Main authors discussed: Susan Stark, John McDowell, Peter Geach

Aristotelian virtue ethics holds that having appropriate emotions is a key component of stable virtue.  On a standard view, part of what distinguishes the virtuous from the merely continent is that the former will not, while the latter may, experience emotional conflict or ambivalence.  David Carr argues, on the contrary, that to the extent it reflects genuine moral conflict, emotional ambivalence may actually be a sign of virtue, and lack of emotional conflict a mark of mere continence.

After establishing the broadly cognitive and intentional character of emotions, Carr introduces his central example, the story of Ximene in the medieval romance of El Cid.  Ximene is in love with Cid until he accidentally kills her beloved father; from that point on, Ximene is “fired by a passionate hatred and resentment of Cid,” thus placing her in the moral dilemma of simultaneously loving and hating the same man (36).  And it is not clear that Ximene’s emotional ambivalence can be rationally resolved: neither suppressing her hatred of Cid in the name of forgiveness, nor hardening her heart against Cid in the name of revenge, looks like a morally appropriate resolution.  In fact, Carr thinks we want to say the only virtuous course for Ximene is to embrace the conflict between her love for Cid, on the one hand, and her pain at losing her father and resentment of the man who took his life, on the other (37); eliminating either of the conflicting (sets of) feelings seems to involve a loss of “personal integrity.”  While Carr unfortunately doesn’t elaborate on this notion, he seems to have in mind here a kind of emotional honesty that involves being true to one’s feelings and the values they reflect.

But can Ximene ever be fully virtuous  by the lights of Aristotelian virtue theory?  After all, virtue theory “turns crucially,” Carr reminds us, on a distinction between the virtuous and the merely continent: the emotions of the virtuous are supposed to be fully in line with moral ends they have adopted, displaying “wholehearted commitment” to those ends, while the emotions of the merely continent may continue to remain at odds with such ends (37).  On one standard reading of virtue theory, then, it looks like the sort of emotional disunity Ximene experiences entails that she can achieve at most continence (by repressing or renouncing one of her conflicting feelings), but not virtue.  In other words, on this account of cases of emotional ambivalence like Ximene’s, virtue and personal integrity are incompatible.  While Ximene may see violently retributive action as morally unacceptable, “she may not be able to resolve her ‘inner’ conflict without also giving up the resentment toward her father’s murderer that emotional honestly would seem to require” (38).  And so she may never be an agent whose feelings are in full alignment with moral goals.

Carr thinks the conception of the Aristotelian virtuous agent as one who is entirely free from mixed emotions is implausible.  But he rejects Susan Stark’s claim that the relevant difference between the virtuous and the continent is that, while both may experience emotions that conflict with their adopted moral ends, the latter alone experience such emotions as providing motivating reasons for action, while for the virtuous, the “commitment to a larger overriding vision of the good has effectively deprived such feelings of their motivational power” (39). Carr’s most serious worry about this approach is that it fails to preserve any real distinction between the continent and the virtuous, since both successfully pursue the correct course of action in the face of contrary-to-virtue emotions.  Indeed, it seems the only agent whose contrary-to-virtue emotions remain motivationally active is the akratic’s (40).

Carr claims that Stark’s account gets things precisely the wrong way around when it insists the continent continue to experience a conflict the virtuous no longer feel (44).  He has by this point already attempted to show, using the example of Ximene, that “the virtuous are no less prey than the rest of us to the emotional conflicts and moral dilemmas to which human flesh is heir” (44).  So while there may be dishonorable courses of action to which the virtuous, unlike the continent, are no longer drawn, “the absence of moral uncertainty or conflict would not in and of itself distinguish the virtuous from the continent” (44).  What, then, will distinguish them?  Carr thinks the virtuous are those who have the wisdom, imagination, and self-understanding to face squarely the emotional and moral complexity the world presents to them, in ways not available to the merely continent (44-45).  It is the virtuous Ximene who appreciates “that her conflicted simultaneous love and resentment of Cid have objective grounds that cannot be wished away and that require honest and courageous confrontation” (44).

Carr seems to be suggesting that, if moral conflict is an unavoidable feature of the human condition, even for the virtuous, then emotional ambivalence in the face of such conflict, far from showing lack of virtue, displays instead a healthy, mature, and deep understanding of this complexity.  And not only is the experience of mixed emotions key to virtuous appreciation of genuinely conflicting values; according to Carr, and pace Stark, the conflicting emotions of the truly virtuous in confrontation with moral dilemma will retain their motivational force, thereby providing the virtuous agent with the “capacities to recognize and act on the widest possible range of moral options” (43).  The virtuous are “those equipped with the richly complex—albeit conflicted—psychological life through which alternative possibilities of (virtuous) action remain available” (43).  By contrast, Carr claims, lack of psychological conflict is a mark of the self-controlled (merely continent) person.  And when we notice that those who manage to rid their psychological lives of conflict often do so through fear, self-deception, and repression, we see that such single-mindedness reveals a kind of moral immaturity, an inability to honestly face up to the moral complexity of a lived human life.  And so, rightly understood, “emotional ambivalence and personal conflict may provide the rich psychological and moral soil, that—in the light of practical wisdom—is actually required to enhance the prospect of virtuous character and conduct” (46).

Reviewed by Elisa A. Hurley
The University of Western Ontario