Philosophical Perspectives, 28, Ethics, 2014

DUTY, DESIRE AND THE GOOD PERSON: TOWARDS

A NON-ARISTOTELIAN ACCOUNT OF VIRTUE

Nomy Arpaly
Brown University

This paper is about good people. I say that because when using the word
‘virtue’ one is often presumed to be writing about the phronimos. However, out-
side philosophy, the phrase ‘virtuous person’ is often used interchangeably with
the phrases ‘good person’ and ‘moral person’. I use it that way. The expression
‘good person’, which has equivalents in many languages, is not a product of
ancient Greece, and need not have the connotations of words like arête.
‘Good person’ has different connotations from ‘phronimos’ in many ways —
for example, the latter is associated with wit, tasteful social occasions, healthy
habits and high self-esteem. The former is not particularly associated with these.
The latter is associated with the good life (on Earth!) whereas the connection be-
tween the former and the good life is controversial. To a naı̈ve reader of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics1 they can seem quite different. For example, an undergrad-
uate student told me that a contemporary equivalent of Aristotle’s phronimos
is still admired, but he is not called “the virtuous person“ but rather“the cool
dude.” Upon hearing that remark, a friend suggested that, for the benefit of
undergraduates, one should translate “the virtuous person does fine things be-
cause they are fine” into “the cool person does awesome things because they are
awesome.” Another friend added “de re” – for surely a really cool person would
not be concerned with awesomeness de dicto!
Despite the differences in connotation between ‘phronimos’ and ‘good per-
son’, some eminent philosophers hold that the good person is, in fact, a
phronimos. I examine this possibility in section 5. Until then, let us ignore the
phronimos and take our intuitive cues from the (more familiar) good person.
Virtuous people act differently from the rest of us. They keep their promises,
work for good causes, risk themselves to defend innocent people from violence.
Virtuous people also feel different things from the rest of us. They are compas-
sionate. They do not feel Schadenfreude. They are pained (or indignant) at the
thought of injustice. Sometimes they feel a sense of duty (the nature of which will
be discussed in section 4). Virtuous people are also different from the rest of us
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in ways that involve cognition. They are much more likely to notice that someone
needs help or discern that a relationship between acquaintances has become too
paternalistic, and are unlikely to believe that women are dumber than men or to
believe common racial stereotypes are accurate.
Some philosophers hold that to be virtuous just is to have dispositions to
act, to act and feel, or to act, feel, and cognize in certain ways.2 There are,
however, problems with defining virtue purely dispositionally. The view that
virtue is merely a disposition to act is not usually held by those who take virtue
to be important. Thomas Hurka3 makes the following point about the view: a
person might think that moral behavior would be to her advantage and so be
disposed to perform the same actions that the virtuous person would, without
being virtuous herself.4 We can imagine her trying to get to heaven, for example,
certain that God observes her every action.
What about virtue as a disposition to act in certain ways and cognize in
certain ways? If our heaven-seeker is intelligent, she might acquire the cognitive
gifts of a typical virtuous person: she would be good at detecting someone is
in trouble, for instance. Always doing the right thing requires that one notice
such things. Apparently, intelligent narcissists are good at noticing other people’s
vulnerabilities (they like to exploit them) and so are good novelists, virtuous or
not.
It is admittedly harder to imagine a morally mediocre person who has the
same dispositions to feel that the virtuous person has: the person who simply de-
sires to go to heaven will not feel angry at a distant injustice, for example, whereas
a virtuous person might. However, scenarios are possible — albeit unlikely —
in which a morally mediocre person has (as a result of someone manipulating
her brain or of living in a strange would) the affective dispositions a typical
virtuous person has (in addition to the dispositions to act and cognize). This gap
between the virtuous person and her dispositions to various feelings can also be
seen when we notice the way we judge feelings in daily life, since we make such
judgments with much attention to the origins of feelings and not merely to the
