Jules van Schaijik • Oct 12, 2010 - 9:25 pm

But if one extends the range of free acts so as to include virtues and vices, wouldn’t one then also have to expand the notion of freedom itself. Normally an act is said to be free if it is deliberately chosen and initiated by the agent. But virtues aren’t exactly like that. And certainly emotions like jealousy are not.

Josef Seifert • Oct 13, 2010 - 12:54 am

You raise at least two very interesting questions.
1.  The first one refers to the question in which sense virtues and vices can be said to be free, given that, as you say “an act is said to be free if it is deliberately chosen and initiated by the agent. But virtues aren’t exactly like that.” Now it is quite clear that we must here make some distinctions:
First, as you point out, there is a distinction between an instantaneous free action which I perform at a given time and in an actual conscious way and a virtue or vice. Both are not free acts in exactly the same way. Think first of an act in which a person realizes some state of affairs given into her power to realize, such as pushing in a few minutes the knob that sets the machine in motion that will move up, in a capsule, from a mine roughly half a mile under the ground, the first of 33 Chilean miners stuck for two months underground. This act is obviously distinct from the possible virtue of the person who pushes the button. It will happen in two minutes, the virtue of loving care of the person who will push the button not, but exists already. The action of pushing the button will pass after a few moments, the virtue not. Pushing the button is consciously chosen here and now, the virtue not. Now inasmuch as your expression that an act is free “if it is deliberately chosen and initiated by the agent” refers to this kind of free actions, it is not applicable to virtues or vices but this does not at all exclude that it be not free in a deeper sense that fully preserves the part of your affirmation the free act “is deliberately chosen and initiated by the agent.”
In the first place, the virtue springs from many actions and/or inner responses which are clearly free acts that as it were, receive a firmer ground when they grow roots in a person and live as it were on in her in form of a virtue.
Moreover, the virtue itself, for example loving kindness, has the character of an enduring free act in the person, an act which we call attitude. The fact that it lasts above and beyond the short time when it is actually experienced, does not make it less free than the action of pushing the rescue button but more so. Just as our love for our child or wife would not be true love if it ceased when we are eating or sleeping, so a kind and merciful response to an enemy who has wronged us would not be true mercy if it were to give room in the next moment to merciless cruelty and would not live on in us an attitude. It still continues to exist in a person when she does not actually experience her love or merciful, forgiving attitude. In a similar way, we continue to know something even when we do not actually think of it or experience our knowledge.
Moreover, just as the same knowledge that exists superactually in a person, can be recalled and lived actually and consciously at any time, so also free acts cannot only exist superactually in us (in a similar way as our “knowing something even when we do not think of it”) but can likewise be lived at any time in a fully conscious and awakened way, and then they show fully their nature as freely performed acts of merciful forgiving or kindness. These concrete conscious acts, in which virtues are “exercised,” in some sense constitute each time new conscious acts and inner responses or virtuous actions but they also correspond to the underlying virtues and manifest and “contain” them in a sense. They are fruits of virtues, in another way they coincide with the underlying virtues inasmuch as they actualize and actually “exercise” or “live” the virtuous attitude, in still another way, each of these conscious free acts is a new entity that also contributes to the growth of virtue and becomes its partial “cause”. And while in some sense each virtuous act is only a small token of a much larger reality of the underlying superactual free virtuous attitude and possess a lesser reality than the virtue, in another sense, as concrete actions “actualize virtues” or “exercise” them and “put theminto practice,” they have a superior form of reality given the fact that the superactual existence of, for example mercy, in the person has some traits of potential being in contrast to the actually conscious merciful acts and inner stances taken by a person.
Thus while we do not live our love or attitudes such as justice or love of truth all the time, we can actually and consciously live them at any time. This actually taking a virtuous attitude is a much richer form of a free act than the pushing a button, not only because in the latter case the real action is as it were performed by a machine and our act very modestly and externally linked with it (which is not the case in the “untechnicized” “natural free action” of, for example, jumping into the water and rescuing a drowning child), but also because this action touches only what we might call a second and secondary dimension of free will: the initiating an action, the commanding freely certain physical movements through which we realize a given state of affairs, whereas in a virtue or inner act of searching the truth or of experiencing gratitude or thanking a person, we are faced with the deeper “first dimension” of freedom that unfolds between a subject and an object: it is a free response directed in a meaningful way at an object or person.
Moreover, in order that the action of the man who just has pushed the button that led to pulling out Florencio Ávalos, be a free act in a meaningful way and not just an arbitrary and senseless act, such as the arbitrary bodily movements Libet tested, there must be a free response, a free yes or no towards something endowed with a value or disvalue, that underlies the free action. Virtues constitute a profound part of this deeper sphere of free acts. A virtue of justice, honesty or mercy does not just come into and go out of being like the action of pushing the button and thereby sending the capsule up, but it exists at a deeper and more lasting level in the life of a person; it does not merely retain its validity but also preserves its real existence in the person, and is both itself free, grows out of many free actions and gives rise to consciously performed inner responses, to free words of ‘yes’ or of ‘no’ spoken to things and persons, which free acts in their turn strengthen and deepen the virtue.
2.  Your second question relates to feelings or passions such as jealousy or love which have more the character of affective experiences or feelings that do not stand in our power. Thus how would we say that Othello is responsible for his jealousy? Here we would have to consider many things: how there is an indirect influence of freedom on feelings of jealousy that leads to his jealousy, for example his lack of trust in his wife and his woefully uncritical trust in Jago and belief of his intrigues and lies. We would have to consider next how from jealousy many free actions flow for which (jealous actions) Othello has full and direct responsibility such as hitting and then murdering his wife, arranging the (failing) murder of Cassio, etc.  Most importantly, we would have to see how the deepest dimensions of human freedom lie in a kind of “cooperative freedom” with gifts such as emotions of gratitude, love or repentance. While these, analogous to graces, are not within our free power to realize, once they are given us they do not need to stay outside our free center but can be sanctioned and integrated in our free life. On the opposite side, such destructive passions as jealousy and hatred can and ought to be freely disavowed and if they are in this way “decapitated” by our free will, even if they continue to be felt, they will lose their full power over us and their silent connection with the our moral identity and with our selves.
But while measured with the infinite sea of intelligible truths and distinctions that would have to be pointed out, my response is all too brief, it is according to ordinary person’s feelings impressions far too long and thus has to be ended here.