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The Felicity of Virtue
- By Jonathan Haidt
- Published 07/14/2008
- Positive Psychology
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt, PhD is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. His research examines the emotional basis of morality and the ways that morality varies across cultures, including the cultures of liberals and conservatives. He has been active in the positive psychology movement since 1999, and in 2001 he was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology. He is the author of the book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
Below is chapter 8 from The Happiness Hypothesis. To understand it without reading the previous chapters you need to know that chapter 1 described how the self is divided into parts that often conflict.
The central metaphor developed in that chapter is that our minds are like a rider on an elephant. The rider is our conscious, linguistic self. It is what social psychologists call controlled processing.
The elephant is everything else – the 99% of mental processes about which we simply can’t be aware. It is automatic mental processes. The rider may think he’s in control, but whenever the elephant really wants to do something, it’s going to do it.
Real change and growth can only come from training the elephant (covered in chapter 2). Chapter 3 covered reciprocity, and chapter 4 covered hypocrisy, especially “the myth of pure evil”, which is the human tendency to divide the world into perfect good versus perfect evil.
~ ~
When sages and elders urge virtue on the young, they sometimes sound like snake oil salesmen.
The wisdom literature of many cultures essentially says, “Gather round! I have a tonic that will make you happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise! It will get you into heaven, and bring you joy on earth along the way! Just be virtuous!”
Young people are extremely good, though, at rolling their eyes and shutting their ears. Their interests and desires are often at odds with those of adults, and they quickly find ways to pursue their goals and get themselves into trouble, which often becomes character-building adventure.
Huck Finn runs away from his foster mother to raft down the Mississipi with a runaway slave; the young Buddha leaves his father’s palace to begin his spiritual quest in the forest; Luke Skywalker abandons his foster parents to join the galactic rebellion.
All three reject the security and moral guidance offered by adults and set off on their own journeys, journeys that make each into an adult, complete with a set of new virtues. These hard-won virtues are especially admirable to us as readers because they reveal a depth and authenticity of character that we don’t see in the obedient kid who simply accepts the virtues proposed by adults.
In this light, Ben Franklin is supremely admirable.
Born in Boston in 1706, he was apprenticed at the age of twelve to his older brother James, who owned a printing shop. After many disputes with (and beatings by) his brother, he yearned for freedom, but James would not release him from the legal contract of his apprenticeship.
So at the age of seventeen, Ben broke the law and skipped town.
He got on a boat to New York and, failing to find work there, kept on going to Philadelphia. There he found work as an apprentice printer and, through skill and diligence, eventually opened his own print shop and published his own newspaper.
He went on to spectacular success in business (Poor Richard’s Almanack – a compendium of sayings and maxims – was a hit in its day); in science (he proved that lightning is electricity, then tamed it by inventing the lightning rod); in politics (he held too many offices to name); and in diplomacy (he persuaded France to join the American colonies’ war against Britain, though France had little to gain from the enterprise).
He lived to the age of eighty four and enjoyed the whole ride. He took pride in his scientific discoveries and civic creations; he basked in the love and esteem of France as well as of America; and even as an old man he relished the attentions of women and the art of flirtation.
What was his secret? Virtue. Not the sort of uptight, pleasure-hating Puritanism that some people now associate with that word, but a broader kind of virtue that goes back to ancient Greece.
The Greek word arete meant excellence, virtue, or goodness, especially of a functional sort. The arete of a knife is to cut well; the arete of an eye is to see well; the arete of a person is... well, that’s one of the oldest questions of philosophy: what is the true nature, function, or goal of a person, relative to which we can say that he or she is living well or badly?
Thus in saying that well being or happiness (eudaimonia) is “an activity of soul in conformity with excellence or virtue,” Aristotle wasn’t saying that happiness comes from giving to the poor and suppressing your sexuality.
He was saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.
(Aristotle believed that all things in the universe had a telos, or purpose toward which they aimed, even though he did not believe that the gods had designed all things.)
One of Franklin’s many gifts was his extraordinary ability to see potential and then realize it. He saw the potential of having paved and lighted streets, volunteer fire departments, and public libraries, and he pushed to make them all appear in Philadelphia.
He saw the potential of the young American republic and played many roles in creating it. And he saw the potential in himself for improving his ways, and he set out to do so.
In his late twenties, as a young printer and entrepreneur, he embarked on what he called a “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He picked a few virtues he wanted to cultivate, and he tried to live accordingly. He discovered immediately the limitations of the rider:
Franklin was a brilliant intuitive psychologist. He realized that the rider can be successful only to the extent that it trains the elephant (though he did not use those terms), so he devised a training regimen. He wrote out a list of thirteen virtues, each linked to specific behaviors that he should or should not do.
(For example: “Temperance: Eat not to dullness...”; “Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself”; “Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring...”).
