The Perceptual Model as Ideal in McDowell's Account of Virtuous Agency

Avery has written a number of interesting posts about McDowell’s conception of virtuous agency. Here, I would like to offer a reason why McDowell thinks that the virtuous agent has a correct perception of what has to be done, when a particular situation calls for a particular ethically salient action.

Let’s begin by making a distinction between two ways of understanding the aetiology of a particular morally correct action: (1) the Perceptual Model, and (2) the Ratiocinative Model. (I’m trying to follow Avery’s terminology here.) On the Perceptual Model of morally correct action, a virtuous agent is moved to act by his or her perception of what that particular situation demands. Here, the virtuous agent does not think about what he or she ought to do before or while performing the relevant action. The sense in which the virtuous agent does not “think about” what ought to be done can be given an intuitive gloss: the agent is moved to act by an inculcated habit, which is very much like a reflex. In contrast, on the Ratiocinative Model of morally correct action, a virtuous agent is moved to act by his or her entertaining a thought to the effect that “That such-and-such is to be done, here and now”. On this model, the virtuous agent must first entertain such a thought and then act accordingly.

Now, McDowell elevates the status of the Perceptual Model to that of an ideal. Why does he set aside the Ratiocinative Model as being unworthy of the ideal status? Why might he think that Ratiocination ought not to be attributed to the ideal virtuous agent’s motivational psychology? I believe that McDowell elevates this model of virtuous agency to the status of ideal because he wants us to think of the ideal virtuous agent as having a special kind of non-inferential knowledge of a particular ethically salient matter of fact. The notion of non-inferential knowledge allows no room for the kind of error in reasoning in which one’s thinking begins with a correct apprehension of some segment of reality, and ends with a non-apprehension of any segment of reality. Non-inferential knowledge is both immediately ascertained and constitutes an accurate apprehension of some segment of reality. Coupled with McDowell’s account of the fundamentally relational and exhaustively conceptual nature of perceptual experience, non-inferential knowledge of a particular ethically salient matter of fact is perfect, indefeasible knowledge of what must be done, here and now, in the perceptible world. In effect, I believe that McDowell’s notion of the ideal virtuous agent is the idea of an Omniscient Agent.

But this does not yet constitute an answer to the question: Why is ratiocination ruled out? The answer, I think, is this: McDowell is assuming that we non-ideal (non-omniscient) agents use ratiocination as a means of discovering particular matters of fact about the empirical world, and that this means of gaining knowledge is simply not required by the ideal (omniscient) virtuous agent. The ideal (omniscient) virtuous agent registers each and every ethically salient fact, in each and every particular occasion, by perception alone.

I think this is a very provocative and plausible way of understanding the notion of an ideal virtuous agent, but I'm curious to know (1) whether anyone thinks that I've correctly described McDowell's position here, and if so, (2) whether anyone finds the position thus described plausible?

McDowell's Theory of Virtue and the Multivocality Objection

One objection to McDowell’s account of virtue is that it seems to give rise to a multivocal account moral aspirations. This multivocality is viewed as problematic since it makes it unclear what the appropriate target of our moral aspirations should be.

Intuitively, one should strive to be like the ideal agent. This seems to be, in part, constitutive of what it means to be the ideal. If this is right, then it would seem that the thing to do would be to emulate the ideal (i.e., virtuous) agent. For McDowell, this means not only acting as the virtuous agent acts, but also employing the same methodology for arriving at one’s moral judgements—namely, moral perception. However, since I know that I am not the ideal, and that I am therefore unable to arrive at what I ought to do via moral perception, I should really aspire towards ratiocination (i.e., all-things-considered judgements). Admittedly, this would represent a step down from the ideal, but given my less-than-ideal status, it seems to be the best I could aspire towards.

