‘…while strength and health are excellences of the body, and memory and concentration of the mind, it is the will that is good in the man of virtue.’
Philippa FootFootnote 1I. Introduction
Issues of moral responsibility have, since Aristotle, mainly centered on two concerns: primarily there have been issues of ‘control’ – most notably, of what is within one's (direct) power to bring about or not bring about – and, secondarily, there have been issues of ‘value.’ The latter pertain, as one might put it, to the basis of the difference between what is praiseworthy and what is blameworthy – within the sphere of what has passed muster with respect to control. Also since Aristotle, the virtues and vices have played an important – on the whole, arguably, the most important- role in philosophical accounts of this value basis.
Now, we may separate – and philosophers often have separated – these concerns: discussions of ‘power’ and ‘free will’ have typically, not directly involved the virtues and vices; nor have discussions of the latter much concerned issues of power and the like. The approach taken here, however, has not been very systematically worked through, even if some recognition of its possibility has been acknowledged – perhaps by Aristotle, more directly by such recent theorists as Philippa Foot, Susan Wolf, and Gary Watson.Footnote 2 On this approach, we are interested in questions of ‘direct control’ – i.e., questions of the will – as these may arise within, and not as separate from, a consideration of the various types of virtue and vice.
In particular, I am interested in differences in degree – or, better to say, in kinds or ‘dimensions’ – of control with respect to three types of virtue (and vice): (i) a certain class of ‘epistemic virtues’ relating to effort; (ii) ‘motivational virtues’ typified by courage; (iii) substantive moral virtues typified by kindness and justice. Drawing on this account, I hope to display the one-dimensional – but not, for that, insignificant or merely indirect – control we have over our beliefs. More generally, I hope to show how such control applies in the first instance to the virtues and vices – and not, except derivatively, to belief or action.
II. The ‘Epistemic Virtues’
In the above quotation, Foot distinguishes ‘excellences of the mind’ from those of the will – but it is notable that some instances of the former are instances of the latter as well. Among the virtues of mind – the epistemic virtues – we may distinguish mere epistemic capacities like vision, memory, or mathematical problem-solving from qualities of truth-seeking: such qualities as attentiveness, impartiality, and open-mindedness. Otherwise put, we mean to distinguish cognitive abilities from qualities of cognitive effort.Footnote 3 Now, the salient difference between these – so far as the will is concerned – is, I suggest, simply this:
Whereas cognitive abilities may be exercised at will (one can ‘try to remember,’ etc.), good performance with respect to these involves significantly more than such an effort. By contrast, good performance with respect to the other group resides mainly in giving a good effort.
Thus, in the example of ‘care,’ as a quality of effort, one can hardly distinguish – at any given point – ‘being careful’ and ‘making a good effort to be careful.’Footnote 4 By contrast, exhibiting ‘good vision’ in no way consists in making a good effort to do so.
Let us consider in somewhat more detail the virtue of open-mindedness. We praise open-mindedness on some occasions; and fault its absence on others. We do not appeal – as we often do in the case of cognitive abilities – to ‘a lack of open-mindedness’ (in a given instance) as an excuse. And this makes perfect sense from the standpoint of our earlier reflections: to offer such an excuse would be, in effect, to offer ‘a lack of effort’ as an excuse. I may not agree with what another says, I may not entirely understand it, but keeping an open-mind with respect to it is, to a much greater extent, subject to my own efforts. If you like, open-mindedness is responsive ‘to the will’ – again, in a way that cognitive abilities are not.
What, then, of ‘closed-mindedness?’ First, it should be observed that it does not consist in the effort to be closed-minded. On the contrary, it seems to persist, and even thrive, in one's ignorance that it is going on. In fact, if I should come to think that I am being closed-minded, I must convince myself that there are good reasons for my cognitive stance (i.e., that it is not mere closed-mindedness on my part) before, as a cynic would point out, I can go on being closed-minded.Footnote 5 To that extent, one could say of the consciousness that one is being closed-minded – and the conscious attempt to be closed-minded – that these are at least temporarily ‘self-suppressing.’
