II. The very first entry in the book is as follows:
What we take for virtues are often merely a collection of different acts and personal interests pieced together by chance or our own ingenuity and it is not always because of valour or chastity that men are valiant or women chaste.
I think he chose it so as to set the tone for the rest of the book. His guiding thought here is: those who do things we normally consider to be good, are often in a position such that doing that good was easier than doing anything else. For example, take someone who loves spending time with their family versus one who does not, but spends time with them anyway. Does the person who grits their teeth and puts up with the experience out of duty or the one who effortlessly enjoys it in spite of any duties deserve more praise? (I am thankfully in the latter camp.)
On the one hand, we think that it is an independent good that we enjoy spending time with our family but on the other, doing it so effortlessly does not exactly call for much praise. I mean, so what if you do what you were already going to do. You don't deserve moral praise for it, nor does it mean that one's moral conduct is particularly astute—you were just lucky that this thing we think is virtuous comes easily to you! Indeed some people's habits and dispositions line up so well with conventional morality that as soon as some demand is made on them that falls outside of their habitual domain, we see that they struggle to accommodate it because they are not used to making real compromises for others. Until then they had just been lucky. Praise, it seems, ought to be a function of effort. La Rochefoucauld gestures in this direction a few times:
Although men pride themselves on their noble deeds, these are seldom the outcome of a grand design but simply the effects of chance.
Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power.
Perseverance should neither be praised or blamed, since it is only the continuance of tastes and emotions which we can neither shed not acquire.
Fortunate people seldom mend their ways, for when good luck crowns their misdeeds with success they think it is because they are right.
A correlate to this thought is that people will argue for the goodness of something they are already predisposed to think in the first place, whether it is due to happenstance or personal disposition. I think we see this all the time. For example, vegetarians and vegans will grow up with parents that only fed them that way and then tout the virtuous comportment of their actions. I do not dispute that they are doing the right thing, because they are, no doubt, increasing the net happiness in the world. Nor am I accusing them of some hypocrisy. Rather, I guess what La Rochefoucauld is implying, is they are not virtuous for doing the right thing because that's always already what they've been doing. Suppose it turned out tomorrow that eating meat was an obvious good in the way that going meat-free is. How many of these people would change their diet to adhere to this good? That would be the test of virtue.
Another infuriating case of this is those who claim that global warming is making them "rethink" their relationship to child-bearing. Bringing more children onto this earth, the argument goes, only serves to both exacerbate global warming and bring a child into an awful existence. Therefore, having a child is immoral. No one who has ever said this has ever wanted (or ever sees themselves wanting) a child in the first place; nor has anyone who isn't depressed said it! They just saw a way of twisting their personal dispositions into a fulcrum of moral superiority. If, on the other hand, someone who really wanted to have kids, and who is not depressed, advocated this view (because they thought it was correct), that would be virtuous, even if they are ultimately wrong about the decision's goodness.
I find the picture implied by these maxims rather compelling. We seem to want people to have actually tried to reach some good, rather than fallen into it. We want people to pursue the good, even in counterfactuals where that goodness runs contrary to established habits. This seems to me, to be virtue. If this is right though, it is very hard to attain, as it requires us to revolt against habit. In sum, humans often retroactively attribute virtue to their own habits and omissions in so far as they line up with conventional morality, but it is effort that turns mere goodness, into virtue.
III. There is arguably another story, perhaps incompatible, to be told about what virtue might be. Aristotle thought virtue was something like an entrenched disposition to act so as to attain the good, rather than some other outcome. On this account, the goal of habituation is to line up one's desires with the good. For example, it might be that I really ought to help with the dishes, but I really don't feel like it. I groan about it for a while, but eventually, get up and help. On the earlier account, I am doing something virtuous because it took a greater force of will. But this doesn't seem right: surely, as with Aristotle, the virtuous person just gets up and does it without complaining? Take another case. Suppose one person enters a store and is resisting a powerful urge to steal. They leave without taking anything. Suppose another person enters a store, has no impulse to steal, and leaves without taking anything. Surely the latter is more virtuous than the former as they were free the impulse to engage in some vice. Perhaps we could bite the bullet here and say, with La Rochefoucauld, that only the person who is also "strong enough to be bad" can be virtuous. However, there is some intuitive pull to this idea of effortless goodness that I want to explain in a theory of virtue. Surely, the virtuous person acts promptly, as they should and when they should. The honest person is virtuous (in this regard) not because they are constantly struggling not to lie, but because they effortlessly tell the truth.
