1. Motivational Virtues

‘Motivational’ virtues are character traits that involve perceiving and responding correctly to particular goods (or evils) in the world.Footnote ² The person who possesses such virtues will notice instances of these goods or evils, and will be motivated to promote or act in accordance with the goods – and vice versa for the evils. Justice and benevolence are paradigmatic examples of such virtues. Benevolence, for example, is a matter of responsiveness to other people's needs and wellbeing. The benevolent person will be sensitive to others’ thoughts and feelings, for example, and will seek to avoid causing anyone suffering. They desire that others’ lives go well, and are perceptive about when and how to bring that about. Similarly, the just person will be sensitive to matters of justice (or fairness), and motivated to correct injustices and bring about a fairer world. In each case, the thing responded to is worthy of a response and the particular response is merited by the situation. So, one cannot use these virtues for bad ends: they must be dispositions to respond in good ways to features of the world.

Could hope be understood as a motivational virtue in the above sense? Initially, we might think so. Hope plays an important role in lots of the activities we value, and hopefulness is a trait that we generally admire. The Black Lives Matter protests that took place in the summer of 2020, for example, did not only express people's disappointment and outrage at racial injustices (though they certainly did do this). They also expressed, and depended on, the hope that things could be otherwise, that a more racially just world is possible and that it is within our power to bring it about. This hope was therefore a hope that something genuinely valuable would come about, and it was an appropriate response to the injustice in the world as it is. Similarly, the scientists working on covid vaccines presumably hoped to be able to save lives, and this is also a clearly valuable aim. Maintaining such hopes in the face of setbacks and difficulties can be a significant achievement, and we admire those who steadfastly persevere in such hopeful tasks.

Nonetheless, there are many ways in which hope can detract from our lives, have bad consequences for other people, or reflect badly on our characters. It seems possible to hope for bad things, and for this hope to sustain the hopeful person in pursuing bad ends. The terrorist involved in plots to kill large numbers of people, for example, might be just as hopeful that the plot will be successful as the scientist seeking a covid vaccine might be about finding life-saving technology. The terrorists’ hope is likely to have bad consequences for other people, and perhaps for society as a whole. But it also seems to leave them worse off as an individual: their hope is part of what makes them a bad person. In this case, the hope is not a response to anything genuinely valuable; they do not hope for something that is worthy of hope.

Hope therefore doesn't seem to be a motivational virtue. It can motivate us to act, but it doesn't always motivate us to act in ways that are good. Hope can lead us to respond to situations in ways that are unmerited or inappropriate just as much as it can lead us to respond in good ways. Moreover, the fact that it isn't a motivational virtue can initially make it hard to see why we should think of it as a virtue at all. There are all sorts of different things that one can hope for, and not all of these are admirable. Hope doesn't seem to obviously track any morally significant feature of the world, since although some hopes are for good outcomes (‘I hope that a covid vaccine can be found’), others are for morally irrelevant outcomes (‘I hope that my favourite food is available at the restaurant today’) or even morally bad outcomes (‘I hope my rival publicly embarrasses themselves’). Hope therefore cannot be a motivational virtue, and if hope is inherently valuable, it must be valuable in some other way.

2. Structural Virtues

A glance at some other traits considered to be virtues, however, shows that motivational virtues are not the only kind. For example, think of courage. Courage is a fairly uncontroversial virtue, yet it can plausibly be aimed at bad ends: plausibly, the terrorist can be highly courageous despite using their courage for bad ends. They can confront and recognise danger and remain uncowed by it, and this makes them seem courageous despite their task being deeply morally misguided. Fortitude, too, appears to be demonstrated as much by persevering in worthless tasks when faced with setbacks as it does by persevering in morally valuable ones. At least some virtues, then, are not a matter of responsiveness to moral goods, since these virtues can all be exercised when seeking bad goals.Footnote ³

What else might make these traits valuable? Why might they still count as virtues despite not being distinguished as good responses to particular goods or evils? A plausible answer is that they are valuable forms of self-government, or ‘structural virtues’. Structural virtues are not a matter of being well-oriented with regard to particular goods. Instead, they concern the excellent governance one's own life in accordance with one's aims and values. That is, these virtues concern one's ability to ‘structure’ one's life in the right kind of way. The self-controlled person, for example, is not pulled from their chosen path by momentary annoyance or distraction, and the conscientious person attends diligently to the projects they have committed to. Doing so allows the conscientious or diligent person to structure their lives well in certain respects.