dispositions that are found to exist.
Start from an example that does not involve science fiction, though it does
involve some stereotypes. Imagine Giovanna and Penelope feel the same amount
of indignation in response to a certain injustice. Assume that, in principle, indig-
nation is a morally appropriate visceral response to injustice. How much of it,
however, would be virtuous when it comes to the injustice we are discussing? You
might think the answer depends on the magnitude of the wrong, but this is not
the whole story. Imagine Giovanna has a general propensity for feeling strong
emotions. Conversely, Penelope is calm and usually unperturbed. Thus, even a
relatively small amount of indignation coming from the tranquil Penelope shows
that she cares about the injustice, whereas the same amount of indignation on
part of the irritable Giovanna signifies near-indifference. After all, Penelope is
rarely this upset, whereas Giovanna feels that level of nervous arousal whenever
traffic is bad. It is possible that the same amount of indignation would show
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virtue on part of Penelope but not on the part of Giovanna (conversely, the same
amount of not-so-righteous anger at a person who clumsily stepped on one’s
foot might show vice on part of Penelope and not Giovanna). Some differences
between people’s dispositions to feel moral emotions are morally neutral.
Doesn’t this mean simply that a disposition-based view of virtue with regard
to anger has to account for the fact that some people are less (or more) excitable?
This by itself is not a big problem. Consider, however, quite how many morally
neutral factors complicate our dispositions to feel. Vivid memories of racism
or even having watched a good movie dealing with racism at an impressionable
age can make you forever inclined to feel more angry at the thought of racial
injustice than you would otherwise feel, but being preoccupied with serious
personal problems or being on a major tranquilizer can numb your emotional
reaction to the injustice. Whether a given piece of news would make me angry
or merely disappointed depends on many factors, neurological and cultural,
universal and idiosyncratic. Similarly, my disposition to feel happiness when a
disaster is averted varies according to how surprised I am (am I an optimist?),
how exuberant my temperament is, how busy I am (maybe I an overwhelmed,
anxious activist who is already preoccupied with her next task), and whether I
have a mood disorder (that might, for example, preclude happiness altogether at
the moment, but not at the next moment).
Reminded of these complications in the patterns of how people feel, we
should conclude that, if a nefarious neuroscientist were able to tinker artfully
with the morally irrelevant factors that influence a person’s feelings, he would
be capable of producing all sorts of dispositions to feel. In particular, he would
be capable of producing a morally mediocre person with the typical virtuous
person’s patterns of feeling. If that same morally mediocre person was also
disposed to act well just in order to get into Heaven, and was disposed to attend
to morally significant facts about vulnerability, paternalism, and the like just out
of anthropological interest, then the morally mediocre person would have the
dispositions to act, think, and feel as the virtuous person does while remaining
morally mediocre nonetheless.5
In short, the problem with a purely dispositional theory of virtue is that
dispositions have grounds,6 and judgments of goodness in people seem sensitive
to these grounds. While I have not proven that all dispositional or partially
dispositional theories of virtue are false, I take it that the foregoing arguments
suggest it is an advantage for a theory of virtue to provide a relatively simple
explanation for this apparent sensitivity.
My purpose in this paper is to propose and defend a parsimonious theory
of that which grounds all three kinds of dispositions that the typical virtuous
person has, when what grounds the dispositions is indeed virtue and not just
some simulacrum of it. In a word, it is desires that ground all three sorts of
virtues.
My view is a development and hopefully an improvement on the view Tim-
othy Schroeder and I defended in In Praise of Desire,7 and I will here focus on
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defending the view from objections from two sources: Kantians who see a sense
of duty — not desire! — as the most important moral motivation (or the only
“real” one), and Neo-Aristotelians, mentioned earlier, who take the good person
to be a phronimos after all.

