If the Seven are good, common places to start a philosophical psychology, then they should show up in the works of psychologists. They do.
A startling new book, published under the auspices of the American Psychological Association, edited and largely written by Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004), lends empirical support to the Seven, at any rate within the European tradition in which they were theorized. It seeks, as the philosopher Peter Danielson says in another connection, the “ethical genome.”[1] In 644 big-format text pages, using 2300 citations to the technical literature in clinical and social psychology and related fields, the 40 drafters of the chapters (which Peterson and Seligman then rewrote) present a “manual of the sanities,” that is, the “positive psychology” of healthy people. Studying sanity is an idea that the psychologist members the board for the Values in Action Institute of the Mayerson Foundation, which sponsored the volume, such as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (remember: “CHICK-sent-me-high) and Howard Gardner, have been especially known for.
Peterson, Seligman, and the others detect 24 “ strengths of character,” on the basis of ten criteria, not all of which are satisfied for every strength (about half of the 24 do satisfy all ten). A character strength:
Ten Criteria for Twenty-Four Strengths of Character
A character strength:
contributes to the good life, as for example:
Curiosity
Social Intelligence
is valued in its own right:
Integrity
Humility
does not diminish other people:
Kindness
Hope
Perspective
does not have an admirable opposite:
Persistence
Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
Gratitude
can be assessed (that is, observed):
Vitality
Fairness
Leadership
Persistence
is embodied in human exemplars:
Love
Spirituality
Creativity
shows sometimes in children as prodigies:
Love of Learning
Self-Regulation
shows sometimes in total absence:
Humor
Open-Mindedness
Bravery
finds support in human institutions:
Forgiveness and Mercy
Citizenship
Source: Peterson and Seligman 2004, pp. 29-30 and throughout.
The ten criteria on the left side are on their face useful reflections on the virtues. Yet if they were merely speculative the exercise would be much less interesting. The authors, however, take seriously the matching of the criteria with the psychological literature, quantitative and qualitative. In other words the 24 strengths of character not mere assertions but findings, summarizing a gigantic scientific literature.
The 24 species of strengths are clustered into the encompassing genuses of: Courage, Humanity, Justice, and so forth—that is to say precisely the “virtues [,] . . . the core characteristics valued by philosophers and religious thinkers.”[2] The authors number them as six rather than seven, but this is mainly because they lump Hope and Faith together in one virtue named Transcendence, that is, “strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning.”[3] Five of these “High Six” virtues they identify lay down with ease on the classical Seven—Transcendence [that is, Faith and Hope], Courage, Humanity [that is, Love, which appears in their classification as a “character strength” within what they view as the wider virtue], Justice, Temperance.
The only lack of fit is their genus of Wisdom-and-Knowledge, which is not Prudence seen as practical wisdom, Aristotle’s phronēsis, but intellectual strengths of character, namely, creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective. These are desirable strengths, surely. But in the classical definitions they would not be virtues at all, but aptitudes ethically indifferent—such as having a high percentage of fast-twitch muscles, the better to run a record mile or from the police. Or they would be sub-species of Prudence, not a genus substituting for it. Or perhaps they would be subspecies of Love of learning and or of Hope for a touch of the transcendent in art and science. Aquinas in fact did not believe that such “habits,” as he calls them, are properly classified as virtues.[4]
The psychologists instead put their version of what they call “Prudence” under the cardinal virtue of Temperance, and define it narrowly as “being careful about one’s choices; not taking risks.” This is a tiny part of the wider classical or Aquinian or Smithian concept of Prudence, and is in fact more naturally placed under Temperance. It’s the virtue of Proper Caution. Psychologists are likely to identify such a thing as “not taking risks” with what they call “impulse control,” which is rather easy to measure in experiments and questionnaires, and can even be found in a part of the brain. The drafting author of the chapter directly on Prudence, Nick Haslam, spends two pages worrying about such a reduction.
But in the classical definitions it is Temperance, not Prudence, which is the virtue of controlling impulses. Haslam, as revised by Peterson and Seligman, states flatly that “Aristotle does not . . . equate phronēsis with. . . impulse control,” which is correct. Aristotle and Plato and the rest had another word for self-control, sophrosynē [from sophron, sober], which Cicero translated as temperantia.[5] Prudence in the classical definitions is intellectual and calculative, like Justice, not emotion-controlling, like Temperance and Courage. Prudence belongs with the intellectual virtues, not with Temperance, and indeed could be said, as all writers from Plato to Adam Smith did say, to be the chief of the intellectual virtues.
