Does a good heart actually make the world a better place?

June 21, 2024 4:51 AM

According to most ancient philosophers a virtuous heart will yield positive actions, while most modern philosophers would say it depends on the outcomes.

According to ancient philosophers, a virtuous heart—characterized by wisdom, compassion, and virtue—positively impacts the world. Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia emphasizes flourishing through virtue. Seneca highlights character’s role in resilience and compassion. According to Seneca, a virtuous heart contributes positively to the world by embodying wisdom, resilience, and compassion.

Consequentialism suggests that good intentions matter, but actions’ impact is crucial. “The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute its laws.” -Immanuel Kant

In this street interview video a philosopher runs a thought experiment by everyday New Yorkers that encapsulates the divergence between action-based moral theories and virtue-based moral theories.

In the ongoing discourse between action-based moral theories, which emphasize following rules and fulfilling duties, and virtue-based moral theories, which prioritize cultivating virtuous character, the question of whether a good heart truly makes the world a better place remains a thought-provoking paradox.

posted by rageagainsttherobots (30 comments total)

see Variations of Thumos "Here the heart is being used as a direct symbol of the warrior's character and claim to honor/pride." [nyu]
also NIH:
"Aristotle (384–322 BC) saw the heart as the seat of spiritual and mental functions connected with all parts of the body via the blood vessels. He was of the opinion that the major task of the brain was to cool the heart " &c
posted by HearHere at 5:41 AM on June 21

But here's the thing, my little chili babies: all three of those theories are hot stinky cat dookie.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:11 AM on June 21 [9 favorites]

But here's the thing...
yeah :-) consequentialism can be that, esp. when paired with “effective” altruism, like the other articles linked from the FPP. The Good Place is fun though [spoiler alert: Slate]
posted by HearHere at 6:35 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

We all know that the heart is deceitful above all things.

Also, I need to get up earlier to water my stoop plants so that I can say hello to my neighbors.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:40 AM on June 21 [3 favorites]

This is sort of confused.

Although lots of ancient philosophers talk about virtues, it is not at all obvious that they think that virtues have priority over action or whether certain kinds of action are independently good, and the virtues need to be understood in terms of them. For example, there is a "virtue-ethics" interpretation of Aristotle, but it's not universally supported, if I had to guess I would say it is more often thought false as an interpretation.

The idea that "impact" or "steadfastness" matters brings in a different question, which I guess is also the question about whether heart "actually makes the world a better place": how to effectively or reliably bring about the right action or outcome. That's different from the question about what goodness or rightness belongs to primarily. Furthermore, this isn't really speaking to the virtue vs. action or virtue-ethics vs. consequentialist debate, since in many theories, steadfastness would itself be the result of a certain virtue like courage, traditionally understood as the ability to persevere in doing what's right even when it is dangerous. For Aristotle, the character virtues (courage, temperance, etc.) are importantly stable dispositions.

Finally, rules and duties are again not quite the same thing as taking the rightness of individual actions in certain circumstances as basic. There might be differences between what a rule prescribes and one is at an individual level the best thing to do. A preference for rules might be justified by an appeal to the best consequences overall; or by appeal to human nature; or both.
posted by melamakarona at 6:41 AM on June 21 [5 favorites]

Just to be clear, the best available evidence (from the 2020 PhilPapers Survey) suggests that most modern philosophers are not consequentialists. Consequentialism is the least frequently endorsed of the big three among philosophers as a whole*, among normative ethicists, and even among applied ethicists.

Even if those figures are far enough off such that consequentialism were the single most-frequently-endorsed view, it would still only be a plurality view, since the deontologists PLUS the virtue theorists would outnumber the consequentialists by a significant margin. (A less exaggerated version of how seven is the most likely number to come up on a single throw of two dice but not-seven is much more likely than seven.)


* The results are a bit tricky to interpret owing to fairly strange ways of asking the questions and presenting the response data, so I might be wrong, please judge for yourself. On my reading, consequentialism is the least-frequently-endorsed of the big three if we're looking at inclusive endorsements. If we pay attention to exclusive endorsements, then consequentialism is the second-most-frequently endorsed of the big three among philosophers as a whole, though it's still last among ethicists and applied ethicists.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 6:41 AM on June 21 [6 favorites]

I was going to suggest replacing the link on effectivealtruism.org to the original on…
And then I noticed it was from substack, so its narcissistic techbros on one hand, nazi bar on the other.
Quite the conundrum.
posted by signal at 6:41 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

rageagainsttherobots, thank you for inspiring this discussion
posted by HearHere at 6:43 AM on June 21 [3 favorites]

Yes, you should eat your chicken, AND you should eat your broccoli, AND you should eat your dessert. You don't just pick one and stick with it forever! You adapt to the needs of your body and your situation! You strike a balance!