The worry that this objection points to is that once we recognise that we are less-than-ideal agents, the ideal can on longer serve as the target of our moral aspirations. In stead of asking, what would Jesus do (i.e., the ideal agent), we seem obliged to ask what would the impetuous-but-well-meaning-apostle Peter do (i.e., the continent agent). Or, to put the matter in more McDowellian and less New-Testament-theological terms, the appropriate question for agents who recognise that they fall short of the ideal moral agent is not “what would the virtuous agent do?” but “what would the continent agent do?” This seems to follow from the fact that on McDowell’s picture the difference between the cognitive methodologies of the virtuous and non-virtuous agents (i.e., perception and ratiocination respectively) is one of kind rather than merely degree. This difference in the respective methodologies of the virtuous and non-virtuous agent opens up the lacuna that allows the multivocality worry to take hold.

This worry may further motivate the desire to have ratiocination figure as a perfectly legitimate part of the virtuous agent’s cognitive moral apparatus. If both the virtuous and continent agent, alike, are pictured as relying on ratiocination, the path appears cleared for the continent agent to become (or at least make some progress towards becoming) the virtuous agent. But so long as their methodologies remain distinct, then our awareness of our own imperfection seems to normatively confine us to emulate (i.e., employ the methodology of) the non-virtuous agent.

I believe the multivocality objection (at least in its present form) errs by construing McDowell’s account of the methodology of the continent agent (i.e., ratiocination) as prescriptive when, by McDowell’s lights, it is purely descriptive. To wit, one is never supposed to aspire towards ratiocination. Rather, moral ratiocination is simply the default position of an agent who suffers from clouded perception. Recall, the virtuous subject’s moral perception constitutes an overriding reason that silences all other reasons. By contrast, the moral perception of the non-virtuous agent is not able to silence all other reasons, which leave several competing reasons in play at once. This leads to a weighing of moral reasons, and this weighing of moral reasons just is what I have been calling moral ratiocination. The upshot of this is that ratiocination, on McDowell’s picture, always amounts to a fall back position (i.e., faute de mieux) and never to an ideal to be aspired towards.

McDowell, Akrasia and the Misguided View

In this post I wish to engage in a piece of philosophical exegesis in order to expose a certain misreading of McDowell. The passage I will be discussing reads as follows:

It would be a mistake to protest that one can fail to act on a reason, and even on a reason judged by oneself to be better than any reason one has for acting otherwise, without there needing to be any clouding or distortion in one’s appreciation of the reason one flouts. That is true; but to suppose it constitutes an objection to Aristotle is to fail to understand the special nature of the conception of virtue that generates Aristotle’s interest in incontinence. (Mind, Value, and Reality, p. 55)

Here, McDowell concedes that Akrasia, the phenomenon where an agent judges that some action A is the best course to pursue, but nevertheless freely chooses not to do A, is possible. On this point, McDowell agrees with Aristotle and Donald Davidson (and disagrees with Socrates who flatly denies such a possibility). More significant still, McDowell acknowledges that the best way of conceiving of Akrasia may not be in terms of “clouding or distortion in one’s appreciation of the reason one flouts.” In short, while McDowell conceives of the distinction between the virtuous agent, on the one hand, and the continent or incontinent agent, on the other, in terms of the latter having a clouded perception, he does not maintain that the possibility of Akrasia is also to be so explained.

This is an important point since some have mistakenly attributed to McDowell the claim that Akrasia can only be explained in terms of clouded moral perception. Let us refer to the thesis that it is possible for an agent to choose not to do A even if the agent’s judgement that A is the best course of action is unclouded as unclouded Akrasia. According to, what I will refer to as the misguided reading of McDowell, the above passage implicates a denial of unclouded Akrasia. The misguided reading rests on the false assumption that the “mistake” McDowell refers to in the passage in question is the idea that unclouded Akrasia is possible. However, the misguided reading overlooks the opening clause of the very next sentence in which McDowell grants “that [the possibility of unclouded Akrasia] is true”. What McDowell actually sees as the mistake is not the possibility of unclouded Akrasia per se but the idea that unclouded Akrasia poses a difficulty for his account. The upshot of the rejection of the misguided reading is that we do not need to see McDowell as attempting to account for the possibility of Akrasia in terms of “clouding or distortion” in an agent’s appreciation of her reasons. On the contrary, a careful reading of the relevant passages reveals that this is a question McDowell is altogether silent on—i.e., McDowell fails to provide any explicit positive account of how Akraisa in general (or unclouded Akrasia in particular) is possible, at least not in the essay presently under discussion.

