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On Psychology and Virtue Ethics

Article in Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology · November 2011

DOI: 10.1037/a0026058

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Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology, in press 2011

On Psychology and Virtue Ethics

Frank C. Richardson
University of Texas

Virtue and Psychology: Pursuing Excellence in Ordinary Practices by Fowers (2005)

represents the most extensive effort to date to mine the resources of virtue ethics for
theory and practice in psychology. Building on this work, I explore some of the
implications of the virtue ethics perspective for the fields of psychology and
psychotherapy, including helping to overcome individualism and instrumentalism,
elaborating a conception of “internal” as opposed to merely “external goods,” clarifying
the nature of “character strengths,” developing further the idea of “strong relationality”
in the sphere of human action, and aiding psychology in general in the effort to
characterize a good or successful life.

Virtue ethics has caused great enthusiasm in many intellectual quarters in recent decades, to say
the least. Blaine Fowers’ work in Virtue and Psychology: Pursuing Excellence in Ordinary
Practices and other publications, a program of theory and research just getting a full head of
steam at the present time, is the most extensive effort to date to mine the resources of virtue
ethics for theory and practice in psychology. In this article, I will describe several key,
representative notions and principles of the virtue perspective that I find particularly compelling,
revealing, or helpful and explore a few of their implications for the fields of psychology and
psychotherapy.

“The Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality”

One of the most exciting things I ever read was Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981, p. 49 ff.) account, in
his celebrated book After Virtue, of the collapse of what MacIntyre terms “the Enlightenment
Project of justifying morality.” Here is how I would retell that story. Many people today look
back with some nostalgia on aspects of life in premodern or traditional societies, in which people
apprehend themselves in a “pretheoretical” (Berger, 1979) or taken-for-granted manner as being
an organic part of a hierarchical and meaningful order of being. In such a life, as Clifford Geertz
(1973, p. 90) puts it, myth and ritual tune “human action to an envisioned cosmic order and
[project] images of order onto the plane of human existence.” This can afford people meaningful
roles to play in life and provide what Antonovsky (1979) calls a “sense of coherence” that helps
make “affectively comprehensible” the uncontrollable and tragic aspects of human existence. At
the same time, very few of us are comfortable with such a vision of life. We are steeped in the
kind of modern consciousness and outlook, deeply antiauthoritarian and emancipatory in
 2

character that was fashioned in large part by progressively desacralizing the universe in order to
undo dogmatism, domination, and irrational constraints on human liberty and creativity.

This kind of nostalgia for something lost coupled with keen ambivalence about it is just
one manifestation of an acute cultural and ultimately personal dilemma that touches every part of
modern life. Paul Ricoeur (1973, p. 156) called this dilemma the “antimony of value,” the
“central antimony of [modern] moral philosophy.” The question is, Are moral or spiritual values
created or discovered? In Ricoeur’s words, “If values are not our work but precede us, why do
they not suppress our freedom? And if they are our work, why are they not arbitrary choices?”
(p. 156). We can’t live with them but can’t live without them, so to speak.

Long interested in moral philosophy, I always thought of modern moral systems like
utilitarianism or Kantian/deontological viewpoints as timeless philosophical options whose
adequacy we had somehow to evaluate. But MacIntyre (1981) argues persuasively that these
systems are based on unquestioned assumptions about the nature of things that when exposed to
the light of day turn out to be the creatures of a particular historical era. They were fashioned in
response to its unique needs and pressures, and in many ways are highly questionable. MacIntyre
suggests that these early modern moral philosophers in a post-traditional world genuinely wanted
to honor both freedom and responsibility. Their problem was how to construe moral values so
that they (1) do not violate hard-won modern ideals of autonomy and political tolerance but (2)
still retain enough authority or credibility so as not to appear arbitrary or irrational.1