Here, however, an important distinction must be made: between – what may not be an instance of vice at all – giving only very limited regard to what seems deserving of no more than this, and giving a limited regard to what one comes to think of as deserving more. If, after some study, I have decided that astrology merits no further scrutiny on my part, I may quite consciously decide to be (in a sense) closed-minded to the lengthy argument of the astrology-advocate sitting next to me on a cross Atlantic flight. But such closed-mindedness is not necessarily a vice at all.Footnote 6 If, however, I should suddenly recognize that I am not giving this person's novel and highly intricate arguments the attention they do deserve – at that point, if I have been guilty of an unvirtuous closed-mindedness, with that recognition, I thereby cease, temporarily at least, to be closed-minded; for my recognition that I need to give his arguments more attention is an expression – however fleeting – of open-mindedness. Similar considerations, moreover, will apply to such other ‘virtues of cognitive effort’ as care (in one's reasoning), attentiveness, fair mindedness, and intellectual effort. The recognition that one is being careless, inattentive, biased in one's thinking – all of these are at least temporarily self-suppressing. Like nocturnal creatures, such vices will flee when exposed to the light – but are liable to return as soon as one's attention falls elsewhere.
III. A ‘Motivational Virtue’: Courage
We shall return, by way of contrast, to the case of the epistemic virtues – but we move on now to what are sometimes termed the ‘motivational virtues’ – or those of ‘will power.’ Thus, in a well-known essay, Robert C. Roberts distinguishes courage and self-control as such virtues by alluding to Plato's notion that these qualities are ‘preservatives.’ Roberts notes that such a quality as courage ‘is in service of something other than itself that is cherished and needed because this cherished thing is in some way threatened,’ adding that ‘courage, self-control, and patience, are in service of the moral and prudential life …’ Footnote 7 Such virtues, then, may be said to be ‘motivationally incomplete’ in that they act to bolster some other goal or purpose, hence, some of the time, some other moral virtue. Courage may be necessary in order to sustain justice; self-control, to sustain generosity; patience, kindness – and so forth.
Partly as a consequence of this ‘supporting role,’ a virtue like courage becomes like an epistemic virtue in one basic respect. One may direct one's efforts at exhibiting courage – either entirely as a means or partly as an end; but one cannot genuinely direct one's efforts at exemplifying cowardice – either as a means or an end. For cowardice, one should say, is a failure of the will in the face of danger – affecting one's pursuits, whatever they may be. One is cowardly, then, in relation to some other end – one that fear is preventing one from trying to attain. In this way, cowardice resists being made the direct object of one's pursuit. One may try to ‘look cowardly,’ a traitorous soldier might deliberately run away in battle so as to start a general panic – but such cases involve having (and succeeding in relation to) other ends.Footnote 8
Ultimately, however, we must be more interested in the most salient differences between courage and open-mindedness – one of which is surely that I can choose a cowardly response to a situation, knowing that I am being cowardly – but without anything like the temporary self-corrective mechanism involved in recognizing that I am being closed-minded. While the recognition that one is being cowardly typically bothers one, it need not act to suppress – even in the moment of recognition – cowardly behavior. There is nothing internal to the mere recognition that one is being cowardly that constitutes an expression of even temporary, minimal courage – in the way that the recognition of epistemic vice constituted at least a temporary expression of epistemic virtue.
In that important respect, the will is ‘freer’ with respect to a motivational virtue like courage than it is with respect to an epistemic virtue like open-mindedness. Even if one cannot ‘will cowardice,’ one can will – without motivational disturbance – some act that one knows to be cowardly. But let us also take notice here of an important respect in which both the epistemic and motivational virtues are limited – in a way that such typical moral virtues as kindness are not. Suppose that I come upon a purse snatcher who has fallen and badly injured himself trying to escape with his prize. Here any number of responses, at the level of virtue or vice, are possible. I may act with kindness (helping to ease his hurt), with justice (notifying the police), with selfishness (hurrying on about my way, not wanting to ‘get involved’) – and so forth. Now, imagine a situation that the subject perceives as calling for significant courage: the enemy attacks, I see the need to stand my ground but am afraid. If, at that point, I choose some other value – I decide, say, that as a good Christian, I should love them and help them by getting out of their way – this is patently not like choosing kindness over, say, justice. Insofar as I perceive the situation as calling for courage, the choice of some other, otherwise perfectly legitimate expression of moral value (or virtue) – unless, like duty in this instance, it is one called for by courage – is not possible, except as an odd, even dishonest, way of choosing to be cowardly. To that extent, courage dominates other values – in a way that (non-motivational) moral virtues do not.