1. Virtue is Intrinsically Desiring the Right or Good

The virtuous person has her characteristic dispositions because she has a
strong intrinsic desire for the right or good (or various desires for different
aspects of the right or good, if such exist) and an aversion to the wrong or bad.
(For the remainder of this paper I will concentrate on the desire for the right
or good, but when I refer to it I mean to refer to the corresponding aversion as
well.)
My view is similar to Hurka’s view8 that virtue is loving the good and Robert
Adams’s9 view that virtue is being for the good. But Schroeder and I argued that
something simpler than love or “being for” will do.10 There are many views of
love, but none that we know make it obvious how one can literally love the right or
good.11 One can, however, desire it for its own sake. In unpublished work, Nicolas
Bommarito defends a view in which, instead of desires, he proposes caring about
or having concern for the right or the good, and the reader who thinks that
caring or being concerned with something involves more than intrinsic desire
might wish to consider this view along with mine. However, both Bommarito
and I assume that neither desiring nor caring is a cognitive state.12 By contrast,
Robert Adams’s “being for” has cognitive elements. (Further points of divergence
will become apparent soon.)
The desire or desires making a person virtuous are intrinsic desires involving
the right concepts.
They must be intrinsic desires because, as Aristotle says (with Hurka, Hurst-
house, and many others), the virtuous person pursues the right or good for its
own sake. She likewise feels happy to see the right done because it is the right,
and not because she sees a link between the right and something else she wants.
In addition to not being an instrumental desire, an intrinsic desire is also char-
acterized by not being a realizer desire13 — which rules out a desire for the right
or the good as part of a desire for all that’s recommended in the Bible, say, even
if doing what’s right or good is included, along with not mixing different kinds
of fibers in one’s garments, in doing all that’s recommended in the Bible. In fact,
in the natural course of things, the person who desires the right and the good
will have desires that are realizers of the desire for the right and the good. For
example, if the good is justice, the virtuous agent will desire, as part of justice,
that there be racial equality in her country. But this is to say that she will have an
intrinsic desire that matters for current theoretical purposes that then generates
a different desire — a realizer desire — that one might note but that does not
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itself matter for theoretical purposes, except for its being a sign of the intrinsic
desire.
Desire(s) constituting virtue(s) must be, not just for the right or good, but
for the right or good correctly conceived. What I have in mind is similar to
Michael Smith’s discussion of caring about morality de re.14 For example: if
simple utilitarianism is the right normative theory, being virtuous is having a
strong intrinsic desire that happiness be maximized conceived of as such, and not
conceived of merely as goodness being realized. In a world in which utilitarianism
is true, a non-utilitarian who has this desire can be virtuous even though, when
he acts on the desire and increases happiness, he does not think he is doing the
right thing conceived of as right. He would be an example of a good person who
holds a mistaken ethical view. Conversely, in this imagined utilitarian world, an
advocate of a grim religion might strongly intrinsically desire what she thinks of
as the right or good (in Smith’s words, desire the right or the good de dicto) but be
vicious because she is indifferent (or averse) to other people’s happiness, believing
the right or good to be a matter of following her sect’s (happiness-indifferent)
rules.
Let us switch from a utilitarian world to a world in which commonsense
morality is the true morality. Cases parallel to the cases above can again be
imagined. For a case of the de re desire without de dicto desire, consider Huck
Finn. Schroeder and I have argued that Huck Finn, when helping Jim escape
slavery (contrary to the dictates of his conscience), could be praiseworthy for his
action.15 If Huck’s motive in helping Jim is a strong intrinsic desire for the right
or the good de re, or one thing that is right or good (for example, that human
beings be treated with a certain respect), then Huck is in this respect a virtuous
person, despite his thinking of himself as bad. For a less dramatic example, take
the American college student who believes that Ayn Rand is right and selfishness
a virtue, but who “in practice” tells painful truths and helps others (etc.) even
when it requires self-sacrifice, as she has strong intrinsic desires for both fairness
and the wellbeing of others. Such people are regarded not as bad people who do
good things out of weakness but as good people who are bad at philosophy. It
was once said to me that an ethics professor need not be moral any more than
a geometry teacher needs to be triangular. The converse is also true: a moral
person need not be an ethicist.
For a case of the de dicto desire for the right and the good appearing without
the de re desire, consider a Nazi who believes that the highest good is glory for the
Aryan race and the destruction of the Jewish people, the latter being somewhat
more important. She thinks the right thing to do is do one’s best to bring about
these things. She strongly desires the right and the good as she conceives them,
is devoted to genocidal action, and is indifferent or hostile to things like human
wellbeing, fairness, and so on. This person is not virtuous, if ordinary thought is
any guide.
A question I often encounter at this stage is, “are you sure that there is
nothing virtuous at all in the de dicto desire? Not even a little bit?”
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Yes, I am sure. Perhaps an analogy between moral virtue and aesthetic

virtue can help here. To have a good taste in novels, one has to like novels that
have certain good-making features. Liking novels that you believe to be good
does not constitute good taste. Imagine someone who likes Redeeming Love.
Why? “Because it’s good,” he says. What makes it good? “It has a heartwarming
Christian message and it expresses strong emotions. Isn’t that what makes books
good?” This explanation does not make the person’s taste sound any better —
if anything it underscores how bad it is. Now suppose the Nazi likes burning
synagogues. Why? “Because it’s moral,” the Nazi answers. Why? “Because it
contributes to the destruction of the Jewish people.” This, I think, does not make
his moral “taste” less bad. (I address this question in detail in other work.16 )
I say virtue is an intrinsic desire for the right and the good. However, I do
not intend to explain here what the right and the good are — in other words,
defend a normative ethical view — though I make a start on doing so elsewhere.17
As Foot points out, if classical utilitarianism is true then, strictly speaking, there
is only one virtue — a type of benevolence.18 The intrinsic desire that happiness
be maximized may give rise to many instrumental desires and realizer desires,19
of course, and it might motivate one to cultivate various habits or traits, but in a
deep sense, it is the only true virtue if utilitarianism is true. Though the Kantian
right and good are harder to define, something similar is true for Kantianism:
there is only one basic virtue and it consist of desiring that Kantian right and
good (perhaps: to act in the way you would have everyone act). Since it is hard
to give examples of virtue without working assumptions about the right and the
good, I will assume, for the purpose of this paper and in keeping with tradition, a
more pluralistic view of the right and the good. I’ll assume that there is at least a
virtue of benevolence and a distinct virtue of fairness, and so the virtuous person
intrinsically desires at least two things — justice and the wellbeing of others. But
this assumption is not essential to the view presented here.

