The idea that the virtues are pivotal to the moral life has staged something of a comeback in recent years. Almost inevitably, however, it raises the question of what human flourishing would be, for the virtues to subserve. Without an independent and general account of that, virtue theory might struggle to avoid some form of relativism. An understanding of vices, of the kinds of personal deficits that they represent, might offer a surer step, albeit an indirect one, to vindicating the virtues. This is a larger aim of Gabriele Taylor's book, Deadly Vices. As an account of the vices this book is astute, lucid and compelling.

Taylor asks which vices deserve to be regarded as “deadly” and why. Her chosen inventory of deadly vices is the familiar one: sloth, envy, covetousness, pride, anger, gluttony, and lust. The anatomy of these she offers makes instructive but easily overlooked distinctions that expose subtypes: e.g., for covetousness, the miserly avaricious, the spendthrift, and the greedy; for pride, vanity, conceit, and arrogance, not all of which themselves need rank as vices. A vice is a spontaneous psychic strategy for wringing good feeling (often of reassurance) out of adverse reality by an ill-formed shortcut. Taylor's primary answer to the question as to what qualifies a disposition as a vice is that it harms the person who harbours it. Often the harm is internal to the disposition: it undoes the good that it seeks. A vice is its own nemesis. It subverts the need that spawns it. Thus, vanity tries to shore up self-esteem in a way that only makes self-esteem more precarious; the anger that is resentment defends self-esteem in a way that actually undermines it; obsessive hoarding makes the miser less secure. But Taylor also presents a deeper and more general account of the way in which such vices are deadly to those given over to them. She holds that vices rest on confusion and self-deception of kinds that entail a loss of genuine agency. This begins with the type of self-consciousness that underpins vice. Attitudes to one's experience can lean in either of two opposed ways. I may take the significance of my experiences to lie in what they purport to convey to me about the world, or I may take it to lie in my having them, their role in my very own personal drama. In the first orientation, experience is measured, in part, by its adequacy to the world; in the second, the world is measured by its effect on me. In the latter case there is little room for appeal against the credentials of immediate feeling. Taylor refers to this difference of focus as between world and self as a distinction between “implicit” and “explicit” self-consciousness. In wholly explicit self-consciousness a “person sees the world wholly in terms of her own position in it, all her thoughts and feelings, and desires concentrate only on that … self-centredness is her essence.” [56] Here a psychic state will be received primarily in terms of its relations to one's other psychic states rather than in terms of its groundedness in the world. That tends to deprive the person of “a progression towards relative objectivity”, the capacity for critical reflection on how one experiences things. This prevents evaluation from rising above preference and implusive feeling. One is encased in one's subjectivity. Where there is no perspective on one's immediate desires, feelings and thoughts, only the perspective of them, there is no capacity to correct or resist them. This person is reduced to being what Frankfurt calls a “wanton”, one who is unable to impose an order that he or she has reason to regard as desirable (as distinct from just desired) on life [63]. Such a person is reactive without really being an evaluator, and is not therefore really possessed of free will and thus not really an agent. This psychology offers a natural home to the vices. Thus, it is a feature of vices that one surrenders to them rather than chooses them; one is carried along by their defining thoughts and passions as these insinuatingly arise. Foreclosing on deliberation excludes, among other things, the actual thought that a beckoning attitude constitutes (or might constitute) a vice. By contrast, virtue is not impugned by recognition: resentment dares not speak its name, but courage is only fortified by this. So proneness to vice requires self-deception, rationalising belief-formation that travesties objectivity. (-Note that this sketch gives only an indication of the richness and interest of Taylor's full account of the recessive structure of vice.)

Though the greatest harm of a vice is done to the self that harbours it, vices also, Taylor recognises, harm others. Generally they foster brutality and cruelty, and she has a chapter exploring just how the several deadly vices deliver these. And there is a final chapter on countervailing virtues, in effect, on the dispositions that transcend the moral solipsism diagnosed above.

Taylor's account of the deadly vices does leave the reader with certain questions. Here are two. However persuasive her treatment of the vices familiar to Christian tradition, one sometimes wonders whether this list is exclusive. Why isn't sentimentality, for instance, a vice? Or boorish philistinism? And mightn't these even be ‘deadly’ on the kinds of grounds she provides? Again, as one reviews those old favourites, gluttony and lust, what about the inversions of these: aggressive minimalisms such as censorious abstemiousness, prudery and the like? -Perhaps these could be subsumed under pride or even meanness, but it would be interesting to see how they should be treated.

There is also a more general concern. Taylor's portrayal of vice is of the inner landscape of those wholly submerged in their vices. This raises, only to obscure, a question about the mind of the person who is not wholly possessed by his or her vices, in whom the capacity for virtue is not disabled and may even be fitfully robust. And that is most of us. We may lapse into wrath, feel the stab of resentment, suffer a certain susceptibility to vanity or to promptings of arrogance, but we can often correct for these. The problem is this. If one is unfree when in the grips of a vice, how can one take arms against it then? If, while swayed by vanity or gripped by resentment, I am helplessly the creature of my feelings, unable to achieve critical perspective on them and on my actual situation, how can I then recoil from what is uncoiling in me, chastise myself and step back in time? Yet we often do “get a grip” on ourselves and pull back from the thrall of these seductions. Conversely, if I am capable of a countervailing virtue, that should mean that I am not in the grip of the self-preoccupied outlook that governs the vices. So countervailing virtues could not heal either because access to these virtues presupposes I am already sound or because my susceptibility to my vices precisely involves inaccessibility to such virtues. It would seem that if vices can be now and again redeemed or contained, virtues can be corrupted. The problem is, how? The question is what relations could hold between the conflicting psychological dispositions in one who is neither wholly fallen nor quite beyond damage. Perhaps the appearance of a problem here arises from the implicit singularity of reference of “I” or “self”, the whole-mind model. Perhaps some kind of mental partitioning is needed to account for the phenomena of strength in weakness and weakness in strength. (The problem might, of course, just re-arise concerning the relations of partitioned contents.) If these issues are insufficiently explored in this book, at least it brings them to the fore. Its themes, and the analyses it does offer, are never less than absorbing, insightful and challenging. Deadly Vices is a must for anyone engaged with moral philosophy or philosophical psychology.