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Self-Interest and Virtue*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Neera K. Badhwar
Neera K. Badhwar
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Oklahoma
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Extract

The Aristotelian view that the moral virtues–the virtues of character informed by practical wisdom–are essential to an individual's happiness, and are thus in an individual's self-interest, has been little discussed outside of purely scholarly contexts. With a few exceptions, contemporary philosophers have tended to be suspicious of Aristotle's claims about human nature and the nature of rationality and happiness (eudaimonia). But recent scholarship has offered an interpretation of the basic elements of Aristotle's views of human nature and happiness, and of reason and virtue, that brings them more into line with common-sense thinking and with contemporary philosophical and empirical psychology. This makes it fruitful to reexamine the question of the role of virtue in self-interest.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , Winter 1997 , pp. 226 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1997

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References

1 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Irwin, Terence (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1169b30-32 and 1179bl-4.Google Scholar All further references to the Nicomachean Ethics are to this translation, unless otherwise noted, and are abbreviated in the text as NE.

2 See, e.g., Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press, 1985);Google Scholar and Gauthier, David, ed., Morality and Rational Self-interest (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar Some notable exceptions are Dent, N. J. H., The Moral Psychology of the Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);Google ScholarCasey, John, Pagan Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);Google Scholar and Brink, David, “Rational Egoism, Self, and Others,” in Identity, Character, and Morality, ed. Flanagan, Owen and Rorty, Amelie O. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 339–78.Google Scholar Brink gives a neo-Aristotelian, neo-Parfitian, egoistic justification of morality.

3 See, e.g., Terence Irwin's discussion of the human function, rationality, and happiness in Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), sections 193–98; Cooper, John M., Reason and the Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986);Google Scholar and Sherman, Nancy, The Fabric of Character (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).Google Scholar

4 See my essay “The Limited Unity of Virtue,” Nous, vol. 3, no. 1 (September 1996). The empirical evidence against the assumption that the virtues are global is summarized in Flanagan, Owen, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).Google Scholar My argument is made largely on the basis of philosophical considerations.

5 See my “The Limited Unity of Virtue”; “The Rejection of Ethical Rationalism,” Logos, vol. 10 (1989), pp. 99–131; and Friendship: A Philosophical Reader (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 20–25.

6 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a22–28, trans. Ross, W. D., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes, Jonathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar Further references to Meta-physics are given parenthetically in the text. The thought expressed in this passage is put in a dramatic context in a description of one of the main characters of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged: “[H]e looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world–to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing” (Rand, Atlas Shrugged [New York: New American Library, 1957], p. 652).

7 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1253a7–15.

8 At Politics, 1253a7–15, Aristotle tells us not only that a human being is a social or political animal, but also that he is more so than other social animals, and that this has to do with his possession of rationality. For only a rational (logikon) being can perceive and communicate the good and the bad, the just and the unjust.

9 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1168a5–28, 1170a32-b3. Cf. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971),Google Scholar section 65 on the Aristotelian Principle, esp. pp. 426–27.

10 Melanie Klein calls childhood curiosity a love of knowledge, epistemophilia, in her Love, Guilt, and Reparation; cited in Lear, Jonathan, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See Sherman's discussion of prohairesis as a reasoned choice expressing a person's ultimate ends or values and, hence, character (Sherman, The Fabric of Character, pp. 79–84).

12 Aristotle regards women's deliberative capacity as akuron, lacking in authority (Politics, 1260a12–30,1261a14). Ironically, women are still the primary moral educators of the young child. See the discussion of this issue in Sherman, The Fabric of Character, pp. 154–55.

13 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1168a15. Aristotle has in mind all rational productive activity: fashioning crafts, writing poetry, benefiting others, and loving (1167b34–1168a22). Two of the features of rational productive activity that make it valuable–the effort of production, and the knowledge that what is produced is yours–also apply to the nonrational productive act of giving birth (1168a25ff.). And while what is actualized here is not the rational self, Aristotle suggests that it is still, in some sense, an act of self-actualization.

Cf. Lawrence Haworth's view that autonomous choice is an expression of a fundamental aspect of our human nature, because it expresses “the desires to stand out, to make a mark, and to be responsible” (Haworth, Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986], p. 190; see also ch. 11, esp. pp. 186–90).

14 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. J. Solomon, in Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1237a30ff.; Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII, ch. 3. Friendships between the virtuous are called “primary” friendships in the Eudemian Ethics, and “character” friendships in the Nicomachean Ethics. Further references to the Eudemian Ethics in the text are abbreviated as EE.