3. Theoretical Parsimony with Phenomenological Richness

The theory I am presenting here is parsimonious, but is it too much so?

Consider the effects that strong intrinsic desires have on us. Intrinsic desires
richly affect not just actions but also feelings and cognitions.
Consider first action. A person who intrinsically desires that P tends to act
so as to bring it about that P: if you intrinsically desire that people not suffer, you
will tend to act so that people not suffer. Not all intrinsic desires cause action, it
should be noted. As Galen Strawson argues, a creature who cannot act can still
intrinsically desire, for example, that the weather be sunny,20 and one can desire
not to have been born, or to receive a gift that arrives regardless of what one
does. Some other intrinsic desires, such as a desire for the wellbeing of someone
who is doing very well already, cause action rarely. Still, the general tendency
exists.
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Note that, if it is a desire that makes a virtue rather than the pattern of
actions (or disposition) itself, it follows a person who has the desire but cannot
act, or even a non-acting creature as per Strawson, is still good. The Aristotelian
tradition suggests that there is nothing good about the virtue of her who must
sleep all the time, and I agree that it is “no good” as far as the search for the
good life is concerned or as far as the potential beneficiaries of her potential
right actions are concerned. However, it would not do to say “Harry is not a
good person, he is in a coma” or “she used to be a good person until her body
became paralyzed.”21 Even if, given one’s theory of dispositions, one would deny
that the comatose or paralyzed person is disposed to act rightly in the face of
world hunger, one would not need to deny that the comatose or paralyzed person
has an intrinsic desire for people’s welfare, and so one would not have to deny
— on my theory — that the comatose or paralyzed person is good.
Consider feelings next.22 What we (non-instrumentally) desire determines
what we find pleasant or unpleasant. If one intrinsically desires victory for the
Red Sox one will be pleased when they win and displeased when they lose. If
you have sexual desires, you will feel pleasure when they are satisfied. You can
then develop an additional desire — a desire for the pleasure that you get when
your sexual desires are satisfied. This second layer of motivation, as one may
call it, must not prevent us from seeing that the sexual pleasure one can desire
is itself the result of intrinsic desire — in fact, a creature with no sexual desires
cannot experience sexual pleasure, and physical contact with someone one does
not desire does not produce pleasure.23 (A little more on sensuous sources of
pleasure should be said, to show how general the above pattern is. Consider the
pleasure one gets from eating a peach, and the related desires. The desire for
the pleasure of eating a peach is similar to the desire for the pleasure of sex.
The pleasure of eating the peach would not be there were you not to intrinsically
desire some experiences, such as sweetness and coolness, just for their own sakes.)
Even when we desire enjoyment, then, what we enjoy is determined by what we
intrinsically desire. Whether we are talking about what we desire completely
determining what we enjoy or just determining it to a large extent, conclusions
follow about the virtuous person.
A person with a strong intrinsic desire for the right or good will take pleasure
in different things, and will be displeased by different things, from the things
that please and displease someone without such a desire. If you strongly and
intrinsically desire the wellbeing of others you tend to feel pleasure when you
see suffering alleviated and displeasure when it increases. If you strongly and
intrinsically desire justice you will find reading certain portions of the newspaper
unpleasant. You might also develop a bit of a “second layer” of motivation —
for example, volunteer for a cause for the pleasure that feeling useful gives you.
Since almost all emotions are either pleasant or unpleasant, when your pattern of
pleasures and displeasures is different from that of others, your whole emotional
world is colored differently — you hopes, your fears, your loves and hates, what
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you find funny, not to mention things like anger. The emotional world of the
virtuous person is quite different from the world of the less virtuous person.
Being a little more careful: people feel pleasure at getting more of what they
desire than they are used to getting (what they take for granted), and displeasure
at getting less. Thus, the first bite of a peach on a hot day is the most pleasant
one, as you are most used to a hot and dry mouth when it happens, and least
take for granted the good qualities of the peach you bite into. We all desire
the convenience that comes with having working electricity, but we don’t enjoy
it when we are used to it. After six months in a remote hamlet, though, using
electricity can be a scintillating pleasure.
Sometimes you feel no pleasure because you are only “intellectually” aware
of desire satisfaction, and not “viscerally.” Thus we do not always enjoy actions
that promise future desire satisfaction. When I eat a peach, that causes the
immediate satisfaction of my desires for sweetness, coolness, etc. That results in
pleasure. When going to the dentist I understand that I am causing a future
increase in desire satisfaction: I strongly desire to avoid physical discomfort, this
desire is realized by a desire to avoid toothache, and here I am avoiding a future
toothache. However, my understanding stays almost exclusively “in theory.” It is
usually hard for a human being to feel pleasant relief simply because a potential
toothache in the relatively distant future is averted (you can’t make yourself
delight in electricity by cancelling next year’s trip to a Tibetan hamlet!). On the
other hand, going to the dentist causes an immediate frustration of my desire
to avoid physical discomfort. That is viscerally felt. Thus going to the dentist is
unpleasant even though I know that “in the long run” it will satisfy my desire to
avoid a toothache, and staying home will frustrate it.
Because of such effects, getting what one intrinsically desires only tends to
bring pleasure. A person who intrinsically desires justice might be so accustomed
to acting justly that she does not normally feel significant pleasure in doing
so. (She also might not feel pleasure in acting justly when she is motivated not
by a positive intrinsic desire to act justly but by an aversion to acting unjustly,
which would dispose her more to displeasure when acting unjustly). In other
cases, doing the right thing is a lot like going to the dentist, and such cases are
discussed in the section of this paper devoted to the sense of duty. By default,
though, a person who has a strong intrinsic desire for the right and good will
rejoice in right actions and good states of affairs and be sad or angry when
wrong is done or an evil happens.
Finally, consider how desires effect cognition.
First, they influence patterns of attention. A person who intrinsically desires
to see birds will notice a bird where someone else would not. She will also be
more likely to notice artistic representations of birds, sounds that resemble bird
calls, and the fact that the word ‘knowledge’ contains the word ‘owl’. Similarly,
she who strongly desires justice is more likely to notice the label that tells her in
what country a shirt was made or the sexist subtext in a popular song. A person
who strongly desires that people not suffer is more likely to notice the tortured
 Duty, Desire, and the Good Person / 67