Why do we need structural virtues? On first glance, it may seem rather a low bar for being a virtue that a trait merely enables one to live up to one's own aims and values. Such aims can be too low or misplaced altogether. However, this kind of excellent self-governance is no easy task for human beings. Fear, for instance, is a powerful force, and it can be very difficult to resist the temptation to avoid danger, even when one judges the goal to be worthwhile. So, courage is a noteworthy human excellence. Similarly, it can be very difficult to display fortitude in an undertaking, and to keep persevering despite trials and setbacks. Mere belief that the undertaking is worth attempting is not always sufficient to guarantee perseverance in the task. There are always temptations to give up, to take an easier or more convenient path, and it can be hard to stick with a difficult task even if one judges it to be worthwhile. Structural virtues thus seem like considerable achievements given the difficulty humans experience in structuring their lives well.

Structural virtues function as counters to our natural temptations. Courage, for example, counters temptations to cowardice and recklessness. On the one hand, we are often too responsive to fear: we feel so overwhelmed by it that we avoid taking worthwhile but risky actions. On the other hand, we can also be insufficiently responsive to fear: perhaps we fail to try to minimise the dangers involved in an undertaking, or we take dangerous actions even when they're not worth the risks. Aristotle thus suggests that virtues stand at the ‘golden mean’ between excess and deficiency, and are flanked by vices on either side (Aristotle, Reference Aristotle and Crisp2014, II.6 1106a26–b28). Courage, for example, plausibly stands at a mean between being cowardly and foolhardy or rash. Temperance plausibly sits between self-indulgence and insensibility. The self-indulgent person is too prone to indulge each passing desire, but the insensible person is too prone to ignore their wants and needs, too rigid in their self-governance. The virtuous person avoids both excess and deficiency. Whilst the structurally virtuous person might not act in ways that are good overall, they are admirable insofar as they structure their life in the right kind of way, avoiding various temptations that are natural to us.

3. Hope, Vulnerability and Structural Virtue

Why might we consider hope to be a structural virtue? To begin with, note that there are distinctive scenarios in which structural virtues seem to be especially called-for: facing dangerous situations requires courage, for example, and continuing with projects in the face of difficulties or setbacks requires fortitude. For hope to be a structural virtue, there needs to be a distinctive kind of situation in which it is apt or called-for. I wish to suggest that the situations in which hope is called for are those situations in which our goals or projects are vulnerable.

In acting, we pursue various goals and projects, and these are often within our control. On getting up this morning, I pursued the goal of eating toast for breakfast, and I took it to be something that I could easily bring about. I straightforwardly believed that since I intended it, I would succeed. I therefore expected to have toast for breakfast. However, many of the goals we pursue are things that may not be realised, things that might not come about no matter how we act. The Black Lives Matter protests, for example, by no means guaranteed that a more racially just society would come about. In fact, it would have been irrational for the protestors to have had outright beliefs or expectations that a more just society would come about. Similarly, the scientists researching covid vaccines could not (at least initially) have had outright beliefs or expectations that their vaccines would be successful, nor that they would be able to save lives with them. Ends that might not be realised in this sense are ‘vulnerable’; their realisation is in part down to circumstantial luck. The people in question could do everything as they ought to, and the projects might still fail.

In one sense, of course, both eating breakfast and bringing about a more racially just world are vulnerable to luck. After all, one's house could have been burgled during the night and the food might have been stolen. Or one might trip up whilst walking down the stairs and end up in A & E with a broken leg before having had the chance to eat breakfast. But this kind of luck seems significantly different to the kind of luck to which bringing about a more racially just world is hostage, and there is a distinctive need for hope in the latter circumstances.

