![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Traditional neo-Aristotelian accounts hold that temperance and continence are distinct character traits that are distinguished by the extent to which their bearers experience motivational conflict. In this paper, I formulate two pairs of necessary conditions – which, collectively, I call the conformity thesis – that articulate this distinction. Then, drawing on work in contemporary social and personality psychology, I argue that the conformity thesis is false. Being highly self-controlled is the best, psychologically realistic candidate for continence. However, our best evidence suggests that highly self-controlled/continent people do not experience more or stronger desires that conflict with their evaluative judgments than others, and they are not particularly good at directly resisting these desires. In this way, actual continent people exhibit motivational harmony that is more similar to the traditional picture of temperance. On the other hand, they achieve this harmony because they are able to effectively employ indirect strategies for handling motivational conflict. These strategies are correctly associated with continence. Recognizing that temperance and continence are overlapping character traits puts us in a better position to understand, and design interventions to improve, the neuropsychological capacities that enable humans to intelligently manage their desires.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Paul S. Davies and to two anonymous referees for this journal for comments that improved earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful for a Scheduled Semester Research Leave from William & Mary, which supported my work on revisions in Fall 2020.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. As W.F.R. Hardie puts the contrast: “The man who does what is right in spite of opposing desires is given by Aristotle the name conventionally translated ‘continent’ (enkratēs). He is distinguished from the man who is temperate (sōphrōn), whose desires are in harmony with the right rule, being neither excessive nor defective” (Hardie, Citation1968, p. 138).
2. In what follows, I will set aside general worries about the existence of character traits or their causal efficacy (such as those motivated by situationism) and assume that character traits do exist and causally contribute to our behavior. This will allow me to avoid conditional claims like the one to which this footnote is appended.
3. Kristjánsson offers this as a gloss on Owen Flanagan’s “principle of minimal psychological realism.”
4. To anticipate the discussion in Section 2, I am not claiming that psychological realism, as a methodological constraint, itself demands that measures of trait self-control turn out to measure traits that lie on the continence/incontinence spectrum. Rather, I am claiming that, given the facts about highly self-controlled people, high trait self-control is our best current candidate for the trait of continence. This claim depends on empirical facts about this particular case, not merely on a general methodological constraint.
5. If it is “possible in principle” for humans to be virtuous, then aren’t living human beings in some sense “capable” of becoming virtuous? Fleming could appeal to different kinds of modality to address the apparent inconsistency in her claim. Earlier in her article she indicates that “in principle” possibility, in this case, is determined by the “sort of creatures that we are” (Fleming, Citation2006, p. 27), whereas she could claim that the “capabilities” of actual humans reflect a more restricted kind of modality than this, one that is limited by the capacities that living humans contingently have happened to have. This strikes me as an odd, overly idealized view of “human nature,” however.
6. Fleming claims that a conception of virtue is psychologically realistic if “the condition that it models is such that some number of human beings might, with sufficient training and so forth, achieve, or at least hope to approximate, it” (Fleming, Citation2006, pp. 31 n.11). I assume that Fleming’s “might” here refers to what living humans are capable of, not to what is supposedly only “in principle” possible for us. See previous note.
7. Aristotle claims that temperance concerns only those pleasures that humans share with other animals, which he claims are the “pleasures of touch” (NE III.10, 1118a23-b8; p. 1765) or what are often called “appetitive pleasures.” For some nice discussion of this point, see Young (Citation1988). There are disputes about (1) whether Aristotle takes continence to be properly contrasted with virtue in general (the “broad scope” view) or only with temperance (the “narrow scope” view) and (2) regardless of which view Aristotle held, which is the correct view of continence. I am neutral regarding the correct interpretation of Aristotle, and, although I lean toward the broad scope view, none of my discussion depends on it. For more on these disputes, see Gould (Citation1994, p. 177), Stohr (Citation2003), and Baxley (Citation2007, pp. 421, n.17).
8. There are at least three dimensions of assessment-desire conformity: (1) the likelihood that a conflicting desire will occur: according to the conformity thesis, temperate people will be unlikely to experience conflicting desires in a given situation; (2) the number and variety of objects of occurrent desire that (fail to) conform to one’s assessments of value: according to the conformity thesis, temperate people will have a small number and few kinds of occurrent conflicting desires; (3) the strength of the occurrent desires in (2): according to the conformity thesis, temperate people will have weak occurrent conflicting desires.
9. I thank an anonymous referee for this point, which prompted me to modify my initial formulation of the conformity thesis.
10. One might want to adopt a more complicated, multi-dimensional account of “remarkable” assessment-desire conformity that incorporates more of the dimensions discussed in note 8.
11. This proposal for what counts as “remarkable” assessment-desire conformity is co-extensive, in the actual world, with the claim (discussed above) that one has “remarkable” assessment-desire conformity if and only if one’s assessment-desire conformity is above average (assuming that the average assessment-desire conformity remains constant). However, it avoids making one’s temperance (or lack thereof) a property that one has only relative to a population to which one belongs. For example, everyone in a given world could have more of their occurrent desires conform to their evaluative assessments than the average percentage of occurrent desires that have conformed in the actual world (say, 53% or whatever). It also allows that everyone in the future (in the actual world) could be temperate (if they all have assessment-desire conformity above 53%).
12. The last item is “reversed,” as psychologists say.
13. Mele draws a similar distinction between “brute” and “skilled” resistance (Mele, Citation1987, p. 26). Duckworth et al.’s (Citation2016) distinction between “situational” and “intrapsychic” strategies of self-control is also relevant here as it, in effect, provides a finer-grained taxonomy of indirect resistance. Only one of the intrapsychic strategies (response modulation) counts as direct or brute resistance; the other two intrapsychic strategies (cognitive change (also known as ‘construal’) and attentional deployment) and both of the situational strategies (situation selection and situation modification) are indirect forms of resistance. See LLevy (Citation2017, p. 206) on construal as an indirect self-control strategy, which has been emphasized by Kentaro Fujita and colleagues (see, e.g. Fujita, Citation2011).