face of the homeless man in the corner of the street, a man “invisible” to most
people. Since there are many injustices, and many people who need help, and
much that is relevant to these things, the world as seen through the eyes of a
person with a strong desire for right or the good is quite different from the world
as seen through the eyes of the average person.
Intrinsic desires also influence memory. Other things being equal, the more
one wants to talk to a person, the easier it is to remember her phone number.
After years of desiring the victory of the Red Sox, one remembers many games.
The virtuous person, when she looks at that label indicating the country in which
a shirt was made, remembers whether that country has sweatshops. Typically, she
also remembers her friends’ birthdays.
Desires also influence other kinds of learning, including the learning of
skills: a child learning to play the piano learns faster if he intrinsically desires
to play. Even if the desiring child and the bored child practice exactly the same
amount, the child whose correct play satisfies strong intrinsic desires will learn
more. Similarly, a person with a strong intrinsic desire for the right or the good
will be more likely to pick up such skills as talking to people without hurting
their feelings.
To recapitulate: a virtuous person notices and remembers different things
from the morally mediocre person, and he acquires different skills. Such differ-
ences in cognition between the virtuous and the average add up, compound even,
especially with experience. They amount to a very different way of experiencing
the world, a lot of accumulated wisdom, and surely an intuitive “feel” for moral
matters.
So the person who desires the right or the good, correctly conceived, is
special with respect to action, emotion, and cognition. Thus, when I say that the
virtuous person is nothing but a person who strongly desires the right or the
good (and who is lacking intrinsic desires for the wrong or the bad, of course)
I am not denying that virtue, in human beings, comes with a wide array of
characteristic actions, feelings, and cognitions. The phenomenon of the virtuous
person is as complex as any virtue theorist has ever held. But this complexity can
all come from having the relevant intrinsic desire or desires — because intrinsic
desires play rich, complex roles in our mental lives. Even a desire for the victory
of the Red Sox makes a person different emotionally and cognitively from her
partner who does not “get” sports. An intrinsic desire for the right and the good,
relevant in many more situations, can make one a different person in many more
ways. If several distinct things make up the right or good, the virtuous person
has several distinctive desires and is thus even more different from others.

