In this post I’m returning to another of the classical sources of TMT, Plato’s student Aristotle. Although TMT as a whole is more Platonic than Aristotelian in its separation between Narrative ideas and the Intuitive events of the physical world, the theory includes a strong idea that behavior can be “trained” through practice. In the Nicomachean Ethics (350 B.C.), a manual for living addressed to his son Nicomachus, Aristotle's writing addressed the idea of training new behaviors as a process of developing virtues.
If our behavior is determined entirely by the Intuitive System, as TMT suggests, this means that our actions are not the result of in-the-moment conscious choices that we make. To change our behavior, we instead need to modify our habitual tendencies to respond in one way or another. This fits with the classical idea of virtues: That it doesn’t just matter what we do in life, but rather what kind of people we are. This same idea came up in my recent blog post about free will: Balaguer argued that decisions are "free" when they are "authored" by a person, which may simply be a matter of being actions that seem to be in accordance with who that person is. And "who a person is," in turn, is a matter of their past history and behaviors. We readily consider actions to be "authored" by a person when they seem to be consistent with what else we know about that person's history and the behaviors that we have seen them display in the past. Churchland's book about the Narrative System provides a counter-example: When a friend we have previously trusted suddenly betrays us, we can never go back to seeing that person in quite the same way again. Even if the betrayal was a one-time, situation-specific event, it leads us to revise our mental picture of our friend's character, the things they are capable of.
Virtues (or vices), then, are a person's enduring characteristics and habitual patterns of behavior. Plato proposed four classical virtues: wisdom (prudence), temperance, courage, and justice. Aristotle expanded the list to twelve:
1. Courage - bravery and valor, particularly expressed through military exploits in a martial society
2. Temperance - self-control and restraint, the ability to regulate one's own behavior
3. Justice - impartiality, evenhandedness, and fairness in one's dealings with other people
4. Good Temper - level headedness, equanimity in the face of life's inevitable challenges
5. Liberality - not in the political sense, but in the sense of charity, generosity, and open-heartedness
6. Magnificence - joie de vivre, largesse, a sort of charismatic enthusiasm and accomplishments
7. Pride - a strong sense of self-worth or self-respect
8. Honor - reverence, respect, and admiration for the people and institutions that deserve it
9. Friendliness - sociability, conviviality, ability to get along with others
10. Truthfulness - straightforwardness, honesty, candor
11. Wit - good humor, an ability to laugh in the face of life's absurdity
12. Friendship - loyalty to one's friends, cameraderie, companionship
When I was in the scouts, we had a similar list: A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. (Not bad that I could pull that out of my memory after 30 years). Some of Aristotle's entries -- truthfulness, courage, temperance, justice -- seem to reflect enduring characteristics that we consider admirable across time and cultures. Others -- pride, magnificence -- might have been specific to the culture of ancient Greece. But the idea that some characteristics are admirable and worth cultivating in ourselves seems to be a constant. "Virtues," then, are those characteristics that we admire, and that we can through practice develop. And "virtue ethics" is a way of making decisions based on the character of the person who decides.
Aristotle also provided a specific method for developing virtues in oneself: The natural state of people is ignorance about what is best for them, which leads to actions against their own self-interest (akrasia). Overcoming ignorance requires deliberation, which is the second step on the path to virtue. In Two Minds terminology, this might involve exploring a new narrative such as "that didn't work out for me the way that I wanted it to; I wonder where I went wrong?" Someone who develops an intellectual understanding of the needed behavior may then attempt to perform it without really believing in it -- this third stage of moral development is described as continence, which looks like self-control from the outside but from the inside is more like playing a role when one's true self wants to do something else. The final step in moral development is identification with the virtuous behavior, so that it becomes the thing one wants to do and does intuitively. It is in the intuitive selection of behavior from a range of possible alternatives that a person's nature is most strongly revealed.
Aristotle recognized that some circumstances might return even a virtuous person to a state of ignorance: Intoxication, for example, or strong emotions. Even if people can make free decisions under some circumstances, it seems likely that some situations are so overpowering that most people will produce non-virtuous behaviors. Think, for instance, of the well-meaning people who administered increasingly severe electric shocks to supposed innocent victims in Stanley Milgram's famous obedience-to-authority studies. But Aristotle also assumed that it was a sign of bad character if a person didn't try to overcome these instances of temporary ignorance: "acting out of ignorance" is excusable, but "acting while being ignorant" is not. And bad action by deliberate choice is the least virtuous alternative in Aristotle's view. For Aristotle, the more deliberately chosen an action seems to be, the more strongly it indicates a person's underlying character or virtue.
For Two Minds Theory, where "deliberation" is not a matter of conscious thought, these distinctions still seem to apply. When environmental control over a particular behavior is very high, we might not expect much variation in people's responses -- although those who do respond differently, such as the very few people who resisted Milgram's strong instructions to shock a fellow human being, could be seen to have extraordinary virtue or strength of character. But when environmental control is lower, and multiple options are available, we experience the type of "torn decision" where people seem to make free choices and where their character is more strongly revealed. The use of "character" in this context is not a moral judgment, but rather an indication of choices made at the Intuitive Level. These choices are not conscious -- Two Minds Theory says that they cannot be -- so they instead indicate something about who a person is, their habitual tendency to engage in some types of behaviors and not others, which seems very similar to Aristotle's behavioral definition of "virtues." You have a virtue if you are the kind of person who acts virtuously, especially when no one else is watching.
Before we leave this discussion of virtues, it seems worth noting how the concept has also been misused. At this point in history, we often say that people should be judged only by their actions and not by "what kind of person" we think they are. Too often, the idea that people have enduring characteristics of virtue or vice has been used as a justification for racism, classism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination. But at their core, virtues are fundamentally about behavior rather than demographics. Others can tell "what kind of person" you are based on your actions, which tend to be relatively stable over the lifespan -- for instance, with regard to how you make ethical trade-offs or how you spend your leisure time. Although there is undoubtedly an influence of genetically based personality traits on all of our behaviors, Aristotle's model suggests that we can also learn virtues through practice. After a stage of contemplating needed changes, we practice virtuous behavior without really wanting to perform it, and with varied degrees of success. But Aristotle suggests that if we persist in practicing virtues, they do eventually become internalized. Virtues, then, are not just what we do when no one else is watching; they are most clearly shown by what we do when we aren't even thinking about our actions.
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