Chapter Four
Meaningful Work to Meaningful Living: The Virtues and Politics

Political theorizing in the classical mode differs from political theorizing in the modern mode in ways roughly analogous to the differences in the two modes of moral theorizing. As noted in the preface, MacIntyre terms the modem mode of ethical theorizing "Nietz-schean" and the classical mode "Aristotelian"; Richard Taylor contrasts "ethics of duty" and "ethics of aspiration," and I have elsewhere sought to distinguish "ethics of rules" from "ethics of character." To mark the comparable distinction in modes of political thought, Stephen G. Salkever employs the terms "politics of obligation and legitimacy" (modern), and "politics of virtue" (classical).1

Why "politics of virtue"? In modernity no direct connection between politics and virtue is recognized, therefore we must identify, the connection here.

We may remind ourselves of the tenets of developmental democracy that were presented in the introduction and summarized to begin chapter 2. They are that the purpose of politics and government is enhancement of the quality of life of human beings; that the central agency of such enhancement is the initiative to self-development in individuals; and that the paramount function of government is to provide the necessary but non-self-suppliable conditions for optimizing opportunities for individual self-discovery and self-development.

In the conception of personhood and the good life that we are employing, "enhancement of the quality of life of human beings" means the acquisition by human beings of moral virtues, where moral virtues

are understood as dispositions of character that are (1) personal utilities; (2) intrinsic goods; and (3) social utilities. (We will return to a careful consideration of these aspects.) Therefore politics and government whose purpose is the enhancement of the quality of life of human beings must be concerned to generalize opportunities of individuals to acquire moral virtues. In the phrases "meaningful living" and "enhancement of the quality of life" we are employing a values sanction: a meaningful life is a valuable life, and enhancement of the quality of life is enhancement of its value. The value is objective, which is to say it is valuable to whoever meets the conditions for appreciation and utilization of value of the particular kind in question. This includes the values—her life is intrinsically valuable to her—but extends to such others as fulfill the conditions. To appreciate the music of Brahms one must first of all know of it—the condition of acquaintance—but one must also possess cultivated sensitivities to harmony, orchestration, rhythm, and melody.

In this context, an important distinction is to be made between "cardinal" virtues" and "distributed virtues." What we will mean by the former is virtues that are indispensable to worthy living of every kind, examples of which are Plato's famous four, namely wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. What we will mean by "distributed virtues" are virtues that are indispensable to worthy lives of some, but not all, kinds.

And following Aristotle, it is important to distinguish between "a virtuous act" and "an act done virtuously."2 "A virtuous act" is an act done as virtue requires, but not necessarily from virtue. Thus an honest answer may be given by a dishonest person; or a person may do a generous act but without generous motivation—perhaps because he or she has been trained to perform such acts, or because he or she wishes to be regarded as generous.

This distinction enables us to recognize that possession of the virtues is to the credit of persons who possess them; it is the result of their own initiative. Where politics and government have their part to play is in the engagement of that initiative. It is, to be sure, the initiative of individuals in their own self-development, but it is subject to external conditions both of obstruction and of facilitation. Extreme poverty, for example, is an obstructive condition, exaggerating the requirements of survival at the expense of the considerations of living well and becoming a better person. Likewise such political crises as war and threat of impending war are in one important aspect obstructions, for they usurp the total attention of most persons.

The reason that facilitating conditions require attention is that the initiative to self-directed self-development remains merely latent in persons in the early stages of their lives, where it is overlaid by external demands. This pattern of responsiveness to external requirements is reinforced by repetition to acquire the strength of habit and the comfort of familiarity, such that persons are in need of conducive conditions if they are to discover and be responsive to their inner initiative of self-direction. On the side of facilitation, the problem, then, is the engagement of latent initiatives.

Our thesis is that these initiatives are engaged when persons make contact with themselves. This accounts for the emphasis upon self-knowledge in the eudaimonistic tradition, beginning with the great Greek imperative, gnothi seauton —"Know thyself." In the last chapter we argued that by the logic of individual development, the opportune place for this is the stage of life we term adolescence and youth, and we held that the facilitating conditions are, in Mill's words, "freedom, and variety of situations." To afford an illustration of how these conditions serve the purpose of self-discovery we focused upon vocational choice, contending that discovery by individuals of the kind (or interrelated kinds) of work that each experiences as intrinsically rewarding to do is an important increment of self-discovery.

In this chapter we contend that the initiative that is engaged by self-discovery—whether the self-discovery occurs in the context of preparations for vocational choice, or of preparation for any of the other life-shaping choices—exhibits an inherent propensity to spread from the realm in which it is first engaged to other realms. This is to say that self-knowledge and the initiative to self-actualization inherently seek to overcome the compartmentalization of modem life into unrelated and often contradictory "roles." To be sure, this is no more than a tendency; it can be overwhelmed by countervailing conditions of which there are many. But it deserves to be fortified against such conditions, for it is the movement toward the moral virtue of integrity, which—so I will argue—is the foundation of the other moral virtues. In this sense I will be defending the classical thesis of the "unity of the virtues."

As we here use the term, "moral integrity" has three-dimensional meaning. In the first place it means integration of separable aspects of the self—notably faculties, desires, interests, roles, life-shaping choices—into a self-consistent whole. Second, it implies "wholeness as completeness" by which it is distinguishable, for example, from fanaticism and monomania. The third dimension of meaning may be preliminarily de-

scribed as a deeper kind of honesty, and it is this dimension that has prominence in popular usage, as for example when newspaper editorials demand "integrity" of politicians and business managers.

An example will help us at this point. It is for his unsurpassed exemplification of moral integrity that Socrates has a permanent place among the moral heroes of the world. In the Apology, Socrates is offered many inducements to save his life on condition that he change his conduct. He refuses in every case because, he says, he acts on an authority higher than that of his judges. He insists that if allowed to go free on payment of a fine he must resume his life in Athens in the same terms as before. Similarly in exile he must do just as he has done, and very likely to the same discomfiture of authorities and the same outcome. He refuses to envisage an afterlife except as a further opportunity to ply his vocation, this time among the immortal souls of the departed. To the entreaties of friends (Crito ) that they be allowed to arrange his escape from prison and the hemlock he replies that far from doing them a favor, he would be doing them the disservice of betraying in himself everything that made him worthy of their friendship. Most telling of all, throughout the trial, Socrates so conducts himself as to vividly demonstrate the very conduct for which he is condemned.