4. Objections and Replies: Dutiful Feelings

Consider the sense that some actions are demanded of us rather than desired
by us: the sense that sometimes we act out of duty rather than inclination, as
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Kant might put it.24 A virtuous person might feel she must tell the truth, for
example, and that “must” feeling is different from the ordinary “I want to”
feeling.
To start, it is interesting to notice that a virtuous person who does something
supererogatory — performs some very risky action which she would not perceive
as required from anyone else — often feels at least as much of a sense of duty
as a person who performs what would normally be called a duty. What is going
on? Does the desire-based theorist of virtue (or the Humean in general) really
think that we do the right thing because we want to do it just like we drink coffee
because we want coffee?
Before I answer this question, recall that acting on desires is not as narcis-
sistic as some imagine. To act on a desire that P, one does not need to have “I
desire that P” as any part of her reason for action.25 If you have an intrinsic
desire for the wellbeing of your dog, and that desire motivates you to buy good
dog food, your reason for action is not that you desire that your dog be well but
rather that your dog would benefit from good dog food. You might hate yourself
and sincerely hold that the fact that you desire something never counts for it,
and thus have no desire to satisfy your desires; but acting on a desire to benefit
your dog does not require acting on a desire to satisfy one’s desires. A desire
to satisfy your dog’s desires is enough. One can draw an analogy here between
desire and belief. I see a cat with a large face and conclude it is probably a British
Shorthair. My conclusion is only made reasonable by my belief that large-faced
cats are usually British Shorthairs, but my reason for believing that the cat is a
British Shorthair is not even partly that Nomy Arpaly believes that large-faced
cats are usually British Shorthairs. It is simply that this cat has a large face, and
that large-faced cats are usually British Shorthairs.
Reminded of that, we can go back to asking: how can one do the right thing
out of a desire but feel like one is doing it out of duty?
Sometimes the intrinsic desire that motivates the agent is not an appetitive
desire — say, a desire to tell the truth — but an aversion — say, an aversion to
telling lies. The agent is therefore not facing the prospect of pleasure upon telling
the truth, only of displeasure upon telling a lie. And the agent is not feeling
appetitive excitement at the pursuit of truth-telling, but rather aversive inhibition
at doing something untruthful. In this way the agent does not feel “tempted” to
tell the truth, as no pleasure is promised to her and no excitement is engendered.
She feels she has to tell the truth. This, however, is not the whole story. It is
possible, even in this sort of case, that doing the right thing would produce more
displeasure than the displeasure of guilt (perhaps if one acts on one’s aversion to
naming names to the Nazis it would result in being tortured), and yet the sense
of duty is there.
The key to understanding how a sense of duty can accompany acting from
a desire is remembering that since psychological hedonism and psychological
egoism are false, and since intrinsic desire satisfaction sometimes comes without
 Duty, Desire, and the Good Person / 69

pleasure, it is perfectly possible for you to do the right thing because you desire
it — and still have “nothing in it for you.” An intrinsic desire for the right and
the good can feel like an ordinary desire when one gets immediate pleasure out
of acting well. However, the desire for the right and the good feels like duty
when you know acting on it would be quite unpleasant, and yet it motivates
you, despite competing desires acting on which would be pleasant or at least less
unpleasant. It feels even more like duty when one cannot even comfort oneself
with the abstract promise of some future pleasure, or, as in the case of going to
the dentist, a future absence of pain. Thus a person who believes that virtuous
people do the right thing because they want to do so is far from committed
to the view that for these virtuous people, doing the right thing is “just like”
drinking coffee because they desire coffee. In some cases, it is clearly not just like
it because drinking coffee is paradigmatically pleasant and doing the right thing
is often, as they say, a pain.
Recall the lesson of going to the dentist: an action that brings desire satis-
faction with it often does not bring pleasure with it if the desire satisfaction in
question is far in the future. Suppose I (strongly) intrinsically desire the right and
the good and, as a realization or “part” of that desire, I desire the wellbeing of
my graduate student. For the sake of my student’s wellbeing, I must tell him that
he is not cut out to be a philosopher. “Theoretically” I know this will improve
his life, and thus my desire for his wellbeing will be satisfied. However, viscer-
ally I only know that warning the student will cause him immediate misery, and
so, exactly because I desire his wellbeing, warning him is unpleasant for me. In
addition to that, warning the student will cause the frustration of some strong
non-moral desires I have: for example, he is perhaps going to be angry at me
for life, and I really don’t want that, and while I want the student’s wellbeing
more than I want to be liked by him, the frustration of the desire to be liked
is imminent whereas the satisfaction of my desire for his wellbeing is far in the
(uncertain) future, which makes the impact of the former on my mood much
great than that of the latter. Yet, since by hypothesis I am virtuous, my desire for
the student’s well being is the strongest. I am motivated by that desire to do the
right thing even though it does not sound like fun at all – it is not “tempting.”
“Temptations” is what we call my competing desires — the ones that I feel will
give me pleasure if satisfied.
An egoist enjoys it by default when her selfish desires are satisfied, but still
has to “drag” herself to the dentist, even though it’s to her advantage. Similarly
the virtuous person, by default happy for opportunities to do good, has to
“drag” herself to warn her student. If, in the situation just described, you fail
to warn your student it shows either of two things. One possibility is that you
do not have enough virtue, so you choose pleasant action over right action. The
other possibility is that, like many dentist-avoiders, you lack rationality — the
sort required when long-term considerations (like the student’s future wellbeing)
trump vividly present short-term considerations (like the suffering you’d cause
70 / Nomy Arpaly

him now). One way or another, so-called “acting from duty” is just acting from
an intrinsic desire for the right and the good — but joylessly.