Philosophies are just diet fads that taste worse. Enjoy going "ethically paleo", my dudes
posted by phooky at 6:49 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

Thich Nhat Hahn argued that the only way humanity will achieve peace is from the bottom up, and thus the most basic service a person can provide to the community is to be peaceful and calm themselves and allow that practice to spread to people around them.

I don't know that it will work, but it's the only scheme I've heard of that I think even has a chance.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:09 AM on June 21 [18 favorites]

I think the Buddhist reasoning about intention v. outcomes runs something like "if you don't know enough about the problem for your intervention to improve outcomes then the right thing to do is nothing."

Bad intentions are not going to produce good consequences. I think TFA is burning a strawman.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:16 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

I don't know that it's fair to characterize Aristotle as believing that the intention matters more than the deed itself. In fact, in the Nicomachean Ethics he portrays the process of becoming a virtuous person as doing virtuous actions *before* one has become virtuous oneself (presumably, under the guidance of someone who has already become virtuous). The phronimos, the virtuous man, is someone who has a kind of knowledge of what the virtuous act is in every situation. This implies that the virtuous acts are virtuous in themselves, not virtuous because the virtuous person did them, otherwise one could not do virtuous acts before becoming virtuous. Plato maybe you could read as saying that all that matters is the thought in the mind of the doer, but Plato is a pretty radical dualist who is literally arguing that the only things that are real are concepts (in my reading anyway).

For me, the truth of the intention is in the deed itself, as Hegel writes. Being pure of heart is worth nothing if you are empty of action.

(Incidentally, compassion is not a Greek virtue, not even close. It might be a christian one, however).
posted by dis_integration at 7:20 AM on June 21 [9 favorites]

MeFi just had a great moral philosophy thread last April, with lots of good dunking on Effective Altruism. I'd want everyone to copy and paste their comments in here so that we can just pick up where that one left off, but maybe a link will do...
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:58 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

In spite of the comfort and even pleasure of virtue for the individual, I think the old Berkeley graffito kinda nailed it: "TALK - ACTION = 0"
posted by tspae at 8:03 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

(content note: Abrahamic tradition)
might be a christian one
certainly is: the "Protestant work ethic" [wiki]. [theidolbabbler:] James 2:26 is hermetically similar to 'thumos' above. 'spirit' links to embodiment, pneuma/breath: "Pneuma can refer to different things. It is the Greek word most often used to render the Hebrew word “ruach” (h7307) in the Septuagint, which is an Ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament... and a divine wind (pneuma, g4151) was being carried along over the water."
posted by HearHere at 8:22 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

Does a good heart actually make the world a better place?

Better than what? Than how it is now? Not necessarily. Than how it would be if the good heart were swapped out for a worse one, all other things being equal? Seems plausible enough to bet on as a working assumption.
posted by flabdablet at 9:35 AM on June 21 [3 favorites]

Most discussions of morality seem confused about whether they're talking about:

1) How do we decide what is the right thing to do? or

2) How do we judge who deserves praise/reward and who deserves blame/punishment? or

3) How do we become the sort of persons who do what is right rather than whatever we're inclined to do? (Which is really two very different questions)

3a) How do I become able to deliberately do the things I want to do rather than whatever I'm in the habit of doing? How do I master myself?

3b) How do I become the sort of person who wants to do what is right? How do I become someone who cares about the right things?

The third set of questions seems to me the most important, and the ones that only something like virtue ethics can help us with.
posted by straight at 10:35 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

The third set of questions seems to me the most important, and the ones that only something like virtue ethics can help us with.

Well, there’s also behaviorism. But “something like” here implies a glorious mental image of putting behaviorists and virtue ethicists in the same room and telling them to work it out, which I would personally find hilarious.
posted by brook horse at 10:56 AM on June 21 [3 favorites]

I think it must be the reformed former Catholic in me, but I never understand the value of morality/ethics without action. You can have all the best intentions in the world, you can have all the best rulesets in the world, but without action, it's vapor.
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:14 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

I'm an amateur, but I think virtue ethics typically teaches that doing good is a skill that you learn by practice, following the example of people who are better at it than you are.

So yes, impossible without action.
posted by straight at 11:34 AM on June 21

So good comes from a virtuous heart, but a virtuous heart is created by habits of doing good.

Good guitar solos are played by good guitarists, who are good not because they've read a bunch of books and know all the rules for playing good guitar solos, but because they've practiced. It depends on who you are, but who you are is created by what you do.
posted by straight at 11:38 AM on June 21 [4 favorites]

who you are is created by what you do.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
posted by solotoro at 11:48 AM on June 21 [2 favorites]

0) In virtue of what is a given action the right thing to do?

One important reason to distinguish 0) and 1) is that the answer to 0) together with facts about our cognitive limitations might entail that there is no good or principled way of answering 1). I take it this matters for Section 3 of the lead article.