The "higher authority" to which Socrates maintains steadfast allegiance is variously translated as "my commander," or "my god," or "the god." The Greek word here being translated is daimon . It is Socrates's higher or true self, by which his course of life has been guided. He describes it (and thus himself) in three aspects, namely as philosopher, as gadfly, and as midwife. He is a philosopher, he says, in that he had sought wisdom lifelong, which is to say he has been engaged at the conduct of inquiries. Because many people pretend to knowledge and wisdom that they do not possess, and thereby obstruct inquiry, he has been obliged to become a "gadfly," administering the sting of exposure and refutation to such pretense. His "midwifery" is his distinctive method of teaching. Based on his theory of innate knowledge, an implicit knowledge that requires to be made explicit, Socrates teaches not by inculcation but by elicitation, or coaxing forth.

In the life of Socrates as thus presented to us are generalizable and nongeneralizable aspects. What is generalizable is the virtues he manifests, beginning with integrity. Indeed, the broader eudaimonistic thesis is that all virtues subsist in potentia in every person; thus to be a human being is to be capable of manifesting virtues, and the problem of moral development is the problem of discovering the conditions of their mani-

festation. What is distinctive to Socrates is the particular course of life on which his virtues were manifested. For each person there is such a course of life, but the course represented by the conjunction of philosopher-gadfly-midwife is Socrates's uniquely.

Using the model of Socrates, we can understand the origin of integrity as the identification of the individual with certain values. Objectively considered, "identification" here signifies a person's commitment to actualize, conserve, and defend those values. It will be evident that on this meaning, no person can identify with all values, because of what Leibniz termed "the imperfection of finitude." Perhaps our finitude does not discredit the aspiration to recognize and appreciate all values (though achievement will certainly fall short of the aspiration), but it precludes identification (as just defined), because just as in a single lifetime one cannot do all things, so one cannot do for all values what identification requires. The question for each individual, then, is with which values shall I identify? Some philosophers (the Sartre of Being and Nothingness is a leading example) have held that the choice is arbitrary; what matters is not in the least which values are chosen, but only that choice occurs, that it is choice with commitment, and that it is acknowledged as choice. But I think that introspective evidence speaks to the contrary. Among the values a person recognizes are sure to be some with which he or she is disinclined to identify, and a select few with which he or she is inclined or even (in personal feeling) compelled to identify. Moreover many persons will have had the experience of trying to identify with certain values, but against innate inclination, with troublesome results. Indeed, a not unfamiliar source of self-deception is the unreadiness of the individual to acknowledge unsuccessful identification: the priest who is equivocally a priest, the nurse who is equivocally a nurse, the spouse or parent who is equivocally spouse or parent, and so on. In the cases that are to our present purpose, it is not that the person comes to question the worth of the priesthood (or marriage, or parenting, etc.), or to discredit the relevant values. It is, rather, the perception (unacknowledged in cases of self-deception) that the particular values are "not my values."

This leads us from values-identification (I am using the term here to mean, not identification of values, but the individual's identification of himself or herself with certain values), objectively described, to an inner criterion. Values-identification is not arbitrary or noncriteriological in respect to the particular values with which given individuals identify—it is qualifiable by right and wrong, better and worse. The right values-

identification by an individual is his or her explicit identification (in terms of actualization, conservation, and defense) with the values with which he or she is implicitly—that is, innately—identified. These are the values in the service of which the individual will experience the intrinsic rewards of personal fulfillment. This is to say that values-identification is the actualization of an implicit identity. But if the identity antecedently exists, in the form of the unique potentialities within the individual, what is the point of actualization? Its point is the value-enhancement of actual human existence. Metaphysically considered, a potentiality is a possibility, and the meaning of possibility is "possible existent." Where the possible existent is a value it inherently lays claim to existence. But as possibilities, values are powerless to bring themselves into existence; they can only be actualized by existing entities, and the existing entities upon whose agency they depend are those in whom the possible values subsist as potentialities. In sum, to be a human being is to be responsible for certain values.

The fact that human beings are differentiated with respect to values-potentialities entails a division of labor in the work of values-actualization. The interdependence of values-actualizers confirms the inherently social nature of human beings. This social nature has earlier been noted in the dependence of infants and children, in virtue of which every person is, in the beginning of his or her life, a "social product." The just-noted division of labor in the primary work of values-actualization confirms the inherent social nature of developed individuals. This sociality in the outcome will be explored under the name of community in chapter 6. One of the questions to be probed there, for example, concerns the nature of the autonomy that can be attributed to and discerned in individuals who are interdependent in the fundamental moral enterprise of values-actualization. Meanwhile we may observe that the division of labor in values-actualization entails, in particular, two cardinal virtues that have not previously been commented upon. One of them is the developed capacity in individuals to recognize and appreciate values other than those with which they as individuals are personally identified. We shall name this virtue "liberality." The other is the readiness to respect others' responsibilities for the values with which they are identified, as against the impulse to arrogate those responsibilities for ourselves. The folk-maxim says, "If you want the job done well you must do it yourself," but we are here introducing the crucial proviso—unless it is a job that is someone else's to do, where this means that for the other not to do it is a failure

in self-responsibility. To respect another is to recognize and affirm the fundamental moral responsibilities of that other; to appropriate for oneself the responsibility of another is an especially deep form of disrespect. The virtue of respecting others' fundamental responsibilities for self-actualization we shall term "deference."