On MacIntyre’s (1981) account, quite diverse approaches to modern moral philosophy

represent versions of the same basic strategy in attacking this dilemma. First, this approach
attempts to ground morality in some familiar aspect of human nature or functioning, such as
reason, feeling, or will, understood as morally neutral or as not defined in terms of its role in
some wider cosmic story. Second, each of these approaches then justifies a particular set of
moral values—typically a thinned-out version of inherited, traditional ideals—by arguing that it
grows naturally out of the full and proper exercise of one of these basic human capacities. This
scheme is artfully designed to preserve autonomy and disallow arbitrary authority at all costs.
This commitment to autonomy is illustrated by Kant’s insistence—even though he held sincere
religious beliefs—that in order to conclude reasonably that we should do something commanded
by God, we first would have to know that we ought to do what God commands, and knowing
that we would require a standard of judgment independent of God’s commandments (p. 43).

For example, utilitarian moral theory portrays human beings as engaged in a kind of
direct pursuit of happiness or pleasure, notwithstanding the perennial wisdom that genuine
happiness comes only as a by-product of seeking the good or doing the right thing for its own
sake. This view sees making moral decisions as a matter of calculating the pleasure and pain an
action will cause and pursuing policies that produce the greatest pleasure for the greatest number.
The trouble is, such an approach simply assumes that people will opt for decent, civilized

1
We might think of these philosophers as secular high priests of early modern times, attempting to
explain and justify modern culture to its inhabitants. Perhaps, for many, that role is taken over by
th
psychotherapy theorists and therapists in the 20 century, who try to show how the one-sided
individualism of that era can nevertheless be harmonized with meaningful social ties and sustaining
human relationships.
 3

satisfactions and not for whatever they happen to find pleasurable or diverting or even
sadistically gratifying at the moment. In other words, utilitarian thought really does not establish
but rather presupposes a way of distinguishing between right and wrong or identifying the good
life (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 63).

Similarly, Kantian liberalism takes the inherent dignity of persons more seriously than
utilitarian views and argues that human reason, employing “no criterion external to itself”
(MacIntyre, 1981, p. 43), dictates a rational test for evaluating the rules or maxims that guide
moral choices. By following his famous “categorical imperative,” to act only on principles that
can be consistently universalized without contradiction, he felt that moral autonomy is preserved
and ethics no longer depends on either securing worldly benefits or capitulating to whatever we
just happen to find pleasing. The trouble is, on close examination, it turns out that immoral
maxims like “Only keep promises unless it is really quite inconvenient to do so” can be
universalized without logical contradiction. It’s just that most of us don’t admire the way of life
or kind of person such a principle allows. So, this approach, too, does not establish but rather
presupposes a way of discerning the good or right life. The Enlightenment Project of justifying
morality fails and we are left with moral ideals or convictions we can neither abandon nor
defend.

There is no time for any of the details, but elsewhere (Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon,
1999), we have argued that other modern ethical outlooks, including Romantic or expressive
individualism, modern existentialism, and even to an extent postmodern or social constructionist
viewpoints all represent more or less attenuated versions of this failed Enlightenment project.
Maybe 20th century psychology felt that it could avoid entanglement in this confusing and
seeming irresolvable clash of moral visions by adopting a strictly value-neutral approach to
investigating human life. But Fowers (2005) points out in Virtue and Psychology that this
approach hardly amounts to ethical neutrality. It demands a significant, austere “detachment
from the scientist’s cherished beliefs and outlook” that ironically represents a “central feature of
a character ideal” (p. 20), one that scarcely seems applicable to all phases of the search for
understanding—which might require emotional sensitivity, ethical engagement, and wisdom, as
well as certain kinds of objectivity, to grasp the meaning of human phenomena. Moreover, this
ideal amounts to a confusing injunction that one ought to “value being value-free” (Slife, Smith,
& Burchfield, 2003, p. 60), opening the back door to the surreptitious embrace of one or more of
these at least questionable modern moral outlooks that are then used in a consequential way to
interpret one’s data (or patients). The source of much of this confusion, Fowers believes, is that
these diverse visions of human life all tend to assume the distinctively modern “fact-value split”
or “fact-value” separation, which he feels is ‘neither possible nor desirable.” Recognizing this
sets in motion “the search for an alternative ontology that can encompass both facts and values”
and offer a more plausible account of human striving for a good or decent life.