That McDowell fails to provide a positive account of Akrasia is not surprising, nor should it be seen as a defect (i.e., a sin of omission) given his present purposes. This is because McDowell is only concerned with preserving the Aristotelian distinction between the continent and incontinent agent, and not with an account of Akrasia per se. Thus, the misguided reading errs first and foremost because it construes McDowell’s argument as attempting to establish a conclusion on a subject matter that falls outside the argument’s actual area of concern.

However, even if we reject the misguided reading, the possibility of unclouded Akrasia may still seem to pose a difficulty for McDowell’s account. Since (in the case of the virtuous agent) perceiving what one ought to do is sufficient for doing it, then the agent who manifests weakness of will must be displaying a clouded perception. While this is true by McDowell’s lights, this fact alone does not involve the denial of the possibility of unclouded Akrasia. To see this, we must distinguish between the following two types of cases: (1) ones in which an agent arrives at what she ought to do via the exercise of a perceptual sensitivity (alone) and (2) ones in which an agent arrives at what she ought to do via ratiocination. Strictly speaking, (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive since in the case of the non-virtuous agent (i.e., the continent and incontinent) both ratiocination and a perceptual sensitivity are typically in play. However, in such a case, the deliverance of the agent’s perceptual sensitivity is itself reduced to just another reason in the agent’s all-things-considered judgement. This follows from the fact that (in the case of the non-virtuous agent) moral perception does not have the silencing power that it does in the case of the virtuous agent. In fact, the absence of this silencing power is just what it means for a moral perception to be clouded on McDowell’s picture. By contrast, the virtuous agent, who has an unclouded perception, is one whose perceptual sensitivity silences all competing reasons (with certain qualifications that I will ignore for the time being) and who can therefore be described as not resorting to ratiocination at all. With these subtleties in mind, I will (for brevity) continue to talk of moral perception versus moral ratiocination as if the two are mutually exclusive phenomenon.

With the distinction between moral perception and moral ratiocination firmly in place, we can now appreciate that McDowell sees unclouded Akrasia as only relevant to the latter but not to the former. By McDowell’s lights, an agent cannot have an unclouded perception of what she ought to do and yet fail to do it since (as noted earlier) having an unclouded perception is sufficient for virtuous action. However, McDowell’s account allows that an agent may have an unclouded appreciation of her reasons and yet fail to act upon them. The upshot of this is that Akraisa (i.e., unclouded Akrasia) only applies to moral ratiocination and not to moral perceptions.

The significance of the above conclusion should not be under-appreciated. Recall, on McDowell’s view, the virtuous agent is able to perceive and act upon what she ought to do in a given situation without need for ratiocination. (In fact, this is what distinguishes the virtuous agent from the merely continent agent on McDowell’s picture.) Hence, the non-virtuous agent (i.e., the continent and incontinent) is the agent who has to resort to ratiocination since her perceptions (being clouded) are not sufficient to get her to the point of acting as the virtuous agent acts. In a slogan, the non-virtuous agent shall not live (morally) by perception alone. The upshot of this is that Akrasia can only arise in the case of a non-virtuous agent for whom ratiocination remains relevant. The virtuous agent, by contrast, relies solely on perception and therefore cannot ever suffer from Akrasia. This strikes me as just the sort of result one would want. In conclusion, McDowell’s distinction between moral perceptions and moral ratiocination allows him to preserve the following pair of desiderata: (1) it allows him to grant the possibility of unclouded Akrasia (vis-à-vis moral ratiocination) while maintaining that unclouded perception (alone) is sufficient for virtuous action, and (2) it implies that only non-virtuous agents can suffer from unclouded Akrasia.

