In Defense of the Mirror Thesis

In Defense of the Mirror Thesis Peter Brian Barry Associate Professor of Philosophy Saginaw Valley State University pbbarry@svsu.edu Published in Philosophical Studies, Vol. 155, Issue 2 (2010), pp. 199-205 1 Introduction In this journal, Luke Russell defends a sophisticated dispositional account of evil personhood according to which a person is evil just in case she is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy (Russell 2009). While I am generally sympathetic with this result, at least some of Russell’s discussion of evil personhood is problematic. At present, I consider his rejection of the mirror thesis—roughly, the thesis that evil people are mirror images of the morally best sort of persons. Having discussed and defended the mirror thesis elsewhere, I count myself as one of its adherents (Barry 2010, 2009). Initially, I clarify just what the mirror thesis entails. I then consider Russell’s arguments against it and argue both that his arguments are not convincing and that he is actually committed to my favored thesis about evil personhood. 2 The Mirror Thesis Susan Wolf suggests that a moral saint is as “morally worthy as can be” (Wolf 1982, p. 419)—that is, the morally best sort of person. The mirror thesis suggests that evil people are relevantly analogous to moral saints—that despite their differences, the morally worst sort of people are relevantly similar to the morally best sort of people. Obviously, the analogy will not be perfect: evil people fall short of moral decency while In Defense of the Mirror Thesis 2 moral saints do not; we expect evil people, but not moral saints, to be regular sources of harm and suffering; moral saints are praiseworthy in a way that evil people are not, and so forth. And it would be a mistake to suppose that evil people count as the mirror image of the moral saint in virtue of just any similarity. Recall that while Kant supposed that there could be evil human beings, he denied that there could be “devilish” human beings whose reason is entirely exempt from the influence of the moral law (Kant 1960, pp. 301). Thus, for Kant, even the morally worst of us are not devilish. But it would be odd to suppose that because both evil people and moral saints are not beyond the influence of the moral law, the former is the mirror image of the latter. Further, evil people do not simply “mirror” moral saints but perversely mirror them, as any number of philosophers sympathetic with the mirror thesis have suggested. For example, we are told that the evil person is motivated “in the opposite direction” of the virtuous person and thus counts as his “mirror image” (McNaughton 1988, p. 135), that the moral saint is “the positive counterpart to the evil person” (Haybron, 2002b, p. 274), that certain constitutive dispositions of evil persons and moral saints are the “exact reverse of one another” (McGinn 1997, p. 61), that the evil person occupies a space “at the other end of the moral spectrum” from the moral saint (Garrard 1998, p. 329), and that the sort of wickedness that marks evil persons “is the exact opposite” of the sort of moral goodness that characterizes moral saints (Milo 1984, p. 7). So, I submit that the mirror thesis can initially be captured as follows: (MT): a person is evil just in case she is a perverse mirror image of the moral saint 3 There is, of course, more to be said. As it stands, (MT) is too metaphorical to be illuminating and there are various literal variations of (MT) that are implausible as I have argued elsewhere (Barry 2009). However, the following version of (MT) is plausible and arguably goes a long way to capturing just what it is to be an evil person: (MT*): a person is evil just in case he is a perverse image of the moral saint such that he suffers from extremely vicious character traits (MT*) implies that moral saints are the morally best sort of person in virtue of their extreme moral virtue, that evil persons are the morally worst sort of person in virtue of their extreme moral vice, and that their respective characters are constitutive of being saintly and evil (Barry 2010 and 2009). I take it that (MT) is correct if (MT*) is, such that if the characters of evil people and moral saints are both marked by extreme aretaic properties then the mirror thesis is correct. I shall have more to say about both theses below. But Russell offers some reason to think that (MT) must be incorrect. 3 Russell on (MT) Russell’s rejection of (MT) depends upon a crucial asymmetry between moral saints and evil people, one that allegedly upsets the mirror thesis. On one view of things, an evil person must be consistently and thoroughly vicious, lacking any good side (Haybron, 2002a, p. 269). Russell rejects this sort of consistency account of evil personhood (Russell 2009) and I concur (Barry 2010 and 2009). There are, after all, plausible putative examples of evil persons who do seem to have some “good side” 4 insofar as they do sometimes seem to possess morally appropriate motivation and affect; even Hitler could have cared a bit for Eva Braun. And, importantly, we are certainly not rationally required to revise our overall judgment of Hitler’s character simply because he had some slight morally redeeming qualities since those qualities