Aristotle says that persons who have experienced the satisfactions of self-fulfilling activities will not exchange them for gratification of any other kind. The Greek term for the feeling that constitutes the intrinsic reward of self-fulfilling activity is eudaimonia. It refers both to the feeling and to the condition of which the feeling is the subjective indicator, namely the condition of "living in harmony with oneself." Its contraries are, in the Greek, athlios, akrasia, kakodaimonia, or (rarely) dysdaimonia, meaning "living in opposition to oneself," or "living at odds with oneself," or simply "inner faction (or division). "

Here we come to the meaning of moral integrity as a deeper kind of honesty. Eudaimonism identifies it as lying well beneath "truth telling" in truthful living, that is, living in truth to oneself, where the self consists of the innate potential values that one is responsible for discovering, actualizing, conserving, and defending. Thus Aristotle speaks of "pursuing the truth in words and deeds," which he says occurs when "each man [person] speaks and acts and lives in accordance with his [or her] character."3

The feeling of eudaimonia is the intrinsic reward of the virtue of integrity, understood as "living in truth to oneself." Supposing for the sake of discussion that Aristotle is correct in saying that a person who experiences it will not trade it for gratifications of any other kind, it must be added that such a person will naturally seek to experience it, not just in one dimension of his or her life, but in other dimensions as well. This recognition does two things. It connects "integrity" in the meaning of "living in truth to oneself" to integrity understood as integration of the separable aspects (faculties, roles, desires, interests, life-shaping choices) of the self. And it affords an account of what we earlier contended was the inherent tendency of self-actualization to spread, from the dimension of life in which self-discovery first occurs (the situation of preparation for vocational choice was our focus in chapter 3) to other dimensions. An implication of the "unity of the virtues" thesis is that the occurrence of self-discovery in a dimension of an individual's life is the beginning of a progression to other dimensions.

The feeling of eudaimonia is a benefit to the person who possesses the virtue of integrity. In this sense, "integrity is its own reward." But

integrity also benefits the person who possesses it as a personal utility. We can recognize this by reverting to the eudaimonistic account of human being as problematic being: to be a human being is to be obliged to decide what to become and endeavor to become it. Significant success at endeavoring to become what one has chosen to become requires integration of faculties, desires, interests, roles, and life-shaping choices, such that aspects in each of these categories complement others, and all aspects alike contribute toward the chosen end. This integration must be achieved out of an initial disorder that was enduringly depicted by Plato in his image of the human soul as chariot, charioteer, and two fractious horses, one struggling to rise aloft while the other seeks to plunge below (Phaedrus ). In this condition the chariot cannot move and is at risk of being torn asunder. It symbolizes the disordered and internally contradictory condition of the self in which integration has not in significant measure been achieved. Such a self will be ineffective at achieving its ends and equivocal or contradictory in its identification of them. We are familiar enough with this condition: to begin with, it is entirely typical of young children, whose transitory desires pull them in many directions at once. But it is also familiar in the adult whose desire—say for a new car—is not extinguished by the knowledge that she cannot afford one. It is exemplified by the adult who marries, but with the covert intention of preserving to himself the prerogatives of bachelorhood. It is illustrated by the adult whose pursuit of his career is at cost to his marriage. That such cases are common is evidence not, I think, that the fragmenting conditions of contemporary life are irresistible, but that the problem of achieving integrity is neglected.

We are speaking of the benefits of the virtue of integrity to persons who possess this virtue and will shortly argue for the personal benefits of every virtue to its bearers. But is this appropriate? Are we not engaged at the reduction of moral virtue to prudence that, as F. H. Bradley said, "degrade(s) and prostitute(s) virtue"?4

In answer, it should first be noticed that the propensity to regard prudence and virtue as mutually exclusive is shared by some versions of Christian theology and some modem moral philosophies (Kant is a leading example), but not by classical moral philosophy, according to which prudence is itself a moral virtue. The basis of the judgment that the two are antithetical is the supposition that self-interest is either nonmoral or immoral, and is to be counteracted by morality. But if, as the Greeks supposed, the true interest of persons is to lead worthy lives, then prudence is a virtue because the self-interest that it serves is a moral

interest. This is what underlies the consistent effort by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (and many lesser classical moral theorists) to show that persons stand to gain by being moral. Presently there are some signs of a revival of this understanding, as for example when Robert Nozick concludes: "Plato's vision is right; we are better off being moral, it is a better way to be," adding: "It is a mistake, however, to squeeze this into the view that being moral serves what a person feels to be his self-interest, serves his felt motivations."5

If we do not suppose in persons a self-interest in being moral, the question, "Why be moral?" becomes unanswerable. Such answers as "to achieve salvation in an afterlife" or "to be accepted within the moral community" play to the self-interest that has been adjudged nonmoral or immoral, whereas answers that posit an obligation to be moral are circular, resting on premises that are acceptable only to those who have accepted the conclusions drawn from them. This cul-de-sac gives us good reason to entertain once again the classical premise that a life that is better for others and a life that is better for itself are not mutually exclusive.

Nozick correctly notes that the Platonic vision requires that persons' true interests be distinguished from their perceived interests. As we had occasion to consider in the introduction, persons may misperceive their interests through ignorance and through evil. Ignorance misperceives for a personal good something that is not such. The evil will actively seeks destruction of the good, but is a reactive phenomenon—in Nietz-sche's term a phenomenon of ressentiment —representing the perversion of the native desire to live a worthy life, in response to obstruction of that desire by obstacles in the world or in the self. We indicated in the introduction that a social enterprise to generalize the opportunities of self-actualization must guard itself against misperceived self-interests of both sorts, and we there proposed the constraints of (1) the law, (2) universalizability, and (3) forecasted objective worth. But preoccupation with curtailing the effects of self-misdirection must not be allowed to leave unattended the constructive work of providing social conditions that optimize the opportunities of individuals to enlist their self-actualizing initiatives. This has been our principal concern beginning with chapter 3 and will continue as such for the remainder of this book. Just now we are endeavoring to show how the moral virtues are generated out of the recognition of the potential worth of the self, which is the recognition of important work that requires to be done by each individual.

It is the recognition of something of importance that one has to do that generates a perspective on virtues and vices that is expressed, for example, by John Cowper Powys: "Conceit seals up the exploring antennae of your free sensibility. Malice and hate distract you and waste your life-energy. Possessions make you a fussy super-cargo."6 Vices squander the resources that are available to do the worthy work that is ours to do; virtues both are (in themselves) such resources, and also serve to organize and focus personal resources—physical, mental, emotional—that are not themselves virtues in the moral sense. It is the perspective that led Thoreau to give a large place to "economy" in moral life.

