November 14, 2021

The Demands of Virtue - Neither Hypothetical nor Categorical Part Two

In the first part I showed how the distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives is a distinction between kinds of reasons for action. A categorical imperative establishes reasons to act independently of what one wants to do, thereby cutting off further attempts to give reasons for the action.

Intuitively, we want moral reasons to be categorical. We want people to do the right things regardless of what other ends they pursue. For eudaimonist virtue ethics, this poses a challenge because it might appear like they construe moral reasons as hypothetical: ‘If you want to lead a life of fulfillment, you ought to act virtuously.’ Typically, they then go on to to argue that no one can reasonably dispense of the end of leading a life of fulfillment, so that moral reasons are in a mediated sense categorical. However, this might remain unconvincing, and in any case, it can be argued that there are different ways of achieving fulfillment.

Drawing on the idea that the habitualization of virtue is a transformative experience, I will try to show that moral reasons are neither hypothetical nor categorical reasons.

Hypothetical reasons are intelligible in terms of a relation between means and ends. Taking good aim is one of the means to hit the target. Categorical reasons are intelligible independently of ends. Now, as I argued, the acquisition and habitualization of virtue should be understood as a transformative experience in the sense that the reasons for acting virtuously are presented to the agent as good reasons only after one has gone through the respective process. We should not understand the relation between virtue and the good life as analogous to the relation between a target and the activity of aiming at it. The target is there independently of whether one aims at it or not. But this is not the case with the good life. The good life is brought about by virtuous action in the sense that eudaimonía permeates the experience of virtuous agents. The relation is more like that between singing a note and the note.1

So, from the outside, so to speak, the reasons for virtuous actions are hardly reasons at all. For even if an agent without any conception of the distinction between morally right and wrong could be motivated to acquire virtue by saying that it will allow them to lead a life of fulfillment, the agent’s conception of what it would mean to lead such a life, would change. The reasons they might have had for acquiring virtue before they did would not appeal to them any longer.

From the inside of virtue, moral reasons are not categorical because they still are seen as conducive to eudaimonía, but they are not exactly hypothetical either. This is precisely because even though virtue is conducive to fulfillment, virtue and fulfillment stand in a relation of mutual constitution. The attempt to show how moral reasons can be categorical reasons independent of any other ends an agent pursues is a foundationalist error.