Instrumentalism

Another issue with these modern outlooks, from utilitarianism to existentialism, heirs to the
Enlightenment project, is that they tend to picture human agents as first (1) determining their
goals or ideals in an inward, relatively private fashion and then second (2) implementing them in
a social world that serves mainly either to facilitate or to impede those aims. This leads almost
 4

inevitably to the dominance in our culture at large and the social sciences in particular of a
narrowly instrumental view of mature human behavior. Fowers documents the extent to which
instrumentalism pervades the field of psychology, imposing the idea of a sharp separation
between means and ends in human activity, with ends or goals in living chosen subjectively and
most human action portrayed in terms of “strategies, methods, or techniques that are directed
toward reaching a goal” (p. 56). He identifies two key features of the instrumental account. One
is that there is “no necessary connection between one’s goal and the means one adopts” to reach
it, so the means can be discarded at no cost if another strategy turns out to be more effective or
efficient.2 The other is that an individual or group’s “strategic expertise in reaching their goals”
is strictly “independent of the kinds of persons they are,” of their ethical quality or character
(ibid.).

Fowers notes that the instrumental perspective appears to many to “leave…questions of

goods and values to the individual,” thus freeing researchers and therapists to focus on…value-
neutral “causal connections and strategies. But he insists that “instrumentalism is itself an ethical
framework because it dictates that choices of values and goals should be left to individuals (p.
58). That is why ideas like “health,” “effectiveness,” “functional,” and “well-being” function
almost like god-terms in most psychology. Merely to claim they are what you seek to
“maximize” (another one of those god-terms) puts your moral or social aims beyond question or
doubt. (Who can argue with “well-being?”)

So, instrumentalism and individualism have to be evaluated as, in part, a moral vision
(Christopher, 1996). They can’t get by with claiming to undermine reprehensible ethical ideals
by treating all substantive ethical ideals as merely subjective or preferential, especially when
doing so is part of the defining ethical credo of modern society, one that many feel is ethically
insufficient and begs for critical scrutiny. Indeed, most of us have a strong sense that the
instrumental perspective is incomplete and has by itself a coarsening effect on personal and
social life. Thus, we might find some merit in Fowers’ suggestion that this view “tends to
trivialize cultural meaning, dissolve the capacity to respect and cherish others, and undermine the
pursuit of common goals, thereby eroding the very social foundations necessary for effective
instrumental action,” in its proper place, “in a complex and interdependent society” (p. 60).

However, coming up with a credible alternative perspective is another matter altogether.

MacIntyre (1981), of course, argues that without an alternative way of enframing the pursuit of
social and personal excellence other than a taken-for-granted sense of being embedded in a
traditional meaningful cosmos, there is no way to avoid a slide into moral confusion and a
deleterious relativism. Virtue ethics might contribute greatly to outlining or discerning such an
alternative.

Virtue Ethics

2
So, for example, if instead of conveying to one’s spouse how much one loves and cherishes him or her
by taking the time and trouble to find an especially appropriate birthday or anniversary gift one can
accomplish the same aim by just dropping a little pill in their drink at dinner, there is no problem or loss
with the latter approach. It is merely more efficient.
 5

Virtue ethics is not a narrow ethical theory but a wide and deep perspective on human flourishing
and the good life. It is ironic that we are as inarticulate as we are about key virtue ethics notions
like virtue, character, excellence, flourishing, and practical wisdom, because so much of our
common sense, our practical wisdom about living, our most valued relationships, the things we
most admire about others and are proud of in ourselves, and our sense of priorities, of what is
most important in life, that we manage to get back to periodically, is very hard to understand or
express except in terms of this sort.

In the late Tim Russert’s bestselling last little book, Wisdom of Our Fathers, composed of
letters from daughters and sons about their fathers, one woman writes that shortly after her
parents’ retirement, her mother became ill and was bedridden for over a year before she passed
away. Her husband spent every day with her until her death. Once she said to him, “I’m so sorry
about this, I know we had so many plans for the rest of our life that we won’t be able to enjoy
now.” “What do you mean, he replied. There’s nothing to regret. All I want to do is to be in the
same room with you.” No philosophical ethics is worth its salt if it can’t capture and convey the
realities of loyalty and courage, and of human fulfillment, that this little story reflects.