McDowell On Virtue

The meta-ethical approach limned in John McDowell’s essay, “Virtue and Reason”, combines the Socratic thesis that “virtue is knowledge” with the Aristotelian thesis that a virtuous agent is one who exhibits a “reliable sensitivity” to the requirements of virtue. McDowell describes this sensitivity as a perceptual capacity—the ability to see, for example, what kindness requires. Significantly, McDowell’s picture does not require that the virtuous agent have the conceptual sophistication to nominally identify the particular virtue (for example, “kindness”) the agent happens to be acting from in a given situation. All that is required is that the agent be able to identify the act that kindness requires as “the thing to do”, whenever acting kindly is what ought to be done. The exercise of this sensitivity amounts to a type of knowledge, according to McDowell, because it involves getting things right.

One preliminary objection McDowell considers to the virtue as knowledge thesis is the claim that a mere sensitivity is insufficient to capture virtue since one may apprehend what one ought to do without being motivated to do it. According to this objection, some added appetitive component is needed, so that virtue is best conceived as a composite of reason and desire. I will refer to this idea as the composite conception. McDowell diagnoses the plausibility of the composite conception as stemming from the putative possibility of a non-virtuous agent perceiving the very same thing as a virtuous agent in a given situation and yet not act as the virtuous agent acts.

McDowell’s response to the composite conception appears to give rise to a dilemma, rooted in (what I shall argue are) conflicting sets of claims. On the one hand, he seems to deny the possibility of a virtuous and non-virtuous agent enjoying matching perceptions vis-à-vis what ought to be done:

If we are to retain the identification of virtue with knowledge, then, by contraposition, we are committed to denying that a virtuous person’s perception of a situation can be precisely matched in someone who, in that situation, acts otherwise than virtuously. (p. 54*).

On the other hand, he rejects Socrates’ claim that the difference between the virtuous and non-virtuous agent is one of ignorance, since this has the unattractive upshot that the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act as the virtuous agent does is involuntary. However, it is not clear that both of these positions can be consistently maintained.

McDowell’s proposed solution is “to allow that someone who fails to act virtuously may, in a way, perceive what a virtuous person would…but to insist that his failure occurs only because his appreciation of what he perceives is clouded, or unfocused, by the impact of a desire to do otherwise.” (p. 54) This reply preserves the idea that virtue is nothing more than a sensitivity since, by McDowell’s lights, the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act is not due to the agent lacking something that the virtuous agent possesses. Thus, there is no need to posit something, like say a desire, to bridge the gap between the virtuous agent’s action and the non-virtuous agent’s inaction. In stead, the reverse seems true by McDowell’s lights. To wit, it is the non-virtuous agent who actually possesses something that the virtuous agent lacks—namely, a perception-clouding desire to do otherwise. However, McDowell points out that the fact that there is an appetitive element present in the case of the non-virtuous agent does not mean that there is an appetitive element present in the case of the virtuous agent as well.

McDowell’s reply to the composite conception seems to concede that the virtuous and non-virtuous agents have the same sensitivity after all, albeit the latter’s sensitivity is accompanied by something extra. Recall, McDowell means to deny that the inactivity of the non-virtuous agent is to be explained in terms of ignorance. As such, he appears to allow that the non-virtuous agent possesses the same knowledge (i.e., sensitivity) that the virtuous agent has. However, if virtue is knowledge, then this seems to entail that the non-virtuous agent also possesses virtue. Admittedly, the non-virtuous agent possesses more than just knowledge (i.e., the relevant sensitivity) since he also possesses a competing desire. But, if virtue just is knowledge, then possession of said knowledge should be a sufficient condition for the agent counting as virtuous. If so, then the fact that the non-virtuous agent also has a perception-clouding desire to do otherwise seems beside the point. (Consider: if possessing mammary glands is sufficient for being a mammal, then the fact one also has a tail in no way ameliorates one’s fulfilment of the sufficient condition.)