Identification with certain values generates moral integrity, understood on one hand as integration of personal resources toward the end of actualizing, conserving, and defending those values, and on the other hand as "living in truth to oneself," where the self is conceived as incomplete, to be finished or fulfilled by actualization, conservation, and defense of those values. Knowledge of these values is, therefore, self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is a measure of wisdom. Wisdom is classically defined as "knowledge of the good," and self-knowledge, understood as knowledge of the values whose actualization, conservation, and defense will complete or fulfill the self, is knowledge of the good of the self. To be sure it is not complete wisdom, which is complete knowledge of the good, but it is partial wisdom, and as such it is the starting point of the moral self-development of every person.

Our thesis is that self-knowledge and integrity conduce toward the manifestation of the other cardinal virtues by the individual. This is to speak, not of a necessity, but of a tendency. It can be illustrated in the example of courage. Courage is not a "portable attribute," like the six-gum of the movie gunslinger that are available for hire to the highest bidder. It is not a mere addition to one's character, whatever that may happen to be. Neither is it a disposition granted by the "natural lottery of birth" to the few, leaving the rest empty-handed. As Lester H. Hunt has shown, courageous acts involve a "limiting principle." They are "ones which are done from the principle that one's own safety... has no more than a certain measure of importance."7 It is not misleading to speak of an "instinct of self-preservation" that has primacy in human beings until they discover the values they will identify themselves with. But to discover these values is in the case of each individual to discover "what is worth living for," which is also what is worth placing oneself at risk for. What sets a limit to the importance of one's own safety is something that one cares about more. There are of course countless

things that a person may prize more than his or her own safety. Mothers are disposed to place themselves at risk for their children; romantic lovers are often ready to risk themselves for the beloved (whose reciprocal love serves to control this self-sacrificing propensity); I know a man who risked his life to prevent his parked sports car from rolling off a cliff. How are we to distinguish true courage from such of its pseu-domorphs as foolhardiness, rashness, and so forth? The answer, I think, is by the intrinsic value that this virtue, with other virtues, possesses. The intrinsic value in each virtue derives from the end that it serves as means—the end is in the means—and thus presupposes the value of the end. Where that end is not a value, the apparent virtue is not a virtue. Courage, as defined by Hunt, is a relation between values, namely between the value sought and the value risked. There are many situations in which the value sought is higher than the value risked, and the basic one is the situation of self-actualization, where the objective worth of the actualized self, or the outcome, is greater than that of the present self.

But do we not attribute courage to the bank robber and the international jewel thief? Indeed so, but mistakenly, and the mistake is not far to seek. The fact is that many of us are fascinated by such figures, who exhibit an adventurousness and irresponsibility that we sometimes envy. It is our glamorization of them that results in our attribution to them of courage. This Walter Mittyism becomes culpable, however, when it induces us to contrive a moral philosophy that vindicates it. If we shift from bank robbers and jewel thieves (whom, conveniently, most of us are not likely to be victimized by) and try to attribute courage to sadistic rapists, wanton torturers, and brutal murderers, I believe we will choke on our words. Yet it is unquestionably the case that these latter sorts often exhibit as much or more daring as the former. The difference is that we cannot amuse ourselves by admiring what they do.

The eudaimonistic thesis is that courage is likely to be manifested by any person who discovers and identifies with the values that are the right values for him or her. Such manifestation represents the moral growth that is the natural tendency of human beings. To be a human being is to be in potentia a bearer of moral virtues, and the problem of moral development is that of discovering the conditions for their actualization.

The social utility of the virtues is apparent in their direct contribution to the well-being of others. The Person of integrity can be relied upon to do what he or she accepts responsibility for; the courageous person better serves the collective interests to which she lends herself by

her unwavering resolve when trouble arises. But the virtues also afford social utility by rendering individual enterprises congenial to one another (justice, temperance, tact, liberality, discretion, and civility are conspicuous in this respect). Legal and other institutional means are also required for this purpose, but they must not undermine, or usurp the role of, the virtues.

It is lately a commonplace of moral philosophy to categorize virtues as predominantly "self-regarding" or predominantly "other-regarding." We may take it that the personal utility of the predominantly "self-regarding" virtues is sufficiently recognized. Our thesis that all virtues are personal utilities (as well as intrinsic values and social utilities) meets its test in the virtues that are typically adjudged to be predominantly other-regarding. Accordingly we will here take up two of these—generosity and honesty—while reserving to chapter 5 the additional two of justice and temperance.

By general agreement generosity is the virtue that is expressed in acts whose characterizing intention is to benefit someone other than the agent. It is doing something for the sake of one or more others. Paradigmatically a generous act is an act in which something is given by a donor to a recipient for the purpose of benefiting the recipient. A condition of generous gift-giving is that the donor has reason to believe that her gift will have value for the recipient. That this belief proves to have been mistaken does not in itself deny the generosity of the giving. For example, John may (generously) give to Robert a copy of a book that, as it happens, Robert purchased for himself a day previously. But if John had no reason to think what he gave to Robert would be of value to Robert, John's act would not be generous in our meaning of the word. Most obviously this will be the case if the gift is utterly valueless—say an article of used clothing with no wear left in it. (I will shortly show that this is not in fact disputed by Schopenhauer's and Emerson's esteem of the giving of "useless" gifts.)

Generosity will also not be present, however, if the gift has no value for Robert because John has not troubled to acquire sufficient knowledge of Robert to know what will be valuable to him. To see this requires, first, that we overturn the present propensity to study virtues in "atomic" acts, that is, acts that are considered independently of the agent's general conduct of life. Philippa Foot refers to the propensity when she says, "The reason why it seems to some people so impossibly difficult to show that justice is more profitable than injustice is that they consider in isolation particular just acts."8 We hold that what she says

applies identically to generosity (and to every virtue)—it is embedded inextricably in the texture of the life of the generous person and must be studied in that context. This is part of what Aristotle is saying in his identification of virtues as dispositions of character.

Generous gift-giving begins to acquire its context in the recognition that it is necessarily situated in prior giving, namely the giving of the attention of the prospective gift-giver to the person of the prospective recipient in order to perceive what kind of person he is and what will benefit him. This does not preclude the possibility of giving generously to persons with whom one is not personally acquainted. It can be enough, for example, to know that persons in another part of the world are starving to give food generously. To be given generously some gifts require only such knowledge as is to be inferred from the fact that the recipients are human beings, whereas other gifts require knowledge of the distinctive needs and interests of the recipient. Our contention, therefore, is the general one that generosity requires "proportional" knowledge, where the requisite amounts and kinds of knowledge vary with the circumstances.