Human excellences. Fowers (2005) stresses that “virtues are, simply, human
excellences.” There are excellences of things like craftsmanship and artistic endeavor and
friendship, which Aristotle asserted was the greatest of the virtues. In Virtue and Psychology,
Fowers’ focus is on ethics and the good life where the concern is “virtues of character” or “the
character strengths that make it possible for individuals to pursue their goals and ideals and to
flourish as human beings” (p. 4). This focus on excellence in the pursuit of worthwhile aims in
ordinary life seems to me very helpful. Such an approach is distinct from “much contemporary
talk about ‘values’ as an internal, personal possession.” Rather, “There is no virtue without
concrete activity” (p. 41), or “Virtues are embodied” (p. 67). This is part of how virtue ethics
does away with the “fact-value split.” Virtue or excellence does not reside in fine ideas located in
the heads of social actors. They are embodied and are out there in the practices of ordinary life,
which, in addition, “cannot be conceived as a set of individual actions, but are essentially modes
of social relation, of mutual action” (Taylor, 1985, p. 36).

Here is a hodge-podge of examples: the shrewd practice of democratic politics without

cynicism or corruption; “good enough” parenting; questioning someone’s political or religious
beliefs in a respectful manner; cultivating the kind of loyal friendship that goes beyond mutual
enjoyment and benefits; recognizing when generosity in the form of gift-giving is called for and
selecting and presenting a gift appropriately; discerning whether it is wiser courageously to
speak up or wait to join the issue another time, inspiring students to want to learn; exercising
leadership among colleagues or in an organization that brings out the best in people; effective,
timely psychotherapeutic interpretations; winning someone’s trust without flattery or deceit;
learning to write well; setting firm limits on a child while causing a minimum of guilt or
discouragement; forgiving someone in a wholehearted manner when at all possible; maximizing
the honesty possible in social, political, or professional situations; learning to detect vanity or
envy in oneself and dissolve or transform the emotions involved; gaining the ability to put people
at ease in various life situations; discriminating when in the pursuit of justice “the perfect may be
the enemy of the good;” and so forth.
 6

Maybe this gives a clue as to why Fowers (2005) writes that “The concept of virtue, [or
excellence] encompasses essential features of individuals’ psychological lives—disposition,
cognitions, affect, motivation, goals, behavior, relationships, communities, and society—and
shows how these elements of life can be brought into an integrated whole” (p. 5).

I hasten to add that these examples of internal goods or morally excellent practices are
lifted for the purposes of illustration from concrete contexts of living that are presumably
familiar to most readers of this article. They make full sense only in those contexts and even
there are not unambiguously good, perfect, or final instances of excellent living. There are no
such things. The ideals involved lose their meaning and vitality—they become static, stale, or
dogmatic—unless they are periodically refined through the challenge of new circumstances or an
encounter with heretofore unknown or underappreciated conceptions of the good life from our
own or other traditions. These examples are offered in a descriptive, not a prescriptive spirit.
Individuals and communities will find convincing whatever they do in their search for meaning
and ethical orientation. This process cannot be influenced by coercion or intimidation without
significantly distorting it and the ideals involved. The point is only that some such goods and
ideas of excellence shape the lives of people in any recognizably human society.

Emotional experience. Just one example will have to suffice, one which I find
particularly interesting and telling, namely virtue ethics’ treatment of emotional experience.
According to Fowers (2005), the distinctiveness and appeal of this view comes out when
compared with the available alternatives. The Romantic philosophical tradition that has
decisively shaped humanistic and many other psychotherapy theories teaches us to see “emotions
as spontaneous experiences that are beyond our control and rise naturally out of our inner
nature.” Emotional experience is a guidepost to exploring and understanding our deepest selves
and should be “allowed to unfold naturally and unedited” (p. 44). But this approach affords us
absolutely no way to distinguish between loving and cruel impulses and oddly makes us out to be
hapless victims of them, whatever they are.