How can we square these two opposing views of virtue? On the one hand, we want to praise someone who struggled to do something good, because it took real effort. But, on the other hand, it often seems an independent good that one effortlessly navigates moral space. I think these can be reconciled. It does seem right that someone of virtuous character responds with effortless moral agility. However, for these accounts to be joined, this effortlessness cannot be tied to this or that virtue, it must be tied to goodness itself. For example, take the honest person. Now suppose Jeremy Bentham is at his door with an axe asking, with malicious intention, if they've seen his friend, Immanuel Kant. The honest person knows where Kant is, but also knows that if they tells the truth something bad will happen. What use is their disposition to tell the truth now? The virtuous thing to do is to lie, in spite of their habits to the contrary (and perform a virtuous act in the sense defined above).
Thus, what virtue really consists of is not a particular set of dispositions that adhere to some corresponding virtues, but rather one very specific one: responsiveness towards the good, no matter what the situation might be. This is what I was pointing out earlier with the counterfactuals. It might be that being honest, brave, and vegan is good for the most part and thus worth cultivating. However, the truly virtuous will be counterfactually virtuous. What I mean by this is that their adherence to the good in some situation is not due to contingent matters of fact, mere goodness, but rather a concerted response to what is good, in spite of or along with, one's desires. Thus we have a distinction that reconciles both views: to be counterfactually virtuous is to be of virtuous character, while to act with effort for the good is to perform a virtuous action. The person who has no proclivity for theft is merely good for the most part, while they have a virtuous character if they were also willing to steal if it became morally necessary. To steal against one's habits would be a virtuous action, in my sense. It might be that we are never put into such a situation where we can be tested, but there are all sorts of tests and inferences we make all the time with regards to whether we think other people would act a certain way in times that require moral courage. We think someone is a moral failure not often because they have been tested, but because we think they would fail such a test! Thus, we have our principle of virtue:
Virtue is the disposition to go through with virtuous actions (whether or not this disposition is actualised in some case).
A couple of interesting consequences of this view are as follows. It could be that someone who is utterly counterfactually virtuous is never actually tested on it (hence the subordinate clause in the definition). These are the people who we ought praise for their effortless goodness, those we imagine to be good in cases where it is not effortless. Conversely, it could be that someone who is not virtuous happens to habitually line up with conventional morality for the most part, and is also never tested. In these cases, we just can't actually know whether someone will be virtuous we can only infer it. This becomes especially difficult since a great deal of the evidence we base such inferences on signalling posied specifically to demonstrate potential virtue. The breakdown of this distinction is often a premise of movies. For example, the great black-comedy Force Majeure does this. In this movie, the protagonist is in good standing with his family, they have relative confidence in his virtue. However, he is tested and revealed to be a coward. The rest of the movie plays out the consequences of such a revelation.
IV. Another interesting thing about La Rochefoucauld's aphorisms, beyond the often timeless insight, is the very enlightenment trait of tracing pro-social virtues and behaviours back to self-interest. In a rather extreme example, he writes:
Pity is often feeling our own sufferings in those of others, a shrewd precaution against misfortune that may befall us. We give help to others so that they have to do the same us on similar occasions, and these kindnesses we do them are, to put it plainly, gifts we bestow on ourselves in advance.
Of course, he probably goes too far here, but that is not the point of aphorism such as these. This style of aphorism is a presentation of heuristics for, rather than laws of, social explanation. (You see this in his use of words like "often" or "most", which he begins most of his sweeping claims with.) He is not saying that all pity is really self-interested, just that, as a rule, and for many ordinary social encounters, people are really only thinking of themselves. Putting aside particular special relationships we have with those that are close us, this is often true! In this regard, he reminds me a lot of Pascal, who speaks at length of our wretchedness. For example, Pascal writes that
Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it; in other words, we would never travel by sea if it meant never talking about it, and for the sheer pleasure of seeing things we could never hope to describe to others.
And one of my favourites,
We do not care about our reputation in towns where we are only passing through. But when we have to stay some time we do care. How much time does it take? A time proportionate to our vain and paltry existence.
No doubt he is being dramatic here (in a very funny way), but he is onto something. Namely, that reputation only matters when repeated interaction is on the cards. People and places you'll never see again often get the worst of us because we are self-interested and see no way we could either leverage or be constrained by the quality of this single interaction, sometime in the future.