When Schopenhauer and Emerson contend that generosity is often best expressed in the giving of "useless" gifts,9 they are in spite of appearances not contradicting the aforementioned condition of generosity, that the gift be such as the giver has reason to believe will benefit the recipient. They are advising that when a gift is devoid of material utility, this will serve to make more apparent other values it possesses. They are not offering the (fatuous) advice that recipients who most of all need material values should be given gifts that are devoid of such values. They are advising that most of us who are not in serious material need are nevertheless so preoccupied with material values as to be unable to recognize the higher values that true gifts confer.

What is particularly interesting in Schopenhauer's and Emerson's advisement is the tact and discretion it embodies, specifically in regard to the ever-present possibility of confusion between generosity and charity, and the effect of this confusion upon such a relationship as friendship. Through the ages, friendship has been recognized by those who have attended carefully to it (from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Buber, and C. S. Lewis) as a "horizontal" relationship, that is, relationship among equals. It makes no difference if one member of the pair of friends is president of the United States and the other is wholly without power or prestige—in the friendship such disparities do not appear. (Though, to be sure, such a disparity

as has just been cited renders friendship in that case unlikely to arise. Similarly, for example, friendship between husband and wife is unlikely in social circumstances characterized by male dominance.)

That generosity is a horizontal relationship is attested by the fact that it is compatible with friendship, whereas charity is not. Charity is a "vertical" relationship from sufficiency to deficiency. Indeed, such is our sensitivity to this verticality that charity is only a virtue on condition that it includes the tact that deemphasizes its downward direction—deemphasizes, but cannot eliminate. An important attribute of the "useless" gift is that it cannot be mistaken for charity.

But the "useless" gift makes a profounder point. By eliminating the distraction of material utility it facilitates recognition that what the generous giver gives in her gift is herself. Her gift signifies her appreciation of the worth, whether actual or merely potential, of the recipient. This presupposes two capacities in the giver—knowledge of the distinctive worth of the recipient and actualized worth in the giver that is conferred in the giving of the gift. In other words, she gives herself in her gift, having beforehand taken the trouble to see to it that the self she gives is a worthy self.

Nevertheless the "useless" gift of Schopenhauer and Emerson is a significant symbol; it is not an ideal toward which generosity is aimed. Generosity can be distinguished from charity in normal gift-giving. And that it is at bottom himself that the generous gift-giver gives is sufficiently clear to the alert witness in countless cases where the gift is, not a material thing, but the judgment, sympathy, encouragement, and so forth of the giver. Likewise it is fully evident here that the giver is responsible for first having taken the trouble to make his judgment sound, his encouragement worth having, and so forth. This will be evident in our personal histories as recipients. In our youth we were so eager to receive approval of any sort, thanks to our radical uncertainty of our own worth, that we did not dream of questioning its source. But our subsequent development led us to become more selective in the matter of whose judgments about us were to be taken seriously. We learned to value most the goods of this sort that were tendered by persons whose own development in the relevant respects surpassed our own.

Because the generously given gift must possess value, and as it is at bottom himself that the generous giver gives, it is recognizably the case that generosity is connected to self-interest, understood as each person's interest in living in such a way as to manifest his or her potential worth.

In the early stages of development a person may wish to be generous but not know how. Becoming capable of being generous is part of the process of self-development; it is dependent upon progressively acquired powers of discernment, discrimination, understanding, patience, evaluation, and sympathy (understood as the capacity of imaginative participation in the lives of others). The central motivational power in this process of self-development is the self-love that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle recognized as the precondition of love of others.

As a developmental outcome, generosity may be said to have its seasons. One of the richest rewards of a mature person's achievement of secure place is the liberty it affords for relating generously to others. (A tenured university professor, say, who does not use his secure place to help younger colleagues of promise is depriving himself of one of the deep intrinsic rewards of tenure.) At the lowest end of development, children can be said to be generous only in an appropriately diminished meaning of the term. This is because, as dependents, children give what they have received from others. This remains true even if we suppose that in giving they give themselves, for the selves of children are social products. And though adolescents can be generous, the virtue is not well lodged in this season, because adolescence is the stage in which a person recognizes the self as his or her own first problem, and is intensely self-preoccupied. To be sure, adolescents sometimes exhibit extravagant generosity, but the very extravagance is our clue that the adolescent, in accordance with the exploratory, experimental temper of the stage, is experimenting with generosity (as an adolescent will test himself for courage by, for example, climbing the town water tower and emblazoning upon it his or his girlfriend's initials).

If Carol Gilligan is correct that women in their development from girlhood typically move from an egocentric stage to a stage centered in caring for others, and only thereafter (and with great difficulty, thanks both to inner conflicts and to social expectations) to recognition of the responsibility to care for oneself,10 then I think the stage of caring for others contains an anomaly that can be expressed as giving oneself before one has a self to give.

And what of the personal utility of generosity? It lies first of all in the intrinsic reward of giving oneself when one has a worthy self to give. But generosity also exhibits the "reflex-arc" that characterizes personal development. This is expressed in Thoreau's words: "Genius is only as rich as it is generous; if it hoards it impoverishes itself."11 Self-development is the necessary foundation of generosity, and generosity

contributes to self-development by confirming the objective worth that self-development aims to manifest. As objective, the worth of the self in the degree to which it is actualized is meant to be recognized, appreciated, and utilized by persons other than the self (though by no means to the exclusion of the self), and it is incomplete without such recognition, appreciation, and utilization in appropriate measure. To be sure, this is not the whole of self-actualization. Unfortunately history attests that worthy lives have been lived with little or no contemporaneous recognition, appreciation, or utilization of their worth by others (Nietzsche and Thoreau received small appreciation in their lifetimes; El Greco and Van Gogh received almost none). It may be regarded as the consummating increment.

It should be clear that the personal utility we have discerned in generosity does not compromise the virtue. This is so because the self that is served is not alien to the virtue but is instead the foundation of it as well as of other virtues. That there is personal utility in the aim of worthy living does not alter the aim; indeed, that aim remains the moral aim it is even if personal utility should be a conscious secondary aim, for the utility in question serves the moral aim. Were personal gain to be the primary intent, the virtue would be hopelessly compromised. But "personal utility" logically implies priority of the end that the utility serves, and where the end is worthy living, the virtue of generosity is not compromised.