At this point, however, a likely objection arises. ‘What you report has nothing per se to do with courage or any other motivational virtue, but simply with the fact that you imagine the situation as one in which the value of courage is paramount for that individual – so that, of course, he cannot avoid its dominance: to choose anything but the courageous act is just seen as a failure with respect to that dominant value.’ To this, I would reply as follows. Suppose that kindness was the paramount value for me in a given situation. This would in the normal course of events lead me to choose kindness over other competing virtues (and vices); but if I did choose otherwise, notice the relevant difference: I would not have to perceive this choice as a mere ‘instance of unkindness’ – in the way kindness to the enemy was seen as a mere instance of cowardice. If one chooses justice over kindness, this may well be seen as a failure with respect to kindness but will also be appreciated – fully in its own right – as a positive effort in regard to the other value (justice). By contrast, when one pursues love, kindness, or some other virtue – in a way that expresses a failure with respect to courage – no comparable sense of the value of one's alternative efforts is possible. An unkind act of justice, even for someone who greatly values kindness, has a merit not possessed by a ‘loving act of cowardice’ – if that is even a possible description.Footnote 9
IV. Kindness and Justice as ‘Substantive’ Moral Virtues
There is less that needs to be said concerning the case of kindness, for we have already, in effect, established several key points of contrast, both of which pertain to the considerably greater range of choice available with respect to this type of virtue. In particular, we note that:
(i) cruelty may be chosen as an end or a means – as much so as kindness; it is obviously not a mere absence of (or a mere failure with respect to) kindness, but involves morally negative (unvirtuous) efforts in its own right – and in this respect differs from both cowardice and closed-mindedness.
(ii) one may choose justice (etc.) over kindness in a way that one cannot choose justice over courage.
The case of justice – or, really, injustice – is different, however, in certain interesting ways from that of cruelty. Like such other virtue/vice pairs as love and hate, good will and ill-will, generosity and selfishness, kindness and cruelty involve morally good and bad motives both quite directly tied to primary sources of human motivation. Injustice, however, is different in that its motivational energy, as one might put this, is ‘borrowed’ from other sources. One is unjust out of envy, hate, greed, self-centeredness – and such like motives – but not, surely, out of love of abstract injustice. Obviously, there are quite a number of basic human motivations tending to injustice – but injustice itself is not one of them.
This asymmetry admits of a diversity of explanations.Footnote 10 Explanations aside, however, it bears these two further comments. First, the case of justice/injustice is like the case of courage/cowardice (and unlike that of open/closed-mindedness) in that one may still, in effect, choose injustice – without valuing it as an end or means. Second, the case of justice and injustice remains unlike the case of courage/cowardice (and like the case of kindness/cruelty) in that one can choose kindness over justice, or justice over kindness – without this casting the kind of ‘long motivational shadow’ as is cast by a cowardly choice.
V. The ‘Voluntariness of Belief’: Some Basic Issues
The question of the ‘voluntariness of belief’ has fascinated and puzzled philosophers for some fairly obvious reasons. First, on its face, belief is involuntary. Whereas I can indirectly affect what I believe in any number of ways, I am seemingly powerless to alter my beliefs by any kind of direct effort of the will. At the same time, we are pressed by a number of important considerations – to recognize that one is able to exert considerable control over – that one is often ‘active’ and not merely ‘passive’ – in regard to belief. Among these considerations the following may be cited:
In many instances, we can only be held responsible for what we do insofar as we are responsible for what we believe – in that our beliefs have so thoroughly shaped our acts.Footnote 11 This will cover broadly two different cases. First, there are ‘moral beliefs.’ Here Robert M. Adams has made the case rather well. He points out, first, that even if it never led to action, we do judge certain moral beliefs (e.g., that there is ‘nothing wrong with shoplifting’) morally wrong; and, second, that when such beliefs do lead to morally wrong acts, that what is at the ‘root of a blameworthy action must itself be ethically blameworthy in some degree.’Footnote 12 Second, even when an agent's ethical beliefs are unobjectionable, we do sometimes judge that unvirtuously formed factual beliefs may be blameworthy. In William Clifford's famous exampleFootnote 13 of this, a ship owner manages to convince himself, out of mercenary motives, that a ship he wishes to rent out is seaworthy. The owner should have recognized that there was an abundance of evidence that the ship was not so – hence, is judged not just to have acted – but to have believed – in a blameworthy way, when the ship sinks with all on board.