In normal circumstances one can reasonably believe one will or outright expect to eat toast for breakfast if one has decided to do so. Although it is possible that one would fail to eat toast for breakfast despite having decided to, one relies on the belief that one will do so in forming further beliefs and intentions (one might plan, for example, to leave the house half an hour after getting up, as eating toast for breakfast takes little time). We usually think that one can have knowledge about such future events. That is, in the case of eating breakfast the realisation of the aim is dependent on factors outside of one's control, but these factors are things one can reasonably take for granted, things that do not preclude knowledge. This is not the case with the protestors’ ends. The realisation of their ends was dependent on factors outside their control, but which they could not have simply expected to obtain. We would therefore be reluctant to attribute knowledge about whether society would become more just to even the most optimistic of protestors. Similarly, the factors determining whether the covid vaccine was successful are not factors one could take for granted, or simply expect. ‘Vulnerable ends’, then, are ends that are vulnerable to factors outside the agent's control which the agent does not or should not take for granted. The kind of luck that precludes knowledge or reasonable belief makes an end count as vulnerable.

Situations that call for hope are those involving vulnerable ends. In these cases, one cannot simply act in the belief or the expectation that the end one desires will come about. Humans are limited creatures: our capacities to act and influence the world are highly restricted. We have limited physical and cognitive powers to bring about those things that we aim for, and our attempts often end in failure. The projects that make up our lives are often extended over time, and thus require a stable and supportive environment in order to come to fruition. They frequently require the success of multiple sub-plans, each of which may itself be risky. And they can depend on others’ cooperation, as well as on non-human factors. A vast number of our possible projects thus require acting for the sake of vulnerable goals. As such, many of the valuable projects that we have reason to pursue are vulnerable. Hope is valuable because it allows us to act despite the vulnerability of our ends.

There are some widely accepted cases of hope where we can do little or nothing to bring about the end in question. Adrienne Martin (Reference Martin2014) discusses hopes for good weather or recovery from severe illness, for example, which may involve no agential control over the outcome itself. Still, there remain some relevant vulnerable projects that we might yet engage in that nonetheless involve these outcomes: planning picnics in the event of good weather, for example, or making plans for the future in the case of illness. Hope is required to engage even in these projects.Footnote ⁴

To live a good human life, it is necessary to engage in some vulnerable projects, or pursue some vulnerable goals. The only way to avoid such vulnerability would be to take on only very limited and minimal projects: those that are well within our capacity to secure, whose realisation is not therefore vulnerable to significant luck. But taking on only such limited and minimal projects would be incompatible with living a good life. The projects one engaged in would be far too narrow and unambitious for one to be living well. Any life containing projects that are sufficiently rich and ambitious to be valuable will involve some vulnerable projects – parenthood, fighting racial injustice, learning to quit smoking. A good life, then, will inevitably involve pursuing some goals whose realisation cannot be guaranteed, projects that are vulnerable to failure no matter how well and committedly one tries. Actions in response to such goals are essentially hopeful actions, and such projects are essentially hopeful projects.

This observation seems to explain Solnit's claim that the alternative to hope – which she identifies as surrender – ‘abandons the soul’. Without hope, we would seem to lose out on something important about being human, the ability to dream and aspire, to value and care about things beyond our known capacities to bring about, and to act accordingly. Giving up on these hopeful projects would leave us with a narrowly circumscribed existence barely worth living.

Hopeful actions are a necessary constituent of the good life, then, because living a good life is partly constituted by pursuing vulnerable goals. The person whose life contains vulnerable projects has ordered their life, in at least one respect, in the right kind of way: their life has the right kind of overarching structure to be living well. Hope is thus a structural virtue, a trait that enables one to structure one's life in an excellent way in situations of vulnerability.

4. The Virtue of Hope in a Turbulent World

Hope is thus inherently valuable and a structural virtue. In particular, it is a virtue which is of particular value for us in times of uncertainty and instability – a virtue much needed in changing times.

Human beings are always limited creatures, and the goals we value are often outside the scope of our control. Still, within limits, there are aims that within stable conditions we can expect to be able to realise. In stable conditions, we can take for granted that some aspects of the future will be fairly predictable, and that we can take them for granted. Most of the time, those of us living in Western democracies don't have to hope that political institutions will not collapse overnight, for example, because we can simply take this for granted. We can reasonably expect that political institutions will not simply disappear when the environment in which we live is reasonably stable. Similarly, we can usually simply expect that the shops we buy groceries at will have the items we need.