As much as I like Pascal, La Rochefoucauld is a lot more subtle. Pascal often lets his own anguish get in the way of insight, while La Rochefoucauld is well-tempered and good-humoured in just the right way for a work like this. Here are some more selections of his on self-interest that I like. First, a hidden payoff of seriousness:
Aversion from lying is often a hidden desire to give weight to our own statements and invest in our words with religious authority.
Next, some Hobbesian rationalism:
In most men love of justice is only fear of suffering injustice.
On the benefits of friendship:
What men have called friendship is merely association, respect for each other's interests, and exchange of good offices, in fact nothing more than a business arrangement from which self-love is always out to draw some profit.
On networking and status-seeking:
Though we often persuade ourselves that we like people more influential than ourselves, our friendship is really based on self-interest alone. We do not give them our affection for the good we want to do them but for the good we want to get out of them.
On the function of praise:
We dislike praising, and never praise anybody except our of self-interest. Praise is a subtle, concealed, and delicate form of flattery which gratifies giver and receiver in different ways: the latter accepts it as the due reward of his merit, the former bestows it so as to draw attention to his own fairness and discrimination.
That pride and humility are sometimes the same:
Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself, it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.
On generosity, gratitude, and jealousy:
What is called generosity is most often just the vanity of giving, which we like more than what we give.
Most men's gratitude is but a covert desire to receive greater gifts.
In jealousy there is more self-love than love.
On the use of candour (he's right about this one, you know):
Desire to talk about ourselves and to show our failings from the viewpoint we ourselves would choose, accounts for a great deal of our candour.
Finally, on conversation:
When vanity is not prompting us we have little to say.
One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him. The more clever and polite think it enough simply to put on an attentive expression, while all the time you can see in their eyes and train of thought that they are far removed from what you are saying and anxious to get back to what they want to say. They ought, on the contrary, to reflect that such keenness to please onself is a bad way of pleasing or persuading others, and that to listen well and answer to the point is on of the most perfect qualities one can have in a conversation.
Though overall rather cynical about human interaction, I think La Rochefoucauld is right here. Many people are not even interested in listening to you speak, other than to maneuver the conversation somewhere that either pleases their sensibilities or brings it to a prompt ending. We are all guilty of this, we do it all the time (and sometimes for good reason). That being said, here, unlike in the other cases, he gives excellent advice to those who wish to improve upon this dire state of affairs, those who wish to have real conversations: listen, respond intelligently, and ask questions. Instead of spending time thinking about how you can relate what is being said to yourself, spend that time thinking about how to reply to exactly what they've said. If you do that enough, eventually you find others who do the same for you. This is how you make friends!
(It is not those whose store of knowledge and experience is the most consummate with mine who I seek out and befriend, but those who are curious and open to conversation, wherever it may lead. The essential further reading on the topic is, of course, Montaigne's On the Art of Conversation.)
Whether, with all this, La Rochefoucauld proves that much of our actions, including supposed virtues, can really be traced back to self-interest or merely that every event can be redescribed as such, he does offer genuine insight into social dynamics. Much of what he says might not strictly be true with regards to those close handpicked relationships that we have attempted to vet for these vices, but they certainly do ring true when extrapolated to more general social settings that are constituted more of performances than of anything genuinely self-revealing. That being said, think, the next time some impulse leads you to some social action, did you do it for them, or did you do it for you? I think you'd be surprised with how often you answer with the latter.
V. All of this, taken together, makes La Rochefoucauld sound like something of a pessimist about human nature. Are we really just these vain strivings only interested, for the most part, in ourselves? Is this not a sorry state of affairs? I think here we should be careful here in moving from self-interest to badness. The latter does not follow necessarily from the former. This is another theme that runs through the book. Though it is greatly concealed among all his lamenting of human vice and vanity, La Rochefoucauld thinks (or perhaps ought to think, given his account) that self-interest often provides the source and possibility of goodness itself and perhaps of any goodness whatsoever. He writes:
Self-interest, blamed for all its misdeeds, often deserves credit for our good actions.
This could be read in two ways. First, that self-interest sometimes produces goods (even if it isn't virtue). He could be thinking of cases of the sort mentioned earlier where maintaining those habits we are easily disposed to actually lead to (merely) good action. Habituated self-interest is a real good a lot of the time. Indeed, this is what properly imbibed social norms are: mechanisms for producing goodness (without virtue), automatically.