Second, insofar as religious faith is thought both to include suitable religious beliefs and to be itself something that can be morally required, we are led to hold that religious beliefs must be subject to the will – even if many other beliefs are not.Footnote 14 Here it is notable that religions have generally not treated an ‘absence of belief’ (as such) as an excuse – relative to the fires of hell. Simple ignorance may be an excuse, but given exposure to ‘the truth’ – the absence of belief is treated as a kind of perverse, willful obstinacy.
Third, it must be recognized that, sometimes at least, we are quite prepared to ‘judge subjects for what they believe’ – even when there are no larger issues – moral, religious, or other – at stake. Told that someone died, stubbornly refusing to face some palpable but (for him) unpleasant truth, we are inclined, surely, to judge that person somewhat in the way that we judge Clifford's ship owner – but without the distinctly moral dimension of the latter case. His dying conviction is seen as not just mistaken, but as so in a way that reflects a kind of fault, a kind of irresponsibility – if not a moral fault or a case of moral irresponsibility – on his part.
Now, in terms of trying to do justice to some or all of these (and other) considerations, philosophers of a doxastically voluntaristic bent have essayed four broadly different strategies:
First, they have mainly emphasized a point noted earlier: that belief is subject to our indirect control – via such acts as we may perform, by way of indirectly influencing beliefs later formed.Footnote 15
Second, it may be claimed that we are active, and not passive, with respect to belief insofar as the latter enter into our practical reasoning. John Bishop has particularly emphasized this point, observing that: ‘The agent has no (direct) power not to be in a belief-state he is in fact in; but does have the direct power not to take the content of that belief-state to be true in his practical inferences.’Footnote 16
Third, following William James's famous discussions in ‘The Will to Believe’,Footnote 17 one may emphasize, as Bishop also emphasizes, the ‘passional’ character of much of what we believe: its dependence on our emotions, rather than on any evidence or strict arguments that we may be able to muster. If I cannot get myself to believe that p merely on the strength of a desire that I should believe this, it may be of some consolation to recognize that, to a greater or lesser extent, my beliefs already do have this attribute.
Fourth, one may wish to characterize voluntariness in the case of belief simply in terms of responsiveness to reasons for thinking-true – i.e., holding, much in the spirit of Descartes in Meditation IV, that one's belief is most free when the reasons for it are most certain.Footnote 18
Let me now comment briefly on each of these:
Regarding the first, the evident difficulty in grounding responsibility for belief in responsibility for prior action is simply this. Almost without exception, such actions – or what is more common, failures to act – as might ground culpable belief-states are themselves only blameworthy inasmuch as they themselves are grounded in culpable belief states. So, for instance, in Clifford's case, the boat owner did not seek out further evidence concerning the state of his boat – a failure at the level of action – in part because he did not believe that he needed to do so. The latter belief, we may surely suppose, was blameworthy – but what action was it grounded in? In such quite typical cases, failures of action contribute to the problem, but they hardly lie at its foundation.