He then printed for himself a table with seven columns (one for each day of the week) and thirteen rows (one for each virtue), and he put a black spot in the appropriate square each time he failed to live a whole day in accordance with a particular virtue.
He concentrated on only one virtue per week, hoping to keep its row clear of spots while paying no special attention to the other virtues, though he filled in their rows whenever violations occurred.
Over thirteen weeks he worked through the whole table. Then he repeated the process, finding that with repetition, the table got less and less spotty. Franklin reported in his autobiography that, though he fell far short of perfection, “I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
He went on to say: “my posterity should be informed that to this little artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor ow’d the constant felicity of his life, down to his 79th year, in which this is written.”
We can’t know whether, without his virtue table, Franklin would have been any less happy or successful, but we can search for other evidence to test his main psychological claim.
This claim, which I will call the virtue hypothesis, is the same claim made by Epicurus and the Buddha in the epigraphs that open this chapter: cultivating virtue will make you happy. There are plenty of reasons to doubt the virtue hypothesis.
Franklin himself admitted that he failed utterly to develop the virtue of humility, yet he reaped great social gains by learning to fake it. Perhaps the virtue hypothesis will turn out to be true only in a cynical, Machiavellian way: cultivating the appearance of virtue will make you successful, and therefore happy, regardless of your true character.
The Virtues of the Ancients
Ideas have pedigrees, ideas have baggage. When we Westerners think about morality, we use concepts that are thousands of years old, but that took a turn in their development in the last two hundred years. We don’t realize that our approach to morality is odd from the perspective of other cultures, or that it is based on a particular set of psychological assumptions – a set that now appears to be wrong.
Every culture is concerned about the moral development of its children, and in every culture that left us more than a few pages of writing, we find texts that reveal its approach to morality. Specific rules and prohibitions vary quite a bit, but the broad outlines of these approaches have a lot in common.
Most cultures wrote about virtues to be cultivated, and many of those virtues were and still are valued across most cultures (for example, honesty, justice, courage, benevolence, self-restraint, and respect for authority).
Most approaches then specified a great many specific actions that were good and bad with respect to those particular virtues.
Most approaches were practical, striving to inculcate virtues that would benefit the person who cultivates them.
[continued]
From Chapter 8 of The Happiness Hypothesis. See the book site for more.
www.happinesshypothesis.com
© 2006 by Jonathan Haidt. Published by Basic Books. All rights reserved.
[Photo of Benjamin Franklin from Wikipedia.]
The central metaphor developed in that chapter is that our minds are like a rider on an elephant. The rider is our conscious, linguistic self. It is what social psychologists call controlled processing.
The elephant is everything else – the 99% of mental processes about which we simply can’t be aware. It is automatic mental processes. The rider may think he’s in control, but whenever the elephant really wants to do something, it’s going to do it.
Real change and growth can only come from training the elephant (covered in chapter 2). Chapter 3 covered reciprocity, and chapter 4 covered hypocrisy, especially “the myth of pure evil”, which is the human tendency to divide the world into perfect good versus perfect evil.
~ ~
It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly and justly, and it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly and justly without living pleasantly (Epicurus)
Set your heart on doing good. Do it over and over again, and you will be filled with joy. A fool is happy until his mischief turns against him. And a good man may suffer until his goodness flowers. (Buddha)
Set your heart on doing good. Do it over and over again, and you will be filled with joy. A fool is happy until his mischief turns against him. And a good man may suffer until his goodness flowers. (Buddha)
When sages and elders urge virtue on the young, they sometimes sound like snake oil salesmen.
The wisdom literature of many cultures essentially says, “Gather round! I have a tonic that will make you happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise! It will get you into heaven, and bring you joy on earth along the way! Just be virtuous!”
Young people are extremely good, though, at rolling their eyes and shutting their ears. Their interests and desires are often at odds with those of adults, and they quickly find ways to pursue their goals and get themselves into trouble, which often becomes character-building adventure.
Huck Finn runs away from his foster mother to raft down the Mississipi with a runaway slave; the young Buddha leaves his father’s palace to begin his spiritual quest in the forest; Luke Skywalker abandons his foster parents to join the galactic rebellion.
All three reject the security and moral guidance offered by adults and set off on their own journeys, journeys that make each into an adult, complete with a set of new virtues. These hard-won virtues are especially admirable to us as readers because they reveal a depth and authenticity of character that we don’t see in the obedient kid who simply accepts the virtues proposed by adults.
In this light, Ben Franklin is supremely admirable. Born in Boston in 1706, he was apprenticed at the age of twelve to his older brother James, who owned a printing shop. After many disputes with (and beatings by) his brother, he yearned for freedom, but James would not release him from the legal contract of his apprenticeship.
So at the age of seventeen, Ben broke the law and skipped town.