15 The phrase “separate self” is at Eudemian Ethics, 1245a35. The terms “other self,” “another self,” “another himself,” and “second self” are used in various places, including Nicomachean Ethics, 1170b7; Eudemian Ethics, 1245a30; and Magna Moralia, trans. St. George Stock, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, book II, ch. 15. The importance of choice in the best sort of friendship is brought out in various places in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. “[T]he primary friendship, that of good men, is a mutual returning of love and choice. … This sort of friendship, then, is peculiar to man, for he alone perceives another's choice” (Eudemian Ethics, 1236b3–6); and again, “the primary friendship is a reciprocal choice of the absolutely good and pleasant because it is good and pleasant” (Eudemian Ethics, 1237a30ff).

See also Nicomachean Ethics, 1170b6–7.

Cf. C. S. Lewis's observation that to love a friend is to “care about the same truth” (Lewis, The Four Loves [Glasgow: William Collins Sons and Co., 1960], p. 62). “The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends,” for “[t]hose who have nothing can share nothing” (p. 63).

16 See Belkin, Lisa, “Death on the CNN Curve,” New York Times Magazine, July 23, 1995, p. 18.Google Scholar Eighteen-month-old Jessica McClure fell into a dry water well in October 1987; her plight, and her rescue by O'Donnell, were the focus of national media attention for months after the event.

17 Some of these studies and theories are usefully summarized in Brown, Roger and Herrnstein, Richard J., Psychology (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975), pp. 177–82.Google Scholar Particularly noteworthy are the neurologist Kurt Goldstein's definition of self-actualization as the impulse to fulfill one's potentialities, Abraham Maslow's classification of

18 That the continent man lacks practical wisdom, even though he understands the true worth of pleasure, wealth, honor, and so on, and deliberates and acts correctly in a variety of circumstances, is implicit in Aristotle's view that practical wisdom implies, and is implied by, virtue. I discuss this in “The Limited Unity of Virtue.”

19 The cognitive nature of emotion is a common theme of much recent psychological and philosophical writing on emotion. Thus, the psychologist Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), argues that emotions express our evaluations of situations or events as good or bad for us. More broadly, Sousa, Ronald de, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987),Google Scholar gives a philosophical defense of the claim that emotions apprehend real evaluative properties. The role of emotion in making us cognizant of evaluative facts is also a common feature of daily experience. For example, new mothers, once able to sleep through the sound of thunder, typically find that even the slightest whimper from the baby now has the power to wake them up: their concern for the child makes them susceptible to its needs.

20 Cleckley, Hervey, The Mask of Sanity (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1964),Google Scholar argues that the psychopath's failure of moral agency is due to his stunted emotional capacity rather than any deficiency in his ability for logical thought. For the psychopath is able to make rational inferences like anyone else and, indeed, is often unusually intelligent. Yet he is incapable of seeing the significance of things, of grasping value. See also the summary of psychological research on the psychopath's lack of affectivity, and especially of empathy and self-awareness, in Goleman, Daniel, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), ch. 7.Google Scholar Lack of empathy, however, is neither the only, nor the necessary, cause of criminality.

22 See Ronald Milo's discussion of satanic wickedness in his book Immorality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 7.

23 For an account of the fascination with alchemy and natural magic in the Renaissance, see Boas, Marie, The Scientific Renaissance: 1450–1630 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).Google Scholar

24 I argue against such a possibility in “The Limited Unity of Virtue,” on the grounds that vice in any domain entails a general and culpable ignorance of the good, whereas moral virtue in any domain entails a general knowledge of the good. Thus, the political viciousness displayed by people like Mao Tse-tung or Himmler or Pol Pot reveals such a warped notion of human nature that it could not possibly coexist with wisdom in any domain.

25 Cf. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, section 67; and Branden, Nathaniel, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam, 1994), esp. ch. 2.Google Scholar

26 See, for example, Cox, Stephen, Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1989);Google Scholar and McCall, Nathan's autobiographical Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (New York: Random House, 1994).Google Scholar Cox relates how well-educated Mafia members, with opportunities for professional jobs, still chose to follow in their fathers' footsteps of a life of blood and power out of a general ineptitude and an aversion to “hard, honest work” (p. 371). He also cites Harvey Bona-donna, a mobster's son, as stating that his friends and relatives in the rackets simply “did not want to work,” that they preferred “to go out and prey upon the community, to steal” (p. 382). McCall's opportunities for interesting work were far more limited, but not as limited, he realizes in hindsight, as he thought when he drifted toward the relatively easy life of crime (p. 402).