5. Objections and Replies: The Roles of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Skill

I mentioned earlier the neo-Aristotelian view that the good person is a

phronimos. The idea is not necessarily that Aristotle’s list of virtues is the right
one, or that, as in my undergraduate student’s remark, the good person is a cool
dude. The idea is just that being a good person necessarily involves some types
of knowledge and know-how — especially practical wisdom (phronesis).
I said earlier that virtue can cause you to become cognitively special. For
example, due to your special concerns, you’ll more often notice the sad homeless
man in the corner and you’ll more often pick up social skills needed to avoid
unnecessarily hurting others’ feelings. However, noticing the homeless man simply
because you are an observant anthropologist does not entail that you are a better
person than you would otherwise be, nor does having social skills simply because
you are a trained actor. Conversely, you are not a worse person in virtue of failing
to notice the homeless man because you are so absent-minded that it is dangerous
for you to cross the road, or in virtue of failing to learn social skills due to your
autism.
This implies that the good person does not always do “the right thing, in the
right way, in the right circumstances,” as the familiar formula has it. A good, nay,
saintly person can, due to low intelligence, give money to a charity that a smarter
person would see is inefficient, or vote for a bad candidate whose campaign he
misunderstands. The person whose higher intelligence allows her to see through
the bogus charity or candidate is not thereby more virtuous than the less brilliant
person who falls for them. A person’s intelligence is morally neutral.
Do note the word ‘person’; a cat cannot be virtuous. A cat, however, cannot
be vicious either, because cats cannot possess concepts necessary for desiring (or
desiring the opposite of) the right or the good, even de re. Cats cannot possess
concepts of helping, harming, promising, lying, unfairness, and so on, and are
thus not only unable to desire such things or be averse to them but even unable
to be indifferent to them the same way a vicious human is. The psychopath, who
knows that he causes harm but is indifferent to this fact, is quite different from
the cat, who doesn’t quite have the concept of harming (and thus, I think, the
psychopath can be vicious). I do not know at what age a child fully possesses
concepts of harm or equality (etc.), but from that moment on, a child can be
virtuous — or vicious.
This is controversial. Hursthouse, for one, thinks that any theory is in trouble
if it implies that, except for the occasional freak of nature, adolescents can be
virtuous.26 They can be “nice,” have “natural virtue,” but not be virtuous.
I respect the distinction between natural virtue or “niceness,” on the one
hand, and real virtue on the other. No child (or adult) is virtuous simply for
 Duty, Desire, and the Good Person / 71

being what personality psychologists call “agreeable.” Some agreeable (“nice”)

people do not desire the right or the good (and some natural grouches do).
However, virtuous adolescents are not freaks of nature. I have had first-year
undergraduate students who work closely with the homeless and have done so
since high school, or who wanted help with moral dilemmas stemming from the
realities of political activism. I, preoccupied at the time with whether I’ll get
some paper into some journal, admired their moral seriousness. Perhaps, in their
effort to do the right thing in complex situations, they benefited from the advice
of those more experienced, but they were good people.
In addition to low intelligence, attention problems, and lack of experience
in life, I mentioned autism as a morally neutral condition. But do autistic people
not lack empathy, and is lack of empathy not inimical to virtue?
Two things must be distinguished: detecting that others are suffering and
the distress known as “feeling another’s pain.” The two things are connected
through intrinsically desiring other people’s wellbeing. If you are neurologically
normal and you intrinsically desire my wellbeing, and if you then detect my
suffering, you’ll “feel my pain.” If you are autistic, and you intrinsically desire
my wellbeing, you might fail to “feel my pain” — but only because you cannot
detect that I am in pain! This is no more a moral defect than being deaf and thus
unable to hear me scream. When “lack of empathy” is mentioned as vicious, one
refers to the case of the narcissist or psychopath fully detecting my suffering and,
due to being indifferent to my wellbeing, feeling nothing. That is a moral defect.
Could autism, low (but still recognizably human) intelligence or lack of
experience be inimical to the good life? I do not know, but my view is compatible
with the view that these conditions can make your life less good, harm you in
some respect, or just make it more challenging for you to achieve a good life.
It is very reasonable to think the same of blindness, poverty, severe trauma, and
other bad things that can happen to good people without making them any less
good.
I see what I take to be the fact that intelligence is neutral with respect
to virtue as a potential problem for the neo-Aristotelian, but what if the neo-
Aristotelian replies by making a distinction between being intelligent in the
contemporary colloquial sense — i.e. being “smart” — on one hand and being
wise on the other? I do not wish to deny that wisdom and “smarts” are different
things. Every academic knows that it is possible to be smart without being wise.
What I doubt is that it is possible to be wise without being somewhat smart. On
a roughly Aristotelian view, wisdom involves deliberative abilities, thinking well
about one’s ends in life, and applying imprecise generalization to unique moral
situations. Being less than smart limits the growth of one’s deliberative abilities,
even with good will, experience, and practice. Thinking well about one’s ends
requires just as much intellect as thinking well about one’s means, which everyone
agrees is helped by “smarts.” Applying imprecise generalizations to a unique
moral situation can require not only smarts (if the situation is complicated) but
even, at times, a sort of quickness (if one has no time for systematic deliberation
72 / Nomy Arpaly

