On the Obligation to be Virtuous: Shaftesbury and the Question, Why be Moral?

On the Obligation to be Virtuous: Shaftesbury and the Question, Why be Moral? GREGORY W. TRIANOSKY RECENT DISCUSSIONOF THE QUESTION,Why be moral? has centered to a large extent on the seeming conflict between the demands of morality and the demands of selfinterest . Moreover, the conflict has been characterized primarily as a conflict between the demands of two sorts of guides or (sets of) rules for action. The strategy most often employed has been to try to show that the right action, required by the moral action guide, is always or almost always also the prudent action, required by the selfinterest action guide. In this way, it has often been thought, "being moral" could be "justified." Without quarreling here with the general sort of approach exemplified in this strategy , it must be noted that the strategy itself has been quite unsatisfying in at least one important respect. For "right action," and hence the justification of a "code" of right action, is surely not the whole of morality. Moral judgments about persons, character traits, mental states, attitudes, feelings, and so on, play just as prominent a role in our ordinary discourse as judgments about right actions. And, correspondingly , it seems that for many of us a sort of moral life guide, or "code of being," is just as fundamental a part of our morality as the moral action guide. But if this is so, then it is clear that, focusing as it has primarily on the "justification " of moral action guides, the recent discussion has not dealt squarely with the perhaps equally important issue of the "justification" of moral life guides: guides that tell us primarily what sort of person we ought morally to be; what sorts of character traits, attitudes, feelings, or desires we ought to have. Nor is it obvious that the arguments "justifying" adherence to the moral action guide serve to justify adherence to the moral life guide. For it seems plausible that someone might say, "Yes, I believe that I am justified in acting morally, outwardly; but ought I to be--am I justified in beingma moral person, inwardly, and not just in acting like one?" Lord Shaftesbury's discussion of the justification of moral guides, or of, as he calls it, the "obligation to be virtuous," adopts the general sort of approach exemplified above. But Shaftesbury, we might say, uses a "virtue strategy" to answer the question ,Why be moral? He focuses not primarily on the justification of a moral action guide but rather on the justification of a moral life guide. It is for this reason that the doctrines and arguments of his Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit can play a useful and important role in contemporary discussion. A reconsideration and analysis of the arguments Shaftesbury presents there can serve as [289] 290 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY a first step toward a fuller discussion of the role and "justification" of guides to moral life. In this paper I want to try to bring some order into the rich and tangled complexity of Shaftesbury's thought. Primarily, my purpose in so doing is to see whether his arguments for the obligation to be virtuous stand on their own merits, or whether they are logically dependent on certain other elements in his theory. I wish to show, specifically , that these arguments do stand or fall independently of the doctrine of the moral sense. If this can be shown, then the way has been paved for a useful discussion of these arguments, on their merits. Secondarily, however, I think Shaftesbury's thought is of great interest in its own right. An examination of my claim of logical independence , as I shall call it, will take us to the very center of his views on virtue, the moral sense, and the good life. And while I cannot here explore these views in sufficiently great detail, at least the broad outlines of an interpretation of some of the major lines of Shaftesbury's thought will emerge along the way. To establish the claim of logical independence, I will: (1) define Shaftesbury's notion of the "natural affections"; (2) define the (dependent) notions of "virtuous action" and "the virtuous man"; and (3...