27 McCall recalls his penchant for holding a grudge, for hatred and vengeance (Makes Me Wanna Holler, p. 106), not only toward the oppressive whites, but also toward other blacks, the chief victims of his predatory activities (p. 86). And nothing beats the cold indifference of mobsters Greg Scarpa and Lefty Ruggiero. According to Scarpa's former attorney, Scarpa had the intelligence and ability to become a lawyer “or run any big business,” but chose not to because “it would be no fun to him” (cited in Cox, Blood and Power, p. 420). What was “fun,” Cox adds, was to get “the pleasures of deference and opulence, without the bother of working hard and earning them” (p. 420). Noteworthy, too, is the exultant exclamation of Lefty Ruggiero: “As a wiseguy, you can lie, you can cheat, you can steal, you can kill people–legitimately. You can do any goddamn thing you want. … Who wouldn't want to be a wiseguy?” (p. 420).

28 McCall notes the effect of their violent lives on his own and his friends' minds, which, through disuse, slip out of their control and start to go “from logic to illogic” without their realizing it, until they are left wondering why they are “being pushed into the backseat of life and … [cannot] get at the wheel” (Makes Me Wanna Holler, p. 119). Again, Goleman discusses the research that shows how aggressive children become inept at their work thanks to their “impulsivity” or poor self-control, and eventually become unwilling to work (Emotional Intelligence, pp. 236–37). The evidence also suggests that the (aggressive) impulsivity that leads to delinquency also contributes to low IQ scores (p. 335, n. 18), and that the ineptitude and the aggression reinforce each other (pp. 236–37).

29 Regarding Unabomber suspect Kaczynski, Ted, see “Tracking Down the Unabomber,” Time, vol. 147, no. 16 (April 15, 1996), pp. 38–46.Google Scholar

30 This is the (often misunderstood) lesson of the producers' strike in Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

31 That respect or honor is all-important in gangs, is attested to by various sources. Thus, McCall tells of how the most admired member of the gang was the one who “would shoot anybody for looking at him the wrong way” (Makes Me Wanna Holler, p. 61). And in her book about the Los Angeles gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, Leon Bing writes about the infighting among Crips over questions of respect, and reports one of the Crips as saying, “You got to be ready to do anything if somebody dis' [disrespects] your 'hood” (Bing, Do or Die [New York: HarperCollins, 1991], p. 23). The importance of honor in all organized criminal societies is well described in Ianni, Francis A. J. and Reuss-Ianni, Elizabeth, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972), esp. ch. 7.Google Scholar

32 Cf. Aristotle's conception of the “natural slave” as someone who does not have “a deliberative faculty” and, consequently, cannot make his own rational choices (Politics, book I, chs. 5 and 12).

33 See, for example, McCall's description of how his sense of powerlessness fed his fascination with the power of guns (Makes Me Wanna Holler, ch. 8), and of how his sense of his own vulnerability led him to look upon guns as “life's great equalizer” (p. 68). The psychology of ressentiment–the reactive, vengeful affects it involves, and the sense of powerlessness and insignificance it feeds on–is analyzed by Nietzsche, Friedrich in, among other places, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 1, trans. Kaufmann, Walter and Hollingdale, R. J. (New York: Vintage House, 1967).Google Scholar This analysis is further borne out by research on deeply insecure children, typically the products of parental mistreatment. Such children, whether they respond to their mistreatment by becoming bullies at school or withdrawn social outcasts, share a “deep perceptual bias,” perceiving “slights where none were intended,” interpreting an “innocent bump … as a vendetta” (Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p. 235). Aggressive children, especially, proceed on the “presumption of malevolence rather than innocence,” becoming more “muddled” in their thinking as they become more angry and hostile (pp. 235–36).

34 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1150b35; cf. 1144a3. Later, however, Aristotle tells us that a vicious person's “soul is in conflict” and that he hates and shuns himself (1166b14–20). So either Aristotle is of two minds about the nature of a vicious person, or he has two sorts of vicious persons in mind: people who are responsible for “many terrible actions” in the later passage (1166b14–20), and people who express their vice in less destructive ways in the earlier passage (1150b35, 1144a3).