In times of instability, however, there are far fewer things that we can take for granted than under stable conditions. In unstable conditions we may no longer be able to simply expect good outcomes to come about. As such, hope becomes a particularly precious virtue, enabling us to continue to pursue valuable goals and engage in meaningful projects despite no longer being able to rely on good outcomes. For example, during the recent storming of the Capitol building in the US, Americans would not have been justified in taking for granted that political institutions would not simply collapse overnight. As such, continuing to engage in political action in this context – whether through activism, running for office, etc. – requires hope. Similarly, the covid pandemic has overturned many of the everyday expectations that we can ordinarily rely upon. In ordinary contexts, we might simply expect to be able to buy what we need at the shops, for example. But during the early stages of the pandemic, when many shop shelves were empty, many people were no longer in a position to rely upon this. As such, the instability of the pandemic meant that many ordinary actions required hope.

Conditions of turbulence, instability, or change can make it hard to know what to expect about the future. In such situations, our ordinary expectations regarding the future are overturned. This can be disconcerting or even bewildering, and it can be difficult to continue to pursue valuable projects when we lack reassurance about their results. In these circumstances our lack of confident expectations in the future makes us particularly prone to giving up. Hope sustains us in those most difficult of circumstances, and it is therefore here that the value of hope can be seen most starkly.

5. Hope, Fantasy, Despair and Cynicism

Finally, we can best understand the value of hope when we contrast it with other possible responses to the vulnerability of our goals. In particular, hope stands as a corrective to the temptations of despair, fantasy and cynicism. Each of these is a bad response to the vulnerability of our goals, and responding to vulnerability in this way is usually a kind of ethical failing. Each is a kind of refusal to recognise the vulnerability inherent to human existence.

Faced with a valuable outcome that is possible yet whose realisation is far from certain, one faces a practical question of how to respond, and there are a number of different practical attitudes which we might take. Hope is one such attitude. In hoping, one values the end in question and recognises its vulnerability but nonetheless invests oneself in the outcome. Such investment might be practical or emotional. In this sense, hoping is a risk-laden activity: to hope is to knowingly make oneself vulnerable to disappointment, disappointment that in serious cases can be crushing. What's more, in addition to the pain of disappointment, the practical investment that one makes may in the end come to nothing. For example, in the cases of political activism that Solnit discusses, hope involves a considerable investment of time and energy into activities like political organising and protesting to try to bring about valuable outcomes. These hopeful actions risk failure, in which case the practical investment of time and effort will go unrewarded. Hope is a response to the vulnerability of certain possibilities that acknowledges and embraces that vulnerability, and brings with it considerable risks.

Faced with an outcome that could warrant hope, many of us might be wary about hoping, reluctant to adopt an attitude that carries such risks. In this case, one option is simply to give up on the outcome: to despair of it happening and to refuse to be practically and emotionally invested in it. Although this response may be merited in some cases (particularly where the value of the end in question is not very high), despair as a trait denotes a more general avoidance of risk. As such, it involves reluctance to confront or accept our vulnerability as limited human beings, and the vulnerability of those things we care about. Despair, in this sense, requires ignoring important features of the world: it involves ignoring the fact that these possibilities remain open, that they might yet be realised, and that whether they are realised may be in part up to us. Despair can be tempting because it absolves us of responsibility for acting or even for accepting risks. The despairing person can feel that nothing is required of them because they refuse to recognise the possibilities for their own action and the positive possibilities that remain open. But the passivity thus gained looks like a form of paralysis rather than freedom, and it empties their life of opportunities for meaningful projects that could be rewarding. Foot thus identifies despair as the key temptation to which hope stands as a corrective: ‘hope is a virtue because despair too is a temptation’ (Foot, Reference Foot2002, p. 9).

Despair is not, however, the only way to refuse the riskiness of hope. Another way of avoiding vulnerability is fantasy. Whereas the despairing person over-emphasises the badness of vulnerability and ignores the openness of the future to good outcomes, the fantasist overemphasises their control over a situation and ignores the possibility that the desired outcome might not be realised. The fantasist ignores their limitations and is blind to the evidence that good outcomes may not be within their power to realise or that the world may not be how they would wish it to be. Instead, they insist that things will work out for the best and close their eyes to any evidence to the contrary. This, too, is a temptation, because this is how we would like things to be, and the fantasist avoids the difficult task of grappling with inconvenient truths. Life would be pleasant were this to be the case and so the fantasist believes it to be so, ignoring any evidence to the contrary. This response is clearly also ill-advised. The fantasist likely has greater short-term peace of mind than the despairing person but it comes at an extremely high cost. Moreover, the repeated disappointment the fantasist is likely to face as their projects are repeatedly and unexpectedly thwarted means that the fantasist is likely in quick succession to end up despairing. They thus avoid confronting risk, but only by making themself blind and unresponsive to reality.

