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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2010
Bernard Williams says that ‘the characteristic and basic expression of a moral disposition in deliberation is not a premise which refers to that disposition’. If this means that we can never properly self-ascribe virtues and deliberate from this, then Williams is wrong. To deny this possibility is to be committed to either of two positions, neither of which is all that attractive (and certainly not attractive to Williams). The first position demands that virtue cannot know itself; while the second rests on the pessimistic view that morality itself can demand of us our moral identity.
1 Williams, Bernard, ‘Utilitarianism and moral self-indulgence’, Moral Luck, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 48Google Scholar. (All Quotations in this paragraph are from this page.)
2 In fact, elsewhere he himself gives us good reasons for so allowing. (Part of the point of this paper is, as it were, to turn Williams on himself – for I think his dubiousness about deliberating from our virtues reflects a tacit – and unknown – commitment of his to that ‘morality system’ he otherwise repudiates.)
3 Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (London: Fontana, 1985), 10Google Scholar.
4 Is modesty a virtue? Well G. K. Chesterton called it one of the ‘very rare and royal human virtues’, and on such matters perhaps we should take his word. (Chesterton, G. K., ‘The Worship of the Wealthy’, in Manguel, Alberto (ed.) Lying in Bed and Other Essays, (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000), 488Google Scholar.
5 We are being precious about our modesty (and so not modest at all).
6 Maybe the modest person is, necessarily, ‘modesty blind’? Being modest we just can't see modesty at all. But this means that we can't recognise it in others too. Modesty then, becomes the virtue that cannot speak its own name, because it cannot know itself. To have it, then, is to lose the very understanding of the world it is taken to express. But that means it self-annihilates…
7 A final possibility for resisting the possibility of the proper self-ascription of modesty takes another tack. The idea is that to self-ascribe modesty involves taking a certain pleasure in one's modesty – and that the taking of this pleasure shows that one is not modest. A modest person, it will be said, is not modest because of the pleasure it brings them – the pleasures of either or both self-approval and the approval by others – but because they answer the (moral) world's call for modesty.
The first thing to say in response is to point out that there is a difference between doing something for the pleasure it brings, and taking pleasure in what one has (rightly) done. It is a hard thought that that the bearer of true virtue must not even take pleasure in virtue's work well done; and it is probably absurd. After all, if a virtue is that, then it is of value, and if one can know that one has a virtue, then one knows that one has something of value; and it is surely appropriate to take pleasure in possessing something of value.
The second thing to say is that while we might not be able to be truly modest, rather than merely seek to appear modest, in so far as we do the ‘modest thing’ only because of the pleasure it brings us; still one can take due pleasure in being the sort of person – a modest one – who does modest things because this is what one takes the occasion to call for. And if this is the case, then deliberating from our self-ascribed modesty does not undermine the attribution in so far as the pleasure that might accompany the self-ascription is a pleasure at being the kind of person who can be genuinely modest, whether it happens to bring further, incidental pleasures or not.
8 Thus Sartre writes: ‘the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero.’ Existentialism and Humanism, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
9 The first – ‘chips are down’ – case is one in which right action involves us in being clear on who we are; while the second case is one in which such action involves our need to discover who we are.
10 Reinhardt, Lloyd, ‘Desire, Evil and Grace’, Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 205 (Jul., 1978), 325–333CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (In the final analysis I do not think Reinhardt's position is contrary to my own.)
11 Quoted in Warner, Oliver, A Portrait of Nelson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 269Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., 32.
13 Homer, The Iliad, I, 100–110.
14 Quoted in Williams, Bernard, Shame and Necessity, (University of California Press, 1984), 81Google Scholar. (My italics.)
15 Achilles' time and background were, of course, very different from Nelson's. There was, for Achilles no question of his determining to be a hero – a hero is simply what he was. Nor, in his unreflective era, did Achilles feel the need or pressure to expressly formulate his heroic status, or to connect it to any broader conception of the world.
16 Warner, op. cit., 87.
17 Nicoll, Maurice, The New Man, (Taylor & Francis, 1984), 62Google Scholar.
18 Ibid.
19 Bernard Williams, “Persons, Character, Morality”, Moral Luck, op. cit., 13.
20 Ibid., 14.