As was set forth in the introduction: in eudaimonistic perspective, each person's true work is his or her life, to which the person's "job" in the work-a-day sense should be contributory. The contribution of the job to the life is a mark of integrity (whose measure, of course, includes corresponding contributions by marriage and family, avocations, friends, religious and civic commitments, and all other distinguishable strands in the life of the individual). We have defined "meaningful work" in the primary sense as meaningful living, understood as valuable living, and more specifically as actualization of particular values that realize the implicit identity of the individual. It now requires explicit statement that on our thesis, meaningful work is the foundational case of generosity. We can recognize this in the phenomenon of "objectivization," by which the person of the friend is in the friendship, the person of the painter is in her paintings, the person of the engineer is in the finished bridge that he designs, the craftsperson is in her crafted products. Identification with the work produces objectivization, by which, in Emerson's words, "the inmost in due time becomes the outmost."12 He refers to the ob-

jectivization of what is initially subjective in the self, by which what is at first private becomes public and available to others (as a poem, say, starts in one's head and is subsequently written down and perhaps printed). For human beings the process of living is inherently a process of objectivization—it is ex -isting, understood as living from oneself outward, into the world. It is ex -pressing oneself into objective situations by which one's self becomes available to others. This constitutes generosity in the cases of persons who have striven to make the self and its expressions as worthy as possible.

Consistent with his thesis of the inherent criteriology of all virtues, Aristotle says that the generous person "will give to the right people, and the right amount, and at the right time, and fulfill all the other conditions of right living."13 This has sometimes been held to prescribe a degree of calculation that is inconsistent with the virtue, but I think it can be shown instead to express the dependence of generosity, with every other virtue, upon wisdom, understood as practical knowledge of the good and how it can be attained. We shall look more closely at the inherent critiera of generosity, beginning with "the right amount."

Is it possible to be "excessively generous," such that the excess undermines the generosity? Certainly a person can give away more money (say), or time, or food (etc.), than he or she can afford to be without. At first sight, however, this appears to be a failure, not of generosity, but of prudence. Or if the excess is said to be "more than the recipient deserves," the case appears to involve failure in respect to justice rather than to generosity.14

We can agree that some intended criticisms of "excessive generosity" are mistargeted while denying that this is so for all, and thereby preserve Aristotle's case for an inherent criteriology.

A form of excessive generosity that is not chargeable to imprudence or injustice (in the modem sense) is giving more of something to someone than is good for him or her. That too much can be as debilitating as too little is a neglected implication of the Greek counsel of sophrosune, or "proportion." But do we need to be reminded that excessive power, or wealth, or adulation, can seriously disorient their recipients? Moreover "help" of any kind becomes oppressive when it usurps responsibilities that are properly those of the persons "helped," responsibilities that must be exercised by them in the interest of their own self-development. To recognize others as ends in themselves, and self-responsible, is implicitly to affirm that generosity has intrinsic upper limits. There are cases in which conduct that recognizes others as ends

in themselves exemplifies generosity. Suppose that shortly after your marriage you exhibit a budding interest in photography, in which, as it happens, your bride has in her past acquired expertise. If, because she sees your pleasure in your growing skill (though her own skill greatly surpasses it), she leaves the family photography to you, she behaves generously. For the most part, however, the more appropriate term for conduct in recognition of others as ends in themselves is "respect."

And what of the inherent criterion of giving "to the right people"? If it meant giving to deserving people what they are entitled to, it would be a matter not of generosity but of justice, but this is not Aristotle's meaning. The "right people" criterion reflects the fact that persons are qualitatively individuated such that for what a particular person has to give, only some persons are appropriate recipients. One does not generously give a bottle of whiskey to a teetotaler, or a Union Jack to the Irish patriot Parnell, or one's attentions to someone who finds them an unwanted intrusion. This may seem to be a question, not of giving to the right person, but of giving the tight gift, but the relevance of the "right person" criterion will be evident if we call into play our previous recognition that it is at bottom herself that the generous giver gives. Each person is distinctive, manifesting distinctive values, which only some others are prepared to recognize, appreciate, and utilize. Emerson is calling attention to his when he says, "... cleave to your companions; I will seek my own."15 Our appropriate "companions" are persons who can recognize, appreciate, and utilize our distinctive worth, as we do theirs. In a certain sense what one has to give selects its recipients, namely those persons by whom the particular values in the gift can be recognized and utilized.

Here generosity points to its foundation in personal integrity: one must give in truth to oneself; it is not one's part to give what anyone or another may happen to need, or what anyone or another may importune one to give, but what one has to give by virtue of what one is. The foundation of generosity in integrity prevents the dissipation of the self of the giver that is attendant upon "being all things to all people."

In our society as in many others, women are conditioned (whether in accordance with woman's "nature" or not is here irrelevant) to be "caring." But until limits are set to the scope of each woman's caring, dissipation of her self is the result. The particular form of this dissipation is the woman's inevitable and continuous feeling of guilt, arising from the fact that while she is caring for one thing (oftenest a person, though candidates include pets, houseplants, wildlife, the natural envi-

ronment; the first person to make a practice of speaking tenderly to houseplants was quite certainly a woman), she is not caring for many others. The conclusion to be drawn is that responsibility for caring must be limited (as must any conception of responsibility, in recognition of persons' finitude). But how shall it be limited? Traditionally the circle of the family has been employed, but ineffectively, because it is immediately evident that the need for care extends beyond it, and care is inherently responsive to need. In accordance with what has been said above, the appropriate limitation of responsibility will be set by self-knowledge and the responsibility to care for oneself in recognition that this is a necessary condition of caring for others. To care for oneself entails knowing oneself and being oneself, which qualify the kinds of care one can give in truth to oneself. Carol Gilligan marks the recognition by women that their caring must include self-care as the threshhold of the crucial consummating stage in the moral self-development of women.16

From the task of disclosing the personal utility in the "other regarding" virtue of generosity, we turn to the corresponding task with respect to the virtue of honesty, but here we shall be brief, for the line of thought is the same.