Hope thus tips into fantasy at the point where one closes one's eyes on reality and indulges in positive illusions about the hoped-for outcome, regardless of the evidence. As I have understood it, such fantasy is in general a dangerous temptation. Martin (Reference Martin2014), however, points out that some instances of fantasy can be useful. Fantasising about an outcome that we truly value and can bring about may be irresponsible, but fantasising as a way of exploring a possible outcome, for example, could be helpful in deciding if it's something that truly appeals and one should pursue. Nonetheless, the irresponsible kind of fantasy remains a common and generally dangerous temptation.

Finally, one might avoid the riskiness of hope by refusing to value the vulnerable end: that is, one might adopt cynicism. Faced with the high costs and vulnerability of hoping for an outcome that might not be realised, the cynic prefers to withdraw from valuing it, telling themself that it cannot be so valuable after all. The person who responds in this way refuses vulnerability by refusing to appreciate the full value that certain outcomes have for them. Like the fantasist, the cynic closes their eyes to certain features of the situation, but in this case, they close their eyes to the fact that this is an outcome they care about, a goal they value. This response is another way to attempt to render oneself invulnerable, but once again it involves an important kind of failure. In this case, it is an appreciative failure (or perhaps a failure of self-knowledge), and the cost is a diminishment in the richness of their own life. This response to vulnerability is thus also undesirable.

We can see, then, that there are a number of possible responses to the vulnerability of an outcome. Despair, fantasy and cynicism can all superficially seem like attractive options, and we are often tempted to opt for these easy resolutions to the difficulties of living with our vulnerability. But it is clear that they are ethically unattractive options, and that they are not virtuous responses to our own fragility and the fragility of our goals. As Solnit puts it, these all represent forms of surrender: surrender of the possibility of the thing we value (despair), surrender of our value system (cynicism), or surrender of our grasp of reality altogether (fantasy). Rather than grappling with our vulnerable condition, these responses all represent an evasion of it, and the person who responds in these ways would fail to live in accordance with their aims and values. Hope functions as a counter to these temptations, enabling us to have a clear-eyed assessment of the value and likelihood of a goal or project whilst remaining invested in it. It thus allows us to recognise our own vulnerability whilst remaining committed to those vulnerable goals that we ought to care about.

This is not, of course, to say that every instance of hope involves a clear-eyed assessment of the evidence, or that every good possibility is worth hoping for. One can hope too much, as well as hoping too little, and it's possible to hope indiscriminately as well as wisely. The person who hopes desperately for trivial things but not for important ends, for example, is clearly not living well overall. Miriam McCormick (Reference McCormick2017) thus suggests that there are various factors aside from likelihood of the outcome that determine the rationality of a hope. However, it is the trait of hope (or ‘hopefulness’), or the disposition to hope, that is a virtue, not individual instances of it. The hopeful person is the person who is disposed to hope to the right degree, in accordance with those things that they value. Excessive embracing of vulnerable goals and projects will tend towards fantasy, and deficient embracing of such goals and projects will tend towards despair or cynicism. The hopeful person is disposed to respond in the right kind of way to vulnerable situations, and this can be virtuous even if some instances of hope are misplaced.

In particular, despite hope being a virtue there remains the danger mentioned earlier, namely that the hopeful person may be disposed to act hopefully regarding even those ends that we think ought not to be valued. The scientist involved in manufacturing weapons used for nefarious ends, for example, might be sustained in their task by the hope that they will create destructive weapons. However, structural virtues are not a panacea for all evils; they do not guarantee that the person possessing the virtue is getting things right overall. Instead, they depend upon motivational virtues – or the presence of knowledge about what's truly valuable – to be conducive to overall good. Hopefulness does not guarantee that one is living well, then, and nor does any other structural virtue. However, it is an essential component of living well, and as such it is of immense value to vulnerable beings like us.