Regarding the second, we may readily concede that practical reasoning is something we do, is clearly an ‘action’ rather than a ‘passion’ on our part. We should also observe, however, that this is true insofar as we have decided to use a given belief as a premise in our reasoning. By the same token, we can decide to use all sorts of other considerations clearly not subject to the will also as such a basis. I may decide to use the fact that I have a stomach ache as a basis for practical reasoning concerning a trip to the doctor; and this would not seem different from using a belief I have (involuntarily) acquired in subsequent practical reasoning. Now, to this, it may be replied in turn that beliefs are constituent elements of practical reasoning, whereas pains and other bodily sensations are not. But by Bishop's own lights, this response fails: that I feel in a certain way, that I believe in a certain way – either of these may become part of a practical inference – but only insofar as I decide to make them so. Here it is being the object of such a decision – and not that one's decision is itself the expression of a belief – that makes something (in that particular way) ‘voluntary’ (again, by Bishop's lights).
Regarding the third, we should point out that the ‘passional’ character of belief hardly implies (and is not, strictly, taken by James or Bishop to imply) that belief is directly dependent on the will. On the contrary, two main pillars of Hume's philosophy of mind are the passional character of much belief, and the involuntariness of (all) belief. Again, the state of my stomach may be due to passional factors – emotional distress – but is hardly responsive in any very direct way to my will.
Regarding the fourth, we should point out that determination by reasons for thinking-true is arguably not sufficient and certainly not necessary for responsibility – which has been, after all, the main quarry of discussions of the voluntary as far back as Aristotle.Footnote 19 Arguably, it is not sufficient because, under many circumstances, the pull of reasons for thinking can be as irresistible as the most powerful reasons for doing. Am I ‘responsible’ for believing that 1 = 1? Do I believe this ‘voluntarily?’ Determination by reasons, in any case, is not necessary because, in the case of epistemic vice, one may be responsible (culpable) for not being guided by reasons (even if one is under the mistaken impression of being so guided). Thus, even if we were to accept Descartes's claim that certainty can be quite ‘voluntary,’ it remains true that this viewpoint has no very obvious way of distinguishing a culpable from a non-culpable failure to allow good reasons to determine one's belief-state.
VI. Assembling Our Findings: The Voluntariness of Belief
Let us return to matters specific to the account being constructed here. What had emerged – I think it may be said – is quite a definite hierarchy regarding the will. The motivational virtues involve a dimension of choice not possessed by the epistemic; and the moral virtues, one not possessed by the motivational. Now, the place of the epistemic virtues in this ordering goes some considerable way, I want to maintain, to explaining our sense of the distinctive ‘involuntariness of belief’ (but also goes some considerable way, I would equally maintain, to accounting for those respects, surveyed above, in which we do seemingly want to treat belief as voluntary).
Of course, some beliefs are ‘involuntary’ simply in that they are immediate, uncontrolled reactions to changes in our environment – but these cases do not, I think, get at the distinctive involuntariness of belief; for they are analogous to immediate, uncontrolled (‘reflex’) actions. The claim that belief is distinctively involuntary, moreover, is typically made by way of offering this type of challenge: that even when we are free to reflect, we cannot control what we believe concerning a given item. No matter how much one might reflect on the matter – and wish to believe this – the belief that ‘George W. Bush does not exist’ simply will not take hold.
On the account proposed here, belief is (relatively) ‘involuntary’ in that such virtues as are typically implicated in the formation and retention of belief – if they are subject to the will at all – are subject to it only in the very limited way described above, in section II. At the same time, belief is ‘voluntary’ in that these virtues are – if only in a very attenuated way – directly subject to the will. But to this a number of quite fundamental objections may now be offered:
First, it may be objected, that belief is not just relatively unresponsive to the will, it is entirely so. We recall here the often quoted lines from Bernard Williams on this matter:
If I could acquire a belief at will, I could acquire it whether it was true or not; moreover I would know that I could acquire it whether it was true or not. If in full consciousness I could will to acquire a “belief” irrespective of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it as a belief, i.e. as something purporting to represent reality.Footnote 20
The first problem with this contention, from my standpoint, is that it treats ‘believing at will’ as a matter of believing, irrespective of reasons for thinking-true – i.e. reasons for believing. This, however, is patently unfair to belief – and its virtues. (It would be as though one insisted that acting at will required acting irrespective of reasons for doing.) Surely, in the case of belief, ‘dependence on the will’ will mean dependence on such truth-related virtues as are responsive to the will – just as in the case of action it means the dependence of other virtues on the will.Footnote 21 There are, we have found, important relative differences regarding these virtues – and their respective relations to the will. These affect, however, not just the relation between the epistemic and other virtues, but the relation between the motivational and the moral virtues.