before responding to the situation). If there is a way to be wise without being

smart, the neo-Aristotelian needs to explain what it is.

6. Conclusion

Kant says that the only absolutely good thing in a person is a good will.
Virtue ethicists, on the other hand, hold that many things make a person virtuous
— thoughts, feelings, and dispositions to act alike. Kant said the virtuous person
acts out of duty. Virtue ethicists say she often enjoys doing the right thing. In
this paper, I have sketched a view that appeals to intuitions from both camps:
the view that behind the thoughts, feelings and actions that appear to make up
virtue there is just one thing, and that is the desire for the right and good. I
hope I have pointed to how the rich phenomenology described by virtue ethicists
and the deep resonance of the idea of duty do not automatically rule out the
possibility that wanting the right things is, ultimately, what makes one a good
person.

Notes

1. Aristotle (1999).
2. Rosalind Hursthouse and Julia Annas are two of the leading examples of philoso-
phers who seem to accept the “disposition to act, feel and think” view. See Annas
(2011), Hursthouse (1999). See Driver (1989) for a different take on the cognitive
side of virtue.
3. Hurka (2001).
4. Julia Driver is a virtue theorist who argues (roughly) that all virtue requires is
the right consequences, so that having the right dispositions must suffice for
virtue. But this very consequentialist understanding of the nature of virtue is in
the minority. Here I will presuppose, rather than argue for, its falsity. See Driver
(2001).
5. This, I acknowledge, is not a full argument against the dispositional theory of
virtue. For something closer to a full argument, see Arpaly and Schroeder (2014),
where, in addition to connecting virtue and desire, we disagree with the claim
that a desire is a disposition to act. See also Schroeder (2004) for a more general
argument about mental dispositions and their grounds.
6. Except perhaps metaphysically fundamental dispositions, but no disposition to
act, feel, or think is of this sort.
7. Arpaly & Schroeder (2014).
8. Hurka (2001).
9. Adams (2006).
10. Arpaly & Schroeder (2014).
11. Compare the theories of Ebels-Duggan (2008), Frankfurt (1999), Kolodny (2003),
Solomon (2002), Stump (2006), and Taylor (1976). Velleman (1999) holds that in
loving a person one is oriented to what is morally valuable in her, but loving a
 Duty, Desire, and the Good Person / 73

person is still not loving the good on Velleman’s view. On many other theories,
to love the right or good requires that one intrinsically desire the wellbeing of
the right or good, and it is quite a puzzle how one would literally desire such a
thing.
12. So we hold a theory of desire on which desires are neither cognitions (as in
Scanlon 1998) nor perceptual representations (as in Stampe 1986 or Oddie 2005).
13. A realizer desire occurs when we desire something as a part or an instance of
something else that we desire intrinsically. My desire that Tim not have a cold is
a desire for something that realizes the content of my desire that Tim be healthy.
14. Smith (1994).
15. Arpaly & Schroeder (1999, 2014). I have discussed and defended the claim ex-
tensively in Arpaly (2003).
16. Arpaly, forthcoming (a). See also my post “Moral Concern de Dicto, Again” on
the ethics blog PEASoup.
17. Arpaly, forthcoming (b).
18. Foot (1983).
19. Again, a realizer desire is a desire for something that is a realization of something
intrinsically desired. If I intrinsically desire that everyone be happy, then I will
also desire as a realization of that content that Fred be happy.
20. Strawson (1994).
21. See Bommarito (Unpublished).
22. For a fuller discussion of all that follows, see Arpaly and Schroeder (2014). For
an even fuller discussion, and a detailed defense, see Schroeder (2004).
23. Here I agree with Blackburn (1998) who has a long argument to the same effect.
24. Kant (1998).
25. See Pettit and Smith (1990).
26. Hursthouse (1999).

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