The above objection illustrates why the Socratic response to the composite conception—i.e., equating a lack of virtue with ignorance—is so attractive. If one posits a sufficient condition for virtue and one wants to deny that a particular agent is virtuous, then the thing to do would be to deny that the agent meets the sufficient condition, not to say that the agent meets it but has some additional property. Thus, to the extent that Socrates employs the first strategy and McDowell employs the second, the former is preferable to the latter. As already noted, McDowell rejects the Socratic strategy because it has the unattractive upshot that the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act as the virtuous agent does is involuntary. But he seems equally unable (or unwilling) to say that the non-virtuous agent has the relevant knowledge (i.e., sensitivity) since, given the equation of virtue and knowledge, this would imply that the non-virtuous agent is virtuous.

There is a tempting reply to the above dilemma which I believe should be resisted. It is almost impossible to read McDowell’s claim that the virtuous and non-virtuous agents fail to have matching perceptions without thinking of a thesis McDowell advocates elsewhere—namely, experiential disjunctivism. Roughly, experiential disjunctivism amounts to the thesis that perceptual experiences are essentially relational, so that a subject who undergoes a veridical perceptual experience and one who undergoes a phenomenologically indistinguishable illusory experience actually have different types of experiences. On this view, there is no “highest common factor” shared between verdical and illusory experiences which may be cited as an explanation for their phenomenological indistinguishability. Applying this idea to the case of virtue, McDowell may well argue that although the perceptual experience of the virtuous and non-virtuous agents may be in some sense indistinguishable, the fact that the latter’s experience is clouded by a competing desire entails that the non-virtuous agent is having a different type of experience. That McDowell may have had something along these lines in mind is suggested by his carefully placed qualification “in a way”, in his description of the shared perception of the virtuous and non-virtuous:

This is to allow that someone who fails to act virtuously may, in a way, perceive what a virtuous person would…but to insist that his failure occurs only because his appreciation of what he perceives is clouded, or unfocused, by the impact of a desire to do otherwise. (p. 54, Italics mine)

“In a way” is supposed to flag the fact that though similar, perhaps even indistinguishable in some sense, they are ultimately different perceptions and involve the use of different sensitivities. On this view, moral perceptions are to be individuated, in part, by the presence or absence of competing desires to do otherwise.

However, the disjunctive reading of moral perceptions seems powerless to free us from the aforementioned dilemma. First, even if we grant that the virtuous and non-virtuous undergo different types of perceptual experiences, it does not follow from this that they are exercising different types of sensitivities. Presumably, the same sensitivity can be exercised in different ways and can even give rise to different types of experiences. But since it is the exercise of a certain sensitivity, rather than the type of perceptual experience the sensitivity gives rise to, which is to be identified with virtue, then a disjunctive conception of perceptual experiences does little to ameliorate the present worry. Second, even if we allow that the sensitivities exercised by the virtuous and non-virtuous agents are in fact different, this only pushes us unto the second horn of the dilemma outlined earlier. If the virtuous agent has a different sensitivity to that of the non-virtuous agent, then (given that the sensitivity in question is to be equated with knowledge) the non-virtuous agent lacks the relevant piece of knowledge. But that is just to say that the non-virtuous agent suffers from a type of ignorance. Hence, if this is the correct diagnosis of the non-virtuous agent by McDowell’s lights, then McDowell’s position is no better than the Socratic solution.

In sum, McDowell seems confronted with the following dilemma. If he denies that a virtuous agent may have the same knowledge (i.e., moral sensitivity) that the virtuous agent has, then it seems to imply that the non-virtuous agent had no choice but to act non-virtuously. If, on the other hand, he affirms that the non-virtuous agent may have the same knowledge (i.e., moral sensitivity) that the virtuous person has in a particular situation, then given the equation of virtue with knowledge, McDowell’s position would imply that the non-virtuous agent is virtuous.

*All page numbers taken from the Mind, Value and Reality anthology.