The idea of such total loss of self-knowledge as a kind of amnesia is from the poet Adrienne Rich, who likens lying “as a way of life” to amnesia, “the silence of the unconscious” (Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 [W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1979]; reprinted in The Experience of Philosophy, 2d ed., ed. Raymond Martin and Daniel Kolak [Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1993], p. 563).

Jean-Paul Sartre also compares the initial act of self-deception to putting oneself to sleep, but likens the ensuing state of self-deception to a dreaming state that the self-deceiver continually perpetuates (Sartre, “Self-Deception,” in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre [New York: New American Library, 1975], p. 326).

35 See, for example, Carl Rogers, “Toward a Modern Approach to Values: The Valuing Process in the Mature Person,” and Maslow, Abraham, “The Good Life of the Self-Actualizing Person,” both in Moral Problems in Contemporary Society, ed. Kurtz, Paul (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1969);Google Scholar and Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. Albert Ellis also sees lack of autonomy and lack of self-esteem as the major causes of unhappiness, and his Rational Emotive Therapy focuses on helping the patient to regain these. For a useful summary of his ideas, see Kimble, Gregory, Garmezy, Norman, and Zigler, Edward, Principles of General Psychology, 4th ed. (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1974), pp. 574–75;Google Scholar this book also summarizes the ideas of Rogers (p. 573) and Maslow (pp. 243–46).

36 For a remarkable depiction of the cognitive and emotional state of mind of a man in self-deception, see Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground (New York: Dover Publications, 1992). See also Sartre on the “opacities” and “evanescence” of a self-deceived consciousness, a consciousness that has convinced itself that “the metastable [unstable] structure is the structure of being and that non-persuasion is the structure of all convictions” (“Self-Deception,” pp. 299–328).

37 On this and the following point, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1169b5–6, 1170a5–7, 1170b12–14. See also Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles, pp. 393–95; Brink, “Rational Egoism, Self, and Others,” pp. 355–57; and Schmidtz, David, Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 5.Google Scholar

38 Most of the points in this passage are derived from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book IX; and Branden, Nathaniel, The Psychology of Romantic Love (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), pp. 68–85.Google Scholar Aristotle argues that perceiving oneself in another is pleasant because the good is pleasant, and if one's life is good or “choiceworthy,” observing oneself will also be pleasant, and one can observe oneself better in another person. The notion of “visibility” is Branden's.

39 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1172a13–14, on self-growth and self-knowledge; and Cooper, John M., “Aristotle on Friendship,” in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Rorty, Amelie O. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 301–40.Google Scholar

40 The phrase “privileged trust “ is from Thomas, Laurence, Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), ch. 4. Cf. Aelred of Rivaulx:Google Scholar

“[O]nly those do we call friends to whom we can fearlessly entrust our heart and all its secrets; those, too, who, in turn, are bound to us by the same law of faith and security” (Spiritual Friendship, book I,32, in Pakaluk, Michael, ed., Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1991], p. 137).Google Scholar

41 That there are rare exceptions is attested to by Bing in Do or Die (supra note 31). Bing describes how some of the same people who can torture outsiders to death for no worse fault than being outsiders can also, sometimes, help the younger boys go to school and get out of the gang.

42 See, for example, Peterson, Virgil W., The Mob: Two Hundred Years of Organized Crime in New York (Ottawa: Green Hill Publishers, 1983),Google Scholar on the use of torture and murder to punish double-crossers, and the use of the fear of violence to maintain “rigid discipline” (p. 426). See also the minutes of the Oyster Bay Conference of organized-crime-control specialists, describing the structure of various organized-crime groups: “They are totalitarian in nature. … The leader of the organization has absolute authority over the life and death of the organization's members” (cited in Smith, Dwight C., Jr., The Mafia Mystique [New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1975], p. 247Google Scholar).

43 For an insightful discussion of the mutually exploitative and manipulative–and finally addictive–relationship of two such people, see Stanton Peele (with Brodsky, Archie), Love and Addiction (New York: Taplinger, 1975).Google Scholar

44 The term “second-hand” is Ayn Rand's. The nature of the independent individual versus the nature of the second-hander is the central theme of her novel The Fountainhead (New York: New American Library, 1968). The addictive lovers described by Peele and Brodsky in Love and Addiction are also examples of two second-handers.