Second, he could be making a deeper point that self-interest is the source of goodness. Based on the implicit theory of human nature he puts forward here, even if he doesn't think it, this would make a lot of sense as a theory. In the moments he gestures towards such a theory, he reminds of Spinoza. Spinoza thinks first of all that
Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to preserve in its being.
In other words, we are each utterly self-interested. Further, he thinks that the good, or what we call the good, is parasitic on this self-interest and not the other way round:
we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, desire it.
Thus,
The striving to preserve oneself is the first and only foundation of virtue. For no other principle can be conceived prior to this one and no virtue can be conceived without it.
But how can such bare self-interest be the foundation of virtue? Are not the things we call good genuine altruism, sincere care for others, and co-operation—things that are precisely the opposite of self-interest? Spinoza's answer to this is simple: those things we call good are, in fact, in our self-interest to cultivate. We call them good because we've correctly identified that they are in our self-interest! He's basically making an empirical claim here: if we are all selfish and optimise our own good, we would forge stronger social bonds, make and maintain stronger friendships, and co-operate with others to create a better, functioning society. And we would be constructing these joint projects with no other foundation than bare self-interest. This is how we make sense of his claim that
When each man most seeks his own advantage for himself, then men are most useful to one another.
Because
Insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, they must do only those things which are good for human nature, and hence, for each man, that is, those things which agree with the nature of each man.
And
The good which man wants for himself and loves, he will love more constantly if he sees that others love it. So, he will strive to have the others love the same thing. And because this good is common to all, and all can enjoy it, he will therefore...strive that all man may enjoy it. And this striving will be the greater, the more he enjoys this good.
All those things, for Spinoza, we call good: family, friendship, co-operation, and virtue, are not good things in themselves. Rather, we call them good, because they are good individually for us, in fact. While La Rochefoucauld doesn't have the (seemingly misplaced) optimism that Spinoza has regarding the universal rationality of cooperation and kinship, he does couch many of his explanations of social or political goods in terms of their eventual reference back to self-interest. For example,
Reconciliation with our enemies is nothing more than the desire to improve our position, war-weariness, or fear of some unlucky turn of events.
What men have called friendship is merely association, respect for each others interests, and exchange of good offices, in fact nothing more than a business arrangement from which self-love is always out to draw some proft.
In these two, he seems to be suggesting the earlier, weaker thesis, that some good actions or happenings are a result of self-interest. However, in another aphorism, he goes further and says that
We cannot love anything except in terms of ourselves, and when we put our friends above ourselves we are only concerned with our own taste and pleasures. Yet it is only through such preference that friendship can be true and perfect. (Emphasis added.)
Here, he actually suggests the stronger thesis, that self-interest is the thing grounding the goodness of the thing in question like Spinoza does. And in this context it actually makes sense: the friendships that are the best are the ones that we get the most pleasure out of, so we seek more of them. It is only when we are utterly self-interested in our pursuit of pleasure that we best spend our time with others, it is only then that friendships reach their zenith. The selfish pursuit of pleasure in one another's company is good for both members of a friendship. To see this, consider the alternative: a friendship you do not enjoy maintaining (where maybe you stick around out of duty) will not be perfect, as it cannot receive the positive input a more pleasurable one would. Self-interest, in the case of friendship, grounds the possibility of its goodness, because if it was not enjoyed, it would not be good.
If we combine the account of virtue given above with this account of morality-as-self-interest, we get a principle:
Virtue is the extent to which one can successfully act in one's self-interest (because self-interest is goodness), even in cases where realising one's self-interest is obstructed by habits and desires.
A strange theory indeed! I err towards keeping my formulation of virtue but rejecting Spinoza on goodness. (Though, every now and then, in the right mood, I totally sell myself on Part IV of the Ethics. It's an interesting move worth seriously considering, though it does take principled ethical reprimand, in the moral sense, out of one's philosophical repertoire. That is to say, any critique of some wrong has to be based on an empirical claim about it being worse for each individual, rather than it just flat out being wrong. This notion goes out the window.)
VI. The final note I would like to leave us on is a two-fold thesis: (1) some non-essential but somewhat uniform collection of vain strivings we sometimes call human nature is out there and genuinely intelligible and (2) no one person is ever fully understood. These are not my theses, but La Rochefoucauld's (and they remind me of Tolstoy):
It is easier to know man in general than to understand one man in particular.
Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into each person's heart.
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