are altogether trumped and overwhelmed by his extreme moral vice (Barry 2010). However, while Russell allows that evil people need not be morally depraved through and through, he rejects a corollary thesis about moral saints—that is, he insists that moral saints must be morally admirable through and through, lacking any moral vice. Here is Russell: It is true that an extremely virtuous person must be morally admirable in all respects, and could be counted on to do the right thing in all situations, and a mirror-image of that person would be bad in all respects and could be counted on to do the wrong thing in all situations. Even so, we have no reason to believe that every extremely immoral person must be morally bad in all respects (Russell 2009). The problem is not simply that evil people and moral saints are different in some respect; presumably, two non-identical objects will differ in some respect no matter how similar they otherwise are. The problem is that the aretaic properties possessed by evil people in virtue of which they count as the morally worst sort of person do not mirror the aretaic properties possessed by moral saints in virtue of which they count as the morally best sort of people: the former need not be perfectly vicious while the latter must be perfectly virtuous. If all this is right, the mirror thesis seems wrong. 5 Worse, there is another problem for proponents of the mirror thesis. It is worthwhile to make explicit a thesis that Russell adopts when he suggests that “It is true that an extremely virtuous person must be morally admirable in all respects”: (MS): a person is a moral saint only if she is morally admirable in all respects and is not morally bad in any respect Apparently, the conjunction of (MT) and (MS) yields counter-intuitive results. Russell argues as follows: If we assumed that evil persons must be mirror-images of fully virtuous persons, then the chillingly successful and reliable real-life evildoers would not count as evil persons simply because they are not bad in every respect. The implausibility of this result suggests instead that we should reject the mirror thesis (Russell 2009). Roughly, if (MT) is correct, then, given that moral saints count as the morally best sort of person partly because they are morally admirable in all respects and suffer from no moral defects, evil people would have to me morally bad in all respects and not at all admirable. But, as I concede above, we have good reason to doubt that this is the case given our best putative examples of real-life evil persons are not necessary morally flawed though and through. And that is some reason to think that (MT) is false. Still, even if the conjunction of (MT) and (MS) yields an implausible result, that result could just as easily be avoided by rejecting (MS) rather than (MT). I submit both that there are good independent reasons to reject (MS) and that Russell himself is committed to rejecting it. 6 Note that Russell agrees with Haybron that the concept of the evil person has a home in ordinary moral discourse such that an analysis of that concept must be fixed, at least to some degree, by our pre-theoretic intuitions about evil people (Russell 2009). Two sorts of pre-theoretic intuitions play a role in Russell’s rejection of consistency accounts of evil personhood: first, that there are some actual evil persons, and second, that at least some of our particular judgments about putative evil people—namely, that they are evil—are correct. Consistency accounts of evil personhood fail to accord with both intuitions insofar as they make it too hard for any actual people to count as evil persons such that all of our particular affirmative judgments about putative evil people are false. However, the concept of the moral saint surely also has a home in ordinary moral discourse such that an analysis of that concept should also be fixed, at least to some degree, by our pre-theoretic intuitions. Parity of reasoning suggests that if we have the intuitions that there are some evil people and that at least some putative evil people really are evil, we have similar intuitions that there are some moral saints and that at least some putative moral saints really are saints. The problem with (MS) is that it is inconsistent with our actual intuitions about moral sainthood. While there might be disagreement about just who counts as the morally best sort of person, most if not all putative moral saints suffer from not insignificant moral failings and vices: Martin Luther King was a philanderer; Mother Teresa confessed that for some period of time she lost her faith and on occasion declared suspect motives for caring for the hungry; Oskar Schindler’s motives may not have been entirely pure; Gandhi was estranged from his family and arguably engaged in exploitive sexual relations with women to test his ascetic resolve; 7 Socrates neglected his family; Jimmy Carter, a deeply pious and religious man, admitted to having lust in his heart, and so forth (Flanagan, 1991; Hamilton 1999). If (MS) is correct then none are moral saints. Indeed, (MS)’s demand for moral perfection is demanding to the point that it seems that there simply are no actual moral saints, contrary to our intuitions. If consistency accounts of evil personhood should be