45 Cf. Aristotle's remark that the virtuous person is a self-lover because “he acts for the sake of his reasoning part, which is what each person seems to be “ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a16–17); and: “[T]he excellent person, in so far as he is excellent, enjoys actions express-ing virtue, and objects to actions caused by vice, just as the musician enjoys fine melodies and is pained by bad ones” (1170a8–10).

46 I argue for this in my “Moral Agency, Commitment, and Impartiality,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1996), pp. 22–25.

47 Bronte, Charlotte, Shirley, ed. Rosengarten, Herbert and Smith, Margaret (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 174.Google Scholar

48 For a fascinating discussion of this sort of self-abnegation, see Hampton, Jean, “Self-lessness and the Loss of Self,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 135–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Such indifference to the self may also be called the vice of sloth or acedia, from the Greek akedeia, “without care.” Thomas Aquinas discusses sloth in the form of “spiritual apathy,” which he defines as “sorrow over spiritual good,” and in particular, the divine good; see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York: Blackfriar and McGraw- Hill Book Co.,1972),2a2ae, question 35, article 2.

50 A person who claims less than he should, says Aristotle, “would seem to have some-thing bad in him because he does not think he is worthy of the goods” he is worthy of, and “he would seem not to know himself” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1125a20–23). Again, someone who never gets angry when insulted and, thus, never defends himself, but is willing “to accept insults to … [himself] and to overlook insults to … [his] family and friends is slavish” (1126a6–8).

51 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1127a32-b35, where Aristotle contrasts the virtue of truthfulness about oneself with the deficiency of self-deprecation and the excess of boastfulness.

52 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847), ed. Sandy Lesberg (New York: Peebles Press International, Inc., n.d.), p. 242.

53 Ibid., pp. 242–43.

54 Ibid., p. 306.

55 Such, at least, is the portrait of Socrates presented in Plato's Symposium, trans. Joyce, Michael, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961),Google Scholar especially in Alcibiades' speech at 219e-222a.

56 I thank Daniel Shapiro for raising this question.

57 For experimental evidence of the depth and scope of habits of conformity and of obedience to authority, see Asch, Solomon, Social Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974),Google Scholar respectively. Conformity also plays a role in the phenomenon of “the unresponsive bystander”; see the description of the experiments conducted by Latane, Bibb and Darley, John in their book The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? (New York: Appleton, 1970).Google Scholar

58 In Philip Zimbardo's disturbingly fascinating “prison experiments/' college students assigned to play prisoners and guards soon started to exhibit alarming levels of selfabnegating obedience as prisoners, or cruelty and brutality as guards. This happened spontaneously, without pressure from the experimenters. What sufficed for the extreme results were the deliberate creation of an atmosphere of degradation in the “prison camp” by Zimbardo, his tacit permission to the students to do as they liked within the parameters of the experiment, and conformity on the part of the students to their respective peer groups. Owing to the unexpected brutality, Zimbardo had to call off a planned two-week experiment after six days. This experiment, and the Milgram and Asch experiments cited in note 57, are well discussed in Sabini, John and Silver, Maury, “On Destroying the Innocent with a Clear Conscience: A Sociopsychology of the Holocaust,” in their book Moralities of Even/day Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

59 Since the virtues just are rational and emotional dispositions to recognize and respond to value, and since such recognition and response are part and parcel of practical efficacy and happiness, this is hardly surprising. Thus, in “Toward a Modern Approach to Values” (supra note 35), Rogers talks about the psychologically mature person as being “sensitively discriminating” (p. 87) and “accurate” in his responses because he is in touch with the “totality of himself” (p. 89), i.e., his perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, and in touch with “the realities of the objective world” and of other people (p. 92). Such a person comes to value being “real,” tolerant, and self-accepting, and acquires pride. Thus, he moves toward the “universal values” (p. 93) of “sincerity, independence, self-direction, self-knowledge, social responsivity, social responsibility, and loving interpersonal relationships” (p. 95). Similarly, in “The Good Life of the Self-Actualizing Person” (supra note 35), Maslow talks about the self-actualizing person as moving toward “truth, justice, beauty, and virtue,” and thereby coming to feel “loving and admiring” toward herself (pp. 73–74). Again, in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (supra note 25), where Branden discusses why self-esteem is an indispensable component of happiness, he includes “personal integrity” as the “sixth pillar” of self-esteem, and lists the following virtues as the main components of personal integrity: practicing what one preaches, promise-keeping, honoring one's commitments, and “dealing with other human beings fairly, justly, benevolently, and compassionately” (p. 165).