No argument is needed to show that what we ought to mean by honesty is more than truth-telling, for human beings express themselves in forms of conduct other than speech, and may deceive no less by these other forms. To recognize aspiration as a definitive human characteristic is to be aware that human beings are always aiming at an intended future. It follows from this that all human conduct is promissory and is read as such by fellow human beings. (Our perennial underlying question in all social intercourse is what we are to expect of the other: what we are to expect next, what we are to expect after that, what we are to expect ultimately.) Accordingly the deceiver is one who contrives his conduct to misrepresent his intended future (as, in a simple case, if you had fallen, and I extended my hand to you, and then withdrew it as you reached to take it), and the honest person is one whose conduct accurately expresses his intended future. But this drives the question of honesty beneath the matter of truth-telling to truthful living. The problem is that we understand by "truth" a relationship (some sort of "agreement") between something and something else. In the simple case of descriptive sentences, it is a relationship between the sentence and what the sentence describes. But we have just seen that verbal conduct alone is insufficient to the meaning of honesty. We gain the requisite breadth if we conceive of truth as the relationship between "appearance" and

"reality." When we apply this to the prima facie puzzling notion of truthful living, we find that we can conceptualize the notion in the idea of "living in truth to oneself," where "living" is appearance (i.e., expression in the world), and the "self" is the reality. In eudaimonistic thought, as we know, the self that is the reality is the person's distinctive innate potential worth, which his or her actual self—the self that exists in the world and is available to others—may express or misrepresent. "Living truthfully," then, is actualizing one's innate potential worth in the world, and "living untruthfully" is failing to do so (that this may be either deliberate or inadvertent need not detain us here).

Earlier we offered a three-part definition of moral integrity as: (1) integration of separable aspects of the self: faculties, desires, interests, roles, courses of conduct determined by life-shaping choices; (2) wholeness as completeness (by which is meant "completeness as an individual, " not as a Marxian "species being" in whom all human potentialities are to be realized); and (3) a deeper kind of honesty. We have now identified the "deeper kind of honesty" as "living in truth to oneself," that is, as self-actualization. Therefore the case for the personal utility of honesty is the same as the case for the personal utility of moral integrity, which has been set forth previously. It consists, first, in the intrinsic reward in the virtue, which is the feeling of eudaimonia. We translate it as "happiness," but it is a distinctive quality of satisfaction that can be described as inner harmony as against inner dissonance. And second, it is the effectiveness at goal attainment that is exhibited by inner organization as against inner disorder and division. To be sure, there are also the benefits of being trusted by others because one is trustworthy, but this is one of the reflexive effects of the social utility of the virtue of moral integrity, and the social utilities of the virtues are not our present focus.

Thanks to the modern divorce of morality and politics and its effect upon our thinking, it will be well to reiterate here our unconventional thesis of their inherent connection, which we have termed "politics of virtue." It consists of the following three steps. First, the primary responsibility of government is to enhance by such means as are available to it the quality of the lives of the governed. Secondly, enhancement of lives in its profoundest sense means moral development to the end of worthy living. And third, because all persons are (ex hypothesi ) invested innately with both potential worth and incentive to moral growth, the crucial first step in the enhancement of quality of lives, considered as a social endeavor, is to secure conditions under which most persons are

likely to "make contact with themselves," that is, to recognize their own innate potential worth, thereby engaging their incentive to live so as to actualize that worth. In sum: because good politics is concerned with good living, it must be concerned with cultivation of the moral virtues.

A "unity of the virtues" thesis underlies this chapter and must be spelled out. We hold that self-knowledge, understood as knowledge of one's potential worth, is inspirational: it enlists the incentive to growth, it generates the identification of the individual with certain values which marks the beginning of moral integrity, it generates courage by providing the values with respect to which (in Lester Hunt's keen observation) the individual perceives her or his own safety as having "no more than a certain measure of importance," it generates generosity and honesty. A part of our "unity" thesis is our contention that the discovery by a person of her potential personal worth in one aspect of her life actualizes a tendency to seek the self in other aspects of life, and to wish to actualize the potential worth of the self in all domains of the individual life. Here is the larger utility in our proposed programs of chapter 3, which were aimed at facilitating self-discovery in the realm of work in the work-a-day sense. Our purpose would be served by self-discovery in any other dimension of life, hence for vocational choice might have been substituted an investigation of the conditions of any of the other life-shaping choices. What is needed is a starting point of self-knowledge in individuals.

A correlative aspect of our "unity" thesis, announced at the outset of this chapter, is the tendency in the individual for the acquisition of one virtue to lead to the acquisition of other virtues. An account of this tendency must necessarily involve subjective factors, but it also entails, in logic, the mutual interdependence of the cardinal virtues. In this chapter we have sought to exhibit this interdependence in the case of wisdom, integrity, courage, generosity, and honesty. In the next chapter we shall endeavor to do the same for justice and temperance.

This is a "unity-of-the-virtues" thesis, and theses so-named are famously associated with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. They are just as famously attacked, and this propensity has been especially notable of late, even in moral philosophers and classical scholars otherwise disposed favorably to the theorizing of the principals. What I shall be most concerned to call attention to, by way of conclusion to this chapter, is that attacks on "unity of the virtues" as advanced against Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas are in many cases mistaken about the kind of unity that those philosophers held to obtain. In short they are wide of the mark, exposing errors that Socrates, Plato, Aris-

totle, and Aquinas did not commit, while leaving the mistaken impression that "unity of the virtues" is indefensible.

For example, some critics17 suppose that by "unity of the virtues" Socrates meant that "wisdom," "courage," "justice," "temperance," and "piety" are one and the same virtue, or even that their names are synonyms. Then Socrates is refuted by the simple measure of showing that courage is different from wisdom, justice is different from temperance, etc. Remarking on the prevalence of this interpretation, Gregory Vlastos says, "This is how Socrates is being understood today,"18 and Vlastos proceeds with great care to demonstrate the misunderstanding. We shall here follow him briefly and merely in outline. Our aim is to arrive at a defensible understanding of the Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian thesis that in some sense to possess one of the cardinal virtues is to possess them all.