The present objection might continue, however, to this effect. ‘The relevant contrast is between belief and action; and not with respect to different types of virtue. After all, we do not distinguish the relative involuntariness of courageous action from that of kind action – but, again, the relative involuntariness of belief and action (whether courageous, kind, or neither).’
Such a contention, in my view, gets things fundamentally wrong. First, the basis of praise or blame, in the case of action, is such virtues or vices as we exemplify. Moreover, it is clearly a mistake to try to distinguish action and virtue or vice exemplification; for they are, or may be, the same thing. (A kind act and an exhibition of kindness may constitute, in a given instance, one and the same thing.) Thus, one could say that such virtue and vice exemplifications “are” our actions – described in ways that are directly relevant to issues of responsibility. I see no reason, then, why the case of belief should be viewed any differently. If what is ultimately praiseworthy or blameworthy in the case of actions is virtue or vice exhibitions, beliefs will also be praiseworthy or blameworthy insofar as they, too, involve such exhibitions.
Still, it may be objected that whereas courageous and kind actions are identical with exemplifications of courage and kindness, a belief-formation is not identical with (say) an open-mindedness exhibition. But why not, I ask? It may be said that mere exertion of a virtuous effort is insufficient for a belief; but of course a mere exertion of the requisite effort involved in kindness or courage may be equally insufficient for a kind or courageous action. If we wish – in the mode of such philosophers as Donald Davidson, and unlike such as Alvin Goldman (see note 24 below) – to understand such more minimal descriptions as ‘my endeavoring to be kind’ and less minimal ones as ‘my performing a kind act’ as capable of picking out the same spatio-temporal occurrence, the same will be true in the case of open-mindedness and belief. If, by contrast, we make a more fine-grained distinction in the latter case, we will have to do so in the former case as well.
But what of the plausible sounding claim that we do not distinguish courageous and kind acts in respect of voluntariness? On analysis, it amounts to a claim that we do not distinguish exemplifications of courage and kindness in respect of voluntariness. In one sense, we do not; for there is a sense in which any expression of the will – in the absence of interfering factors – is as voluntary as any other. But in this sense, notice, an expression of open-mindedness (in belief) will be as voluntary as an expression or courage or kindness (in action). The differences in these virtues, as we have seen, however, only emerge when we look at a wider range of possibilities.
VII. Accounting for the ‘Data’
Earlier, we identified three areas, or types of cases, in which one is led, seemingly, to adopt some form of doxastic voluntarism. These concerned, respectively: moral responsibility, faith, and responsibility for belief – absent any special regard for consequences (the reflections of the dying man). It remains to show, then, that our virtue approach yields an intuitively acceptable account of these.
In the case of moral beliefs, contrary to Adams fairly extreme position – that it is just morally wrong to have morally bad beliefs, irrespective of their possible involuntariness – we offer this more nuanced position. Morally bad beliefs are apt to be blameworthy, for they are apt to mark positions taken against the accumulated, or at the very least, the more recent wisdom of one's community – and such positions are apt to be epistemically unvirtuous. To use Adams's example, if one were to believe that ‘shoplifting is morally acceptable,’ this would most likely be for such unvirtuous motives as that one wanted to shoplift. If, however, one's belief is not unvirtuous – consider a youth who has been brought up (in isolation) to believe that shoplifting is a perfectly honorable profession – intuitively, one's belief would not be blameworthy.
Then there was the case, on which Clifford focuses attention, of morally bad factual beliefs. In the case of the ship owner, we have a morally reprehensible act, grounded in a morally reprehensible belief (that the ship was seaworthy). But what makes that belief thus blameworthy? Not the mere fact that it led to a blameworthy act, for the act would not be blameworthy unless the belief were so; and not the mere fact that the evidence for it was weak (one may or may not be culpable for failing to see or appreciate a weakness of evidence). Nor is any greater doxastic freedom (than I have posited) required: we can imagine the ship owner as possessing (but failing to exercise) some strange power to ‘believe at will’ that the boat was unseaworthy; but obviously no such power here is required; for all he needs to do is to ‘open his mind’ to the abundant evidence. What is required, then, and what the ship owner has failed to exhibit, is merely a sufficient epistemic virtue not to allow himself to fall into the distorted pattern of thinking (into which, sadly, he did fall).