Having criticized the Peterson and Seligman psychologists on this score I should admit the great truth of a theme underlying their work: that emotion and intellect are intertwined, not always to be distinguished—the book has four citations to Antonio Damasio’s thinking on the matter; though none to Martha Nussbaum’s. But that is precisely why, as the team asserts and as Aristotle, Aquinas, Adam Smith, Martha Nussbaum, and Deirdre McCloskey also assert, the virtues do make a coherent system, and not merely a fungible list of Good Things You Might Want to Get Hold Of.
Aquinas’ definition of Prudence, for example, is that Prudence is “any virtue which causes good in reason’s consideration.”[6] Prudence deals “rightly with those things that are for the sake of the end.” It is “reason rightly deliberating, judging, and commanding.” “There can be no moral virtue without prudence.”[7] Prudence as know-how, that is, figures in the exercise of any virtue. It should not be sorted away as a minor aspect of Temperance.
But I also agree with Peterson, Seligman, and their collaborators that the exact sorting of strengths into the wider virtues is not very important to their project, since their empirical work goes on always at the level of “strengths” or at the still lower level of “situational themes.”
Yet the sorting is important for my own project, namely, finding how the classical virtues lie down on capitalism. The team appears to me to have sorted mistakenly here, mainly because it has not looked carefully enough into the meaning in Western ethical history of “Prudence” as against “Wisdom” and “Temperance.” That’s no great sin in a splendid book and project. After all, even a well-regulated team of over 40 people can’t do everything, and they are to be congratulated for their just and prudent gestures towards the history of ethics.
One side of the problem, I would argue, is that the authors have confused phronēsis, practical wisdom, with sophia, theoretical wisdom. This at any rate is the way Aristotle typically used sophia, as supreme and scientific knowledge. According to Liddell and Scott, earlier sophia refers in fact to “skill” or indeed “practical wisdom.” You could contrast phronēsis instead with episteme, the usual Greek word for knowledge.[8] But anyway phronēsis is devalued by the prestige of theory. Aquinas did not think theoretical, speculativus wisdom was a virtue at all, but a gift of the Holy Spirit, though he himself possessed the gift to a miraculous degree. Aquinas distinguished for example the theoretical “knowledge” of chastity, the kind, say, a philosopher might have, from the prudential “knowledge by connaturality” that a truly chaste person has in her life.[9]
The definition of wisdom given in Chapter 2, “Universal Virtue? Lessons from History,” drafted by Katherine Dahlsgaard, depends revealingly on a German source, namely, certain researchers at the Berlin Max Planck Institute. It is “revealing” because as I’ve noted all Germanic languages except English have difficulty in translating Latin prudentia = Greek phronēsis. The Berliner Max Planckers speak of wisdom as “good judgment and advice about important but uncertain matters of life.”[10] Yes. But this is precisely phronēsis, or Latin practical prudentia, not Germanic Weisheit or wisdom, which mixes the practical and the theoretical. The Dutch word for philosophy is wijsbegeerte, wis[dom] desire, a calque on the Greek literal meaning, “love of theoretical wisdom.” English/French/Latin “prudence” is not Aristotle’s theoretical sophia, which Cicero translated as scientia and sapientia. Phronēsis /prudentia/prudence is a knowledge of means, not of ends, good judgment in practical matters, not a command of theories.
The Dahslgaard-drafted chapter quotes the Yale psychologist R. J. Sternberg (1998), another prominent psychologist on the board of the Values in Action Institute. Sternberg writes about one of his three sorts of intelligence: wisdom “is involved when practical intelligence is applied to . . . a balance of various self-interests . . . with the interests of others.”[11] Sternberg is here precisely not speaking of scientia or sapientia but of prudentia mixed with justitia. Note that he even uses the phrase which translates Aristotle’s phronēsis: “practical wisdom.”