Vlastos demonstrates that Socrates cannot reasonably be supposed to have held that the virtues are identical. What Socrates says of piety in the Euthyphro —that it is a single idea (Form) that recurs self-identically in every pious act and can be used as a standard by which to determine whether a given act is or is not pious:

He would say, mutatis mutandis, of every one of the other virtues. How then could he possibly tolerate, let alone uphold, the notion that each is identical with each? Could one think of him, for instance, conceding that if Euthyphro were to give him the definiens of Courage, he could use that as a "standard" by which to judge whether Euthyphro's prosecution of his father was, or was not, pious? As for claiming that the names of the five virtues were all synonyms, that would imply that any of those five words can be freely interchanged in any sentence (in a transparent context) without changing its sense or truth. Try substituting "Courage" for "Piety" in (1) "Piety" is that eidos in virtue of which all pious actions are pious" (Euthyphro 6D), or "Justice" for (2) "Piety" in "Piety is that part of Justice which has to do with service to the gods" (Euthyphro 12E). The substitutions would falsify (1) and make nonsenee of (2).19

The strategy chosen by Vlastos is to start with what he terms Socrates's "biconditionality thesis" and then apply what is arrived at to the "similarity" thesis (above) and the "unity of the virtues," The biconditionality thesis is the thesis that a person who possesses any one of the virtues will (in some sense ) possess them all. The key to it lies in Socrates's contentions that "courage is wisdom," "justice is wisdom," "temperance is wisdom," "wisdom is courage," and so on. We are to understand by this, Vlastos says, that all five virtues are interpredicable—not however, in the sense of the subject of each predication as the abstract entity named by its term, but in the sense of the subject as instantiation of that

abstract entity. In other words, "justice is temperance" means, not that the concept "justice" is the concept "temperance," but that the just person is also temperate, the temperate person is also wise, and so on. And the key to understanding this is what I will term the "interpenetration" of the meanings of the virtues (not their identity).

To illustrate this, we earlier held that integrity results from the identification of the self with certain values, and this means that integrity participates in wisdom, for knowledge of those values is knowledge of (certain) goods, and knowledge of the good is wisdom. (Knowledge of certain values is, as we said, not the whole of wisdom, which would be knowledge of all values, but is a part of it.) Then we argued (drawing upon Lester Hunt) that courage implies placing a limit upon the importance of one's own safety, and that the placing of this limit occurs in the identification of the self with certain values—to actualize, conserve, and defend them—which is to say that courage participates in wisdom. Likewise wisdom participates in courage, in that courage is implicit in the recognition of the values one will actualize, conserve, and defend. It awaits the occasions that require it (which is to say with Aristotle, it is a disposition). This demonstration can be carried out to arrive at the interpenetration of all of the cardinal virtues. For example, "temperance" is desiring no more than what one is due, and what one is due derives from the values one identifies with, knowledge of which is wisdom. And justice seeks for all persons what is due them on account of the values that are theirs to identify with: therefore it requires a more extensive measure of wisdom, which includes knowledge of the goods of others as well as of the self. It is not possible here to undertake the lengthy task of demonstrating the interpenetration of each cardinal virtue with every other, and I must trust that what has been offered is indicative of the terms and direction of such demonstration.

Now we must consider an immediate objection to the "biconditionality thesis," which is that, quite evidently, many persons manifest some of the cardinal virtues but not all. What I wish to show is that to grant this (as I do) need not be damaging to the biconditionality thesis. The supposition that it overturns the biconditionality thesis leads (in one direction) to regarding the virtues as independent of one another. It is evident in Protagoras' rejoinder to Socrates: "... you will find many men who are unjust, most impious, most intemperate, and most ignorant, but exceptionally brave."20 It results in regarding virtues as "portable attributes" that may be learned independently of one another and applied to otherwise unvirtuous courses of conduct,

an approach resisted strenuously by Socrates. Our leaning in this direction today is exhibited, for example, in "applied ethics," and specifically in the practice of adding "ethics" to each of the professions by requiring a college course—such as "business ethics," "medical ethics," "engineering ethics"—in the educational program of each profession. This "quick fix" approach ignores the thesis that ethical conduct expresses traits of character—the moral virtues—whose cultivation will transform the various professions. In short, the relationship of ethics to practices that have arisen from other grounds and are directed to other ends is not just additive but transformative.

Earlier we used the examples of the jewel thief and the bank robber to note that each virtue (courage was the virtue there treated, but the point is general) has its pseudomorphs. Some of the "Protagorean" difficulty with the biconditionality thesis will be removed by learning to distinguish pseudomorphs of the virtues from the virtues themselves. Nevertheless it is sure to be the case that in the matter of the genuine virtues, persons will be found who manifest some of them but not all. The reason this is not inconsistent with the biconditionality thesis is that virtues in their manifestation are developmental outcomes, and persons do not develop in all aspects of themselves at the same rate. To expect all of the virtues to become manifest in an individual at the same time would be as illogical as to expect that every (or any) individual will make all of his or her life-shaping choices at the same time. But by the understanding of development as the actualization of potentials, it is entirely consistent to recognize mutual implication among the virtues without holding that all must be manifest at once, because the implication (say) of wisdom for courage may be of actualized wisdom for as-yet unactualized, that is, merely potential, courage. Moreover this implication, though logically "of necessity," in Socrates's phrase, does not entail existential necessity, for the actualization of a potentiality partakes of the contingencies of existence. Therefore we do not interpret the biconditionality thesis to hold that where (say) wisdom exists, manifest courage must necessarily follow: we interpret biconditionality in the weaker terms of the tendency for each virtue to elicit into manifestation the other virtues.

Understood in this way, the thesis of the "unity of the virtues" is consistent with the basic tenets of eudaimonistic philosophy. Unlike Vlastos, I will not by detailed exegesis and interpretation endeavor to demonstrate that this is what was meant as "unity of the virtues' by Socrates (or by Plato or Aristotle). My task has been to show, against

modem criticism, that a defensible meaning of the thesis exists. It enables me to argue that a politics that is aimed at improvement of the quality of life must look to the establishment of institutions that afford to the maximum number of persons the best prospect of coming in touch with themselves—their own inner potential worth—at any point. I have granted that from this beginning the growth of self-knowledge, wisdom, identification with certain values, integrity, courage, generosity, temperance, and justice does not follow of necessity. My eudaimonistic thesis is in behalf of no more than the tendency of this development. The question then is: can we afford to ignore, obstruct, or—deliberately or inadvertently—extinguish this tendency?