He got on a boat to New York and, failing to find work there, kept on going to Philadelphia. There he found work as an apprentice printer and, through skill and diligence, eventually opened his own print shop and published his own newspaper.
He went on to spectacular success in business (Poor Richard’s Almanack – a compendium of sayings and maxims – was a hit in its day); in science (he proved that lightning is electricity, then tamed it by inventing the lightning rod); in politics (he held too many offices to name); and in diplomacy (he persuaded France to join the American colonies’ war against Britain, though France had little to gain from the enterprise).
He lived to the age of eighty four and enjoyed the whole ride. He took pride in his scientific discoveries and civic creations; he basked in the love and esteem of France as well as of America; and even as an old man he relished the attentions of women and the art of flirtation.
What was his secret? Virtue. Not the sort of uptight, pleasure-hating Puritanism that some people now associate with that word, but a broader kind of virtue that goes back to ancient Greece.
The Greek word arete meant excellence, virtue, or goodness, especially of a functional sort. The arete of a knife is to cut well; the arete of an eye is to see well; the arete of a person is... well, that’s one of the oldest questions of philosophy: what is the true nature, function, or goal of a person, relative to which we can say that he or she is living well or badly?
Thus in saying that well being or happiness (eudaimonia) is “an activity of soul in conformity with excellence or virtue,” Aristotle wasn’t saying that happiness comes from giving to the poor and suppressing your sexuality.
He was saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.
(Aristotle believed that all things in the universe had a telos, or purpose toward which they aimed, even though he did not believe that the gods had designed all things.)
One of Franklin’s many gifts was his extraordinary ability to see potential and then realize it. He saw the potential of having paved and lighted streets, volunteer fire departments, and public libraries, and he pushed to make them all appear in Philadelphia.
He saw the potential of the young American republic and played many roles in creating it. And he saw the potential in himself for improving his ways, and he set out to do so.
In his late twenties, as a young printer and entrepreneur, he embarked on what he called a “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He picked a few virtues he wanted to cultivate, and he tried to live accordingly. He discovered immediately the limitations of the rider:
While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping, and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.
Franklin was a brilliant intuitive psychologist. He realized that the rider can be successful only to the extent that it trains the elephant (though he did not use those terms), so he devised a training regimen. He wrote out a list of thirteen virtues, each linked to specific behaviors that he should or should not do.
(For example: “Temperance: Eat not to dullness...”; “Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself”; “Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring...”).
He then printed for himself a table with seven columns (one for each day of the week) and thirteen rows (one for each virtue), and he put a black spot in the appropriate square each time he failed to live a whole day in accordance with a particular virtue.
He concentrated on only one virtue per week, hoping to keep its row clear of spots while paying no special attention to the other virtues, though he filled in their rows whenever violations occurred.
Over thirteen weeks he worked through the whole table. Then he repeated the process, finding that with repetition, the table got less and less spotty. Franklin reported in his autobiography that, though he fell far short of perfection, “I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
He went on to say: “my posterity should be informed that to this little artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor ow’d the constant felicity of his life, down to his 79th year, in which this is written.”
We can’t know whether, without his virtue table, Franklin would have been any less happy or successful, but we can search for other evidence to test his main psychological claim.
This claim, which I will call the virtue hypothesis, is the same claim made by Epicurus and the Buddha in the epigraphs that open this chapter: cultivating virtue will make you happy. There are plenty of reasons to doubt the virtue hypothesis.
Franklin himself admitted that he failed utterly to develop the virtue of humility, yet he reaped great social gains by learning to fake it. Perhaps the virtue hypothesis will turn out to be true only in a cynical, Machiavellian way: cultivating the appearance of virtue will make you successful, and therefore happy, regardless of your true character.
The Virtues of the Ancients
Ideas have pedigrees, ideas have baggage. When we Westerners think about morality, we use concepts that are thousands of years old, but that took a turn in their development in the last two hundred years. We don’t realize that our approach to morality is odd from the perspective of other cultures, or that it is based on a particular set of psychological assumptions – a set that now appears to be wrong.
Every culture is concerned about the moral development of its children, and in every culture that left us more than a few pages of writing, we find texts that reveal its approach to morality. Specific rules and prohibitions vary quite a bit, but the broad outlines of these approaches have a lot in common.
Most cultures wrote about virtues to be cultivated, and many of those virtues were and still are valued across most cultures (for example, honesty, justice, courage, benevolence, self-restraint, and respect for authority).
Most approaches then specified a great many specific actions that were good and bad with respect to those particular virtues.
Most approaches were practical, striving to inculcate virtues that would benefit the person who cultivates them.
[continued]
From Chapter 8 of The Happiness Hypothesis. See the book site for more.
www.happinesshypothesis.com
© 2006 by Jonathan Haidt. Published by Basic Books. All rights reserved.
[Photo of Benjamin Franklin from Wikipedia.]