And so later in the book, the Peterson-Seligman book repeatedly elides theoretical wisdom and practical prudence. The Haslam-drafted chapter on Prudence does a better job sometimes, because he has evidently troubled to read Aristotle, if not perhaps Aquinas. But even Haslam gets entangled in sophia, maybe because he was saddled with the group’s too-wide definition of “Wisdom.” [12]
The group have also, on the other border of the word “prudence,” as I said, confused prudence with temperance. Haslam in particular seems to struggle honorably with it. The confusion is important because most of the psychological measures of Prudence mix it with other virtues. Thus the five-factor model of personality traits developed by Costa and McCrae speaks of “conscientiousness” as a prime trait. It is said to be made up of classically prudential facets such as “competence, order, and deliberation,” but then also Justice, in “dutifulness,” Hope, in “achievement striving,” and Temperance, in “self-discipline.”[13]
Haslam himself says that “Prudence therefore implies a balance and harmony . . . . play[ing] a mediating role, . . . ensuring that hope is tempered by realism.”[14] This is Temperance, not Prudence. Or rather, as his unconscious use of “tempered” suggests, it is an amalgam of the know-how to plan and the will-power to carry out the plan. The one is Prudence, the other Temperance. Haslam speaks of “the components of prudence having to do with balance,” but immediately admits that they “fall under Aristotle’s concept of moderation”—sophrosynē is the world Aristotle used for the virtue; and to metron, the [golden] mean, for the corresponding method.
The ethical tradition of the West, in short, would shuffle some of the character strengths the psychologists have examined under other heading. In particular it would place under a virtue of Prudence some of the strengths now under “Wisdom and Knowledge,” such as open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective, and under “Humanity” the strength called “social intelligence” and under “Justice” the strength called “leadership.” It would rename the strength now called “prudence” as “caution,” or “impulse control,” and leave it under “Temperance,” where it appears to belong.
But no matter. What is anyway striking is that a group of modern clinical and social psychologists, using largely Western evidence, have on the whole confirmed what ur-Westerners such as Aristotle and especially Aquinas discerned by other means: that the virtues among we Westerners (at least) are these particular Seven, and that they work as a system in the best of our lives and the best of our communities.
The philosopher John M. Doris has challenged such systems, calling them the theory of “globalism,” the notion that people “have” characters, “robust traits or evaluatively integrated personality structures.”[15] He points out the impressive body of evidence from experimental psychology that people are in fact highly sensitive to situation—that an ordinary Ukrainian can be made into an extermination-camp guard reasonably easily. He notes, too, that non-Western societies, such as the Japanese, “interpret behavior more in terms of situations and much less in terms of personal dispositions than is typical in the West.”[16] Doris’ book is a model of philosophical psychology, even more thorough, if such a thing can be imagined, than Peterson and Seligman, at any rate per person. But in the end he admits that our ethical stories in our culture and our notions of Courage and Faith are important for ethical judgment. He thinks that being realistic about the stories and the notions, noting how fragile and specifically Western the notion of character is, “tuning down” our virtues, will make us better.[17] Could be, and at any rate a philosophical psychology is one way to find out.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Danielson, personal conversation January 2005. Danielson runs at the University of British Columbia an amazing inquiry into what people actually think about the virtues.
[2] Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 13.
[3] Peterson and Selgiman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 30.
[4] Aquinas, Treatise on the Virtues (Summa theologiae), c. 1270, IaIIae, ques. 57, art. 1.
[5] Haslam in Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 480; Cicero, On Duties, I. xxvii, 93.
[6] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 61, art. 3 and 4. These are pages 112 and 113 in John Oesterle, St. Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on the Virtues (which consists of Ia IIae, questions 49-67).
[7] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 58, art. 4; Oesterle, p. 86. Also Ia IIae, q. 65, a. 2; Oesterle, p. 143.
[8] As do Jonsen and Toulmin, Casuistry, 1988, pp. 58-74.
[9] Cited in Novak, Business as a Calling, 1996, p. 2.
[10] Quoted in Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 39.
[11] Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 39. The other two of his dimensions are analytic and creative intelligence. Sternberg by the way suffered from test anxiety as a child and has become an eloquent spokesman against one-dimensional theories of intelligence.
[12] Sarah Broadie accepts her co-editor Christopher Rowe’s translation of “wisdom” unmodified as the word for phronēsis. But she makes clear that it is practical not theoretical, as the Philosopher himself said (Broadie, “Philosophical Introduction,”2002, p. 46).
[13] Haslam, “Prudence,” in Peterson and Seligman, p. 482.
[14] Haslam, “Prudence,” in Peterson and Seligman, p. 480, italics supplied.
[15] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 114.
[16] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 105.
[17] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 169. This is the last page—a short book, in which nonetheless Doris makes use of fully 750 items of bibliography, ranging from thorough use of Lifton on the Nazis to Conrad on Lord Jim.