Mostly, I think Lenman and Chappell are talking past each other because they have in mind two very different functional roles for the ethical norms. Lenman is thinking of norms as directives (internal guidance for non-ideal agents) or possibly imperatives (internal guidance for ideal agents), and Chappell is thinking of norms as appraisives (external standards for non-ideal agents) or possibly evaluatives (external standards for ideal agents). You can't be clueless about a directive. If you were, the rule wouldn't (metaphysically) constitute a directive. Lenman's premiss [3] seems trivially true with respect to directives. But similarly, it's easy to be clueless about an evaluative and easy to fall short in satisfying one. So, Chappell seems to be right if we're talking about rules understood in an evaluative role.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 11:50 AM on June 21 [1 favorite]

Whew, dis_integration has saved me bringing up the Nicomachean Ethics.

I think there might be a little confusion embedded in the whole exercise. Somebody please correct me if I remember badly, but as I understand it, the classical Greek understanding of “virtue” was much broader than our modern one. Certainly broad enough that poor Meno couldn’t define it. It wasn’t necessarily about what a person wanted or how they felt. Virtue could encompass things like learning, discernment, justice, but also even health, prosperity and political influence. “Virtue” is the very potential to enact intentional positive change in the world.

The debate we moderns are having seems to be much more narrowly scoped, along a highly Christian-themed two-axis graph. On one axis is an a priori inclination to do good or evil things, and that is what we tend to mean by “virtue.” On the other axis is choice, whether we indulge or deny our innate leanings. A person can “be evil” on the X axis, and “act evil” on the Y axis, and we clearly conclude this person is evil. Likewise for “good” in the opposite quadrant. The debate we’re having here is about the other two quadrants: what do we conclude about a person who “is” good/evil but declines to “act” good/evil?

My suspicion is that if we were debating this with the ancient Greeks, we’d be talking at cross purposes for a while before we could even begin to make progress on a common discussion. Moreover, I think the apparent difference in our intuitions, as presented here, stems directly from the difference in framing. For the Greeks, virtue-first ethics might have seemed self-evident to the extent that the action is actualization of a prerequisite potential. Good acts flow from virtue because they defined it that way.

Conversely, our own framing seems to demand at least some attention to acts, at least among the secular. A prior disposition towards good or evil that is both objective and private requires an omniscient judge who can peer into our souls. Absent that, self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, and acts (including speech acts) are the only way another human can form a conclusion. If Bob says to you, “god, how I loathe that I feel obligated to give generously to the poor,” then that too is an action with an impact. Maybe people are just complicated and you get to have a complicated opinion about Bob that accounts for both things.

Does the whole modern debate rest on vestiges of the artificial binary implied by “heaven” and “hell?”
posted by gelfin at 12:21 PM on June 21

gelfin: From what I can recall of Aristotelian Ethics, he proposed something not unlike the 2-axis understanding you describe above. Basically, that there are leanings towards good and evil, and actions. Virtuous people are those who desire to do good things and do them. Continent people are those who desire evil, but manage to overcome those urges to do good anyway. Incontinent are those who desire evil, attempt to overcome those urges, and fail, and Vicious are those who don't try to overcome evil urges.

But honestly, this is from memory and philosophy classes were a long damn time ago.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:12 PM on June 21 [1 favorite]

Navelgazer, what about if you desire to do good things, and then don't do them?
posted by The otter lady at 6:15 PM on June 21 [1 favorite]

Weak incontinence? I can’t remember if the Nichomachean E cares about wrong by commission vs omission.
posted by clew at 7:09 PM on June 21

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is often attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who is said to have written (c. 1150), "L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs", but one sentement in the Aeneid predated Christianity.

I'll buy melamakarona's argument that ancient philosophers meant practical things, even if their words ring differently today. I'd assume modern consequentialism is a reaction to the stupidity of virtue-ethics, which itself presumably arose from Christianity.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:10 PM on June 21

antient virtue is it? The Greeks by HDF Kitto [also, later, Pirsig's ZAMM] has something to say:
“Their ideal was not a specifically knightly idea, like Chivalry or Love; they called it aretê - another typically Greek word. When we meet it in Plato we translate it 'Virtue' and consequently miss all the flavour of it. 'Virtue', at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê on the other hand is used indifferently in all the categories and means simply excellence. It may be limited of course by its context; the aretê of a race-horse is speed, of a cart-horse strength. If it used, in a general context, of a man it will connote excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent - morally, intellectually, physically, practically.

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send, and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all rounder; he has surpassing aretê.”
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:58 AM on June 22 [2 favorites]

> Martha Nussbaum’s highlighting of friendship as the superstructure of Nicomachean Ethics [gutenberg] may help here. see, e.g. Rachel Friedman, Friendship as a Non-Relative Virtue:
“those who disagree about the appropriate ways of acting can be seen, not as talking past one another, but rather as “arguing about the same thing, and advancing competing specifications of the same virtue.”” [pdf: Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy]
posted by HearHere at 8:41 AM on June 22 [1 favorite]