of what it is to be virtuous. One is where it just flows. Basically, you just do what you want because you're virtuous and so everything comes out right.

I have your character. So that's effortless. It's an effortlessness. Whereas the model of... The well-trained character, yeah. The model of achieved virtue is completely effortless. And then the model of virtue is a struggle. And Aristotle doesn't care too much about whether it's your responsibility

that you have this character. So what matters is that you have it, which I think is rather Galen's position. Whereas Kant seems obsessed with the idea that you've got to be able to claim, this is my work. Somebody tried to partly rescue Kant, I think, by saying, well, it's all right if you do want to do it. It's not actually as long as, I don't know whether it's as long as you would have done it any way up because it was your duty, or whether it actually has to be that you did do it because it was your duty,

although you also wanted to do it. Yes, I mean quite what the question is. the psychology of what one's motivation is can get horribly complicated. But to be fair to Camden, he does say very explicitly that it's a good thing. There's a place for emotions and relationships which are conducive to people doing dutiful acts. That's good insofar as it makes it easy to do the right thing. And that says it were good for society. But if you're actually really trying to localise and identify the particular motivation

that is the origin of moral worth, then it's easiest to locate that in a situation where the agent had a sense of conflict of, as it were, knowing that her duty is to do one thing, but wanting to do something else instead, because that's where it shines forth more brightly. We might just have time just a touch on utilitarianism, Roger Crisp. Can you give us a brisk, I'm afraid, summary of what the view of the utilitarian movement was to their pragmatic approach to virtue? Yes, I mean, essentially, I think there are two main elements to utilitarianism. The first element is that individuals' lives can go, well or badly, and that's all that matters.

In other words, individual well-being is all that matters. The other element is that in the face of that fact, what we ought to do is try to produce as much of that well-being overall. The classical utilitarians believe that human well-being consisted in pleasure. So what we have to do is produce the most pleasure, subtracting the amount of pain, of course, from the total, when we're doing the calculations. So happiness calculus.

Yes. Now, as I said, The virtue of benevolence really lies behind the utilitarian tradition, though to some extent it's now faded away, and the utilitarian principle is just seen as a principle, as it were, on its own. And what really has happened is that the utilitarians have reinvented the Epicurean notion of virtue, which emerged in the Hellenistic period,

from about 300 BC to 100 AD, the idea that virtue is really just instrumental to some other good. Whereas in Socrates, in Plato and in Aristotle, the essential idea is virtue is a good in itself. It's a constituent of happiness. On one reading of Aristotle, it's the only constituent of happiness, and that was taken up by the Stoic. So it's a sort of instrumentalisation process.

Dennis Rosser. Yeah, I mean, I think Mill made that completely. explicit in his book utilitarianism. He said that utilitarianism maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, that it is to be desired for itself. The mind is not in a right

state unless it loves virtue as a thing desirable in itself. But he saw that as, as Roger said, as purely pragmatic. This is a good thing to have installed in people so that they will generate lots of well-being for others. But one of the interesting things about

the utilitarian, point of view is that it tots up pleasures and tots up pain and does the subtraction and tries to work out what the consequences are and it's all it's a do with consequences what are the consequences of your actions but it actually takes for it it seems to take for granted that all pleasures were equal and then as I understand it John suit mill came in and started to talk about the higher pleasures that reading and listening to music and that stuff was a higher pleasure which a lot of people subscribe to and you can see why and I do a lot of the time but it does actually it raises

a very difficult question. Who says that's a higher pleasure? Pleasure. And on what grounds is that a higher pleasure? And that's a question I think still rages around. It not only affects pleasures, it affects tastes, views of culture, views of society. I think the idea inside can there be high, is there a hierarchy of pleasures?

Is it central to this or an offshoot from this? What do you think? Well, I mean, Mill was in a very tight corner there because one understands entirely his motivation for wanting to make this distinction. And in particular, utilitarianists had been accused of being a morality for pigs, as it were, as if the hedonism that seems to be involved in just insisting that there's this common moral currency, which is pleasure and pain, might seem to invite a life where we all just kind of sit around, as it were, generating that sort of pleasure for everybody.

But nonetheless, he had this commitment to there being one single moral currency. And whereas in the ancients with Arrasothal had the idea, that there was a plurality of different values. Utilitarianism, because it requires there to be this calculus, requires there to be a single currency in which you can do the calculus, and so pleasure and pain seemed to be quite a good option. But Mill, in the end, I mean, found as in contradiction, it seems to me. I mean, he can sort of technically make out that the higher pleasures

are just in the end more pleasurable in the long term, and that's one way out, but I'm not sure it sounds like a really, a very plausible one, or not to really capture the distinction he was after. Very difficult to prove, isn't it? Right. I mean, you could go, don't you think? I'm in Galen. I want, once that quotation about Socrates, can you reproduce it?

It's better to be... Socrates is satisfied than a fool satisfied. Yes. Or here's an extreme example of what... When Wittgenstein was on his deathbed and he had a miserable and tormented life, he said, I tell them I had a wonderful life. And I think that that was a true remark. But it showed...

That would be an example of a higher pleasure because he was suicidal and depressed. most of his life. But it was true that he had a wonderful life, striving after knowledge. I think the thing in Mill is that he's really torn between his utilitarian roots, which really come from his father, James Mill, and Bentham,

according to which the only thing that makes anything good is it's being pleasant. And then the result of his nervous breakdown and his realisation that there are elements in life in the romantic life and in the life of sentiment, which can't be captured in terms of pleasantness. So he talks, for example, of the nobility of the higher pleasures.

Well, nobility is quite a different property from pleasantness. There's something very refreshing, I suppose, in the idea that, well, basically all that matters is sort of general human happiness, and yes, we better catch that out in terms of pleasure in the absence of pain. It's wonderfully non-moralistic, as it were, and as a post-Victorian times one can see that that would be very refreshing. but in the end it does seem to me that the idea of there being a single common currency of value is a bit of a problem. Gailens Rosson, finally all three of you, if we just got a minute to do,

the theory of virtue seems to have, has it just sailed back into fashion, or has it come back, it must have come back for a reason. What's your view? Well, there have been people promulgating it all the way through, but there is meant to have started from a famous article by Elizabeth Hanscombe in 1958. when she said that modern moral philosophy was incoherent and I think recommended a return to the virtues and it's just risen, it's been on the rise ever since.

Yeah, I mean, my take on that is that Anskam's arguments are actually rather dubious. But what she'd noticed was that the virtues really, since the 17th and 18th century, had kind of faded into the background and that moral philosophy had concentrated on notions of natural law and rational norms. And the idea of character and what kind of person one is had just really faded into the background and other people agreed with her

and have been trying to revive those very notions. I think it's a good thing that that's happened. I think that morality is right feeling. That's the heart and basis of morality is right emotion, right feeling, not sort of trying to keep rules, sets of rules. So I think it's a return to the truth. Character first. Thank you all very much.

Thank you, Miranda Fricker. Thank you, Roger Crisp and Gailen Strassen. Thank you for listening next week. We'll be talking about John Milton and Oliver Cromwell. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.