Next, there was the case of religious faith. Here we observed that typically ignorance is taken as a valid excuse – but also that when ‘the truth’ is seen as offered, belief is expected. This, by our lights, is sometimes an acceptable position, for closed-mindedness in the face of plausible indications would be blameworthy. However, mere rejection – absent any such indications of epistemic vice – would not be blameworthy. If a ‘mental defective’ was unable to form suitable beliefs, even given such plausible indications, surely even a ‘defender of the faith’ would have to make allowance. Virtue, not belief, is all, I submit, that can be expected.Footnote 22
Finally, there was the case of the dying man ‘stubbornly refusing to face some palpable but (for him) unpleasant truth.’ Here we have epistemic vice, without a moral threat to the community. Perhaps Clifford's view would be that such a belief is only ‘wrong’ – is only blameworthy – if we can locate specifically moral grounds for thinking it so.Footnote 23 The more intuitive position, I take it, however, is that sometimes a belief is wrong (‘irresponsible’) just because it is seriously unvirtuous – and regardless of moral facts, or the absence of same.
VIII. Implications
The fundamental, or most far reaching, point of our discussion might be put in these terms. It is neither action nor belief, as such, which is properly said to be ‘voluntary’ or ‘involuntary.’ Insofar as our interest in the voluntary comes out of a more basic interest in responsibility – in what is ultimately praiseworthy or blameworthy – we are led to make distinctions regarding those virtues and vices that are the basis of such responsibility. A distinction, then, between the involuntariness of belief and the relative voluntariness of action rests on a distinction between the virtues pertaining to each – and their different relations to the will.
So far as issues of responsibility are concerned, then, the fundamental category is that of the virtues – rather than action or belief. This opens up, then, quite a somewhat different approach in what was, and sometimes still is, called ‘the theory of action.’Footnote 24 Instead of attempting to characterize – what has been arguably the most important goal of this branch of philosophy – in purely general terms, such notions as that of an ‘intentional act’ or a ‘voluntary act,’ the alternative suggested by our discussion would be a continuation of something more like Foot's inquiry into the notion of a ‘virtue’ and its connection to the will. Where the present study departs from Foot – and, for that matter, from a whole succession of doxastic involuntarists – mainly concerns this one matter: their preoccupation with the connection between the will and action, and their relative neglect of its connection with belief.
We began with a notion of responsibility as divided into a ‘control’ and a ‘value’ basis. Do our reflections concerning virtue and control work to break down this distinction? They do somewhat; but let me use the example of open-mindedness to bring out the fundamental limitations of any such program. One basic difficulty troubling any purely virtue-based theory of moral responsibility (see in this regard the references to Watson and Wolf in note 2) is whether exemplifications of virtue and vice – when they are motivated by internal factors of an unusually powerful sort – may not be such as to preclude any ‘freedom to do otherwise.’ Now, consider how open and closed-mindedness differ in this regard:
Insofar as open-mindedness, for reasons we have already touched upon in our treatment of such cases as the astrologer aboard the trans-Atlantic flight, involves an element of judgment – of a fair balancing of the general value of openness to any possible source of truth, with what one knows of the previous ‘track-record’ of this source – the notion of a kind of internally compelled open-mindedness borders, at least, on the oxymoronic. Such open-mindedness is conceptually odd in basically the same way that a psychologically compelled wisdom would be. Just the opposite, however, would be true in the case of closed-mindedness; this is the very kind of thing we expect to result from dark, powerful psychic forces not easily subject to one's control. Insofar as this might be true in any case, our program is blocked. Questions of control, and ultimately of responsibility, can go well beyond ones of virtue or vice exemplification. If this is not true in the case of the epistemic virtues and praiseworthy belief, it will be so in the case of the epistemic vices and such blameworthiness as they may confer.Footnote 25
