Effortless virtue

Why do we admire the person who does right without feeling tempted more than the one who fights temptation and wins?

Two people are handed an envelope of cash that is not theirs, and both return it. One argued with himself for an hour, thought seriously about the holiday it would have paid for, and returned it anyway. The other never really considered keeping it; the option did not present itself as attractive.

Ask which you would rather have as a business partner and the answer comes instantly. Ask which deserves more moral credit and something jams — because on one natural picture of morality the whole point is overcoming self-interest, and only one of them overcame anything. So which intuition is confused?

Notice first that several questions are running through one word. Which act was better? They were identical. Which was harder? Plainly the first. Which person is better? That is what the business-partner test answers, and it is not the same as either.

Take reliability first, because it is the most tractable. The struggler won this contest. Will he win the next one, at the end of a bad week, when the sum is larger and nobody would know? His success came from a fight, and fights have odds. The other man's return did not depend on a fight, so there is nothing in it to lose. That is not a claim about their souls but about the variance of the two dispositions, and it is why the practical judgement is so quick.

Aristotle makes the harder claim. In the Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes the temperate person, who has no appetite for the wrong thing, from the merely continent one, who has it and masters it — and he ranks continence below virtue outright. The contrary pull is itself the defect: a desire still aimed at the wrong object is a part of you not brought into line, and a person in whom reason must overrule appetite is still divided. He also treats pleasure and pain in acting as a diagnostic, so the man who returns the money resentfully has told you something the act alone does not.

Where does the undivided state come from? Not from argument. Aristotle's answer is habituation: we become just by doing just acts, as builders become builders by building, so the desires are not merely restrained but slowly re-shaped into wanting what is worth wanting. Effortlessness on that account is not a temperament some are lucky to have; it is what a long training leaves behind.

There is a stronger version still. John McDowell argued (in "Virtue and Reason", recalled from the late 1970s) that in the fully virtuous person the competing consideration is not outweighed but silenced — it does not register as a reason at all. The money's usefulness is not an attraction that loses; it is not in the running. That fits the second man's report exactly, and explains why he cannot describe a struggle he never had.

Now the objection, and it is serious. Kant, in the Groundwork, considers a man helpful by temperament who finds pleasure in others' contentment. Such action, he says, is amiable and deserves praise — but not esteem, because moral worth shows itself where a person acts from duty against inclination. Kant's point is often reported as hostility to good feelings, which is a misreading with a long life; the more careful reading is that he identifies the case in which the right motive becomes visible, not the only case in which it is present. But the sting survives the correction: if right action can be delivered by inclination alone, it is unclear the person is doing anything moral rather than being pleasant by construction.

And a second objection cuts deeper. If your desires were shaped by an upbringing you did not choose, then admiring you for feeling no pull is admiring your good fortune. The struggler at least did something. Aristotle's reply is that we are responsible for our states because we were responsible for the acts that formed them — but he also concedes that being habituated well from childhood makes all the difference, which gives away a great deal. That concession is where this question meets the problem of moral luck, and it is not closed.

Three refinements, and the first prevents a real misreading.

Effortless does not mean unfeeling. Aristotle's courageous man is afraid; he feels fear in the right amount, at the right things. What the virtuous person lacks is not emotion but a contrary pull toward the wrong act, and the hardest cases — grief, terror, ruinous stakes — are difficult for everyone. The ranking is about the direction of one's desires, not about how much is at stake.

Second, absence of struggle marks virtue only when it comes from seeing the situation correctly. The person who feels no pull because he has never been poor, or never grasped what the money could do, has not silenced a temptation — he has failed to perceive one. Aristotle guards this by requiring that the act be done knowingly and chosen for its own sake, from a settled state. Drop those and effortlessness is indistinguishable from insensitivity, which nobody admires.

Third, the ranking is a judgement about dispositions, not a licence to withhold praise. Encouraging the struggler is entirely appropriate: he is doing the thing that, repeated, produces the state ranked above him. Continence is the road, not a failed imitation of the destination.

• Whether an upbringing you did not choose can leave you creditable for the character it produced.
• How a virtue is actually acquired by practice, given that the early acts are performed without the state that makes them virtuous.

Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.