rejected because they are inconsistent with pre-theoretic intuitions about evil people, then (MS) should similarly be rejected because it is inconsistent with pre-theoretic intuitions about moral saints. I suspect that Russell endorses such a demanding view of moral sainthood because he implicitly endorses an account of moral virtue that sets the mark for virtue rather high. Citing Aristotle, Russell notes that “full virtue is an exacting ideal that requires an integrated unity of good character traits” (Russell 2009). But there are stronger and weaker readings of this claim. On its weaker reading, an integrated unity of good character traits does not require the possession of every moral virtue to significant degrees and the absence of moral vice entirely; an integrated unity of virtues need not be an exhaustive one. But on a stronger reading, presumably the one that Aristotle himself endorses, the possession of any one moral virtue requires possession of all of them and the absence of any particular moral virtue implies the absence of all the rest. This is, of course, the “unity of the virtues” thesis. If the unity of the virtues thesis is correct then (MS) would have to be correct, supposing that moral saints must have full virtue. But the truth of the unity of the virtues thesis is debatable and even some sympathetic commentators reject it (Badhwar 1996; Flanagan 1991; Foot 1983; Hurka 2001; Williams 1985). By contrast, the weaker reading is compatible with a failure to possess some 8 significant moral virtues or a failure to possess them to sufficiently significant degrees and, perhaps, with the possession of modest moral vice. The sort of virtue—at least, the sort of virtue possessed by creatures like us—captured on this weaker reading only requires possession of a sufficient number of morally significant virtues possessed to rather significant degrees. And arguably, this weaker sense of virtue is sufficient for moral sainthood (Barry 2010; Wolf 1982). So, absent some independent argument for the stronger version of the unity of the virtues thesis, there seems to be little reason to adopt, and good reason to reject, the demanding (MS). I conclude that Russell’s arguments against the mirror thesis fail. But there is more to be said. Despite his protests, there is a rather strong case to be made that, by Russell’s own lights, (MT) and (MT*) are true. 4 (MT), Autonomy, and Dispositional Accounts of Evil Personhood Again, Russell defends an account of evil personhood whereby an evil person just is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy. To say that a person is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions is to say, roughly, that it is sufficiently likely that she is in the sort of conditions conducive to the performance of evil actions or that she will frequently perform such actions in those conditions or some such thing (Russell 2009). This is consistent with supposing that evil people suffer from significant moral vices, as suggested by (MT*), since vices, like the virtues, are plausibly understood as complicated multi-track dispositional states, including dispositions that ground a tendency to frequently engage in grave wrongdoing. The further requirement that an evil person is 9 disposed to frequently engage in grave wrongdoing in conditions that favour her autonomy is crucial given our intuition that evil people deserve our strongest moral condemnation (Russell 2009). After all, if someone performs an ostensibly evil action only because of situational factors that undermine her autonomy, there is arguably a sense in which she is not blameworthy—or perhaps not fully or sufficiently blameworthy—in the way that we tend to think that evil people are. Suppose for the sake of argument that Russell’s dispositional account of evil personhood is correct. I submit that a parallel of moral sainthood is just as plausible and for similar reasons; in particular, moral saints are strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform the morally best sort of actions in conditions that favour their autonomy. On one account of things, every action of the moral saint is as morally good as possible such that the life of the moral saint is dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others or society as a whole (Wolf 1982, pp. 419-20). This suggests that saints must be strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform the morally best sort of actions. Further, if evil people deserve our strongest moral condemnation in virtue of their exceptional blameworthiness, moral saints presumably deserve our strongest moral approbation in virtue of their exceptional praiseworthiness. And just like blameworthiness, praiseworthiness surely depends upon what an agent would do in conditions that favor her autonomy. In other words, the complicated disposition that Russell suggests constitutes evil personhood at least appears to perversely mirror the complicated disposition that I have argued constitutes moral sainthood. And that is at least some reason to suppose that, by Russell’s own lights, (MT*) and (MT) along with it, are correct. 10 References Badhwar, Neera Kapur. 1996. “The Limited Unity of Virtue.” Noûs 30: 306-29. Barry, Peter Brian. 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