14. See, e.g. Gillebaart and de Ridder (Citation2015) and Lindner et al. (Citation2017).
15. The phenomenon of ego depletion has been proposed as part of the highly influential “strength” or “resource” model of self-control and is supposed to be a state in which one’s limited self-control resources are depleted. Whether self-control really depends on a limited resource is a controversial issue (see, e.g. Inzlicht et al. (Citation2016) for just one of many critiques). My argument is independent of this debate.
16. See LLevy (Citation2017, pp. 201–3) for discussion of the latter three of these studies.
17. In order to justify identifying high trait self-control with continence, a descriptivist theory may need to claim that it is more important for theorizing in moral psychology to keep the concept of continence tied to an ability to delay gratification (and the prudential benefits that brings) than to any particular way in which that ability is manifested. By contrast, Levy seems to take continence to be (analytically? necessarily?) tied to being good at directly (or at least deliberately or effortfully) resisting conflicting desires (Levy, Citation2017, pp. 203–4). Using a more causally-historically oriented theory of reference would require that ‘high trait self-control’ and ‘continence’ are at least similar to natural kind terms in that we can use them to refer to those people (pointing at the highly self-controlled), who we have now discovered are, contrary to the stereotype of continence, not strong willed. This does not, however, imply that high trait self-control/continence is a natural kind, and I do not assume that it is. Cf. Herdova (Citation2017).
18. Those who think that analyticity is more philosophically important than I do may take this paper as an exercise in “conceptual engineering,” whereas I see it as a project in naturalistic metaphysics.
19. It is not clear that high trait-self control/continence requires (Temp1). E.g. the continent person may experience a significant number of conflicting occurrent desires but use the indirect strategies of cognitive change/construal and attentional deployment/distraction to avoid acting on them. However, if Duckworth et al. (Citation2016, pp. 39–40) are right and “earlier intervention is best,” then a form of continence that does satisfy (Temp1) is likely to be more effective than one that does not, since it involves intervening before occurrent conflicting desires even arise. I return to this point below and in Section 3.
20. Levy comes close to drawing a connection between high trait self-control and temperance in the passage quoted above. His emphasis on habitually acting based on a correct perception of the situation (buying “the smaller tub of ice cream because that’s the right size) sounds very much like temperance. Indeed, Levy uses the word “moderation” (usually taken to be synonymous with “temperance”) in the title of his paper, although, strangely, he does not explicitly discuss moderation/temperance (particularly its relation to high trait self-control) anywhere in the paper itself.
21. Thus, on this view, temperate people would differ from the continent in not satisfying (Con2*).
22. Note that the first part of the italicized portion of the above quotation is in tension with the second. If forethought were only a form of enkrateia (and not a form of phronesis) and the phronimos merely “acts as if he were an enkrates,” then Rorty should have written that he merely simulates forethought, acts “as if” he had it. Instead, she (correctly) writes that the phronimos actually exercises forethought. Callard also emphasizes that one component of phronesis is a kind of self-aware foresight that consists in an agent’s “acting in accordance with a general – and future oriented – understanding of the kind of thing he is” (Callard, Citation2017, pp. 51–2).
23. I agree with the traditional view that temperance is a mean between having excessive (self-indulgent) desires and deficient ones (being insensible) (see Aristotle (Citation1984, NE 1107b6-8, 1119a11-20, 1151b23-32, pp. 1749, 1819–20); Baxley (Citation2007, p. 406); Scarre (Citation2013, p. 15); Stark (Citation2001, p. 449); Stohr (Citation2003, p. 357). It seems that if, for every empirically possible situation, someone did not need to use indirect strategies to act in accordance with their evaluative judgments, then they would be insensible to the relevant object of desire (rather than temperate). For, if the object is valuable at all, there will be some possible situation in which that value conflicts with (but is outweighed by) the value of virtue and thus in which the corresponding conflicting desire is “naturally strong” and needs to be indirectly resisted if one is to act virtuously. See Baxley (Citation2007, pp. 406, 415).
24. Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to clarify this. Note that the passage I quoted from Rorty by itself does not result in temperance collapsing into a form of continence. For, she is assuming that (Con1) is true and that no continent individuals satisfy (Temp1), which I argue against above.
25. Of course, one could claim that temperate people are not overly optimistic in this way since they are truly virtuous. However, I suggest that the better self-understanding that is part of phronesis consists in knowing their own limitations (including their tendency to be overly optimistic): hence the need for foresight about how they would act in a position of “naturally strong temptation.”
26. Jeffrey Scarre seems to be saying that temperance is a variety of continence when he writes that temperance “is continence that has matured with practice and habit” (Scarre, Citation2013, p. 3). However, he also continues to use the term ‘continence’ in narrow sense that contrasts with temperance and is associated with effort and direct resistance and which he claims that the temperate person will never fully “move beyond” (Scarre, Citation2013, pp. 6, 8, 15, 17). This suggests an alternative reading of the p.3 quotation, according to which the temperate person was continent but is no longer (just as a butterfly “is a caterpillar that has matured” but is not, thereby, a kind of caterpillar), even though she can never fully “move beyond” some narrow-sense continent (caterpillar-ish) ways.
27. There is evidence that “acting self-controlled,” by directly resisting conflicting desires, is not only negatively correlated with trait self-control but also negatively correlated with individual well-being (Grund & Carstens, Citation2019, p. 69).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Matthew C. Haug
Matthew C. Haug is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at William & Mary. His research is focused on topics in philosophy of mind, philosophical methodology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.