Fowers (2005) writes that, in contrast, “cognitive therapies and cognitive psychology
generally, inspired by the Enlightenment tradition that extols rationality over emotionality, see
affective life as largely secondary to patterns of thought and behavior,” meaning that “emotions
are to be regulated [and managed] rather than “reverentially received and interpreted” (p. 44).
But the positive genius of the Romantic tradition has been to show that this approach fragments
the person into terminally warring internal agencies and tends to make a one-sided instrumental
control orientation the last word in human relations, undermining spontaneity and wholeness and
completely ignoring the role such virtues as patience, modesty, loyalty, and forgiveness might
play in a good life for humans.

The virtue ethical view transcends the dichotomy between such humanistic and cognitive
approaches. It holds that emotions reveal “the kind of person one is” (Fowers, 2005, p. 44) and
reflect the current state of one’s “character strengths” (p. 9) or excellences in living. Character
development involves non-judgmentally and non-coercively schooling one’s emotions “so that
they are consistent with acting well” and make up an important part of the experience of what
one takes to be the best kind of life. The person who has cultivated such character excellences
 7

can act “with a concordance of emotion, thought, and action,” making possible a degree of
“continuity, wholeness, and cumulativeness” (p. 66) in one’s life over time.

Internal goods. Fowers (2005) makes the notion of “internal goods” central to his
exposition of virtue ethics. External goods such as wealth, power, prestige, or simple pleasures,
comforts, and satisfactions, are the separable outcome of some activity, held as possessions by
individuals. Their supply is usually limited and they are typically objects of competition. Internal
goods are qualitatively different. They reflect a different kind of purpose and are found
meaningful in a different way than external goods. One can attain “internal goods only by acting
in the ways that embody those goods” (p. 65). Be it spending unstructured time with a child or
friend, acting courageously without certainty about the outcome, creating or appreciating fine art,
doing volunteer work in a hospice, or practicing meditation or contemplative prayer, the activity
is felt to be good and is enjoyed for its own sake, not undertaken to reach any other outcome or
product.

The idea is contestable, of course, but it seems that in personal or cultural life external
goods are always “subsidiary to” and serve chiefly as an “infrastructure” for the pursuit of
internal goods (Fowers, 2005, p. 60), which in some form seem to be presupposed even by those
that deny them. Internal goods are not subject to competition because when realized they
immediately enrich the life of the wider community or anyone who appreciates them. We may,
of course, feel envy or worse toward someone else’s excellence or the admiration they elicit from
others for it, but that occurs only because in addition to any appreciation on our part of the
internal goods involved, we also remain unduly attached to external goods of power or prestige
as ends in themselves.

It seems worth pondering the implications of this idea that, in the sphere of excellence or
virtue, means are not at all separable from ends but are “experienced as central to constituting a
particular way of life…” In “constituent-end” as opposed to “means-end” social practices, the
whole activity, more or less excellent, “is undertaken for the sake of being such and such: I run
as a part of being a healthy person, or I help someone for the sake of being a good friend”
(Guignon, 1993, p. 230). For one thing, this suggests that internal goods do have, in Fowers’
(2005, p. 69) words, a certain “primacy” in human life. Fowers states that “people in reasonably
coherent societies are always guided by a more or less shared understanding of what is good.”
Thus, we are always contextualized in and shaped at our core by some moral tradition or
traditions along with some internal goods, some shared moral outlook on the business of living
that set the very terms of our action, reflection, and emotional experience. Thus, Fowers (2005)
writes that “When humans are born, we enter a fully formed social arena in which long-
established projects and practices are already underway…we are already committed to a form of
life and a perspective on how to live it appropriately long before it is possible for us to reflect on
whether and how we want to continue our involvement” (p. 92).

This primacy or centrality may be appealing but can seem confining, as well, to a modern
sensibility. It raises the important question as to how we can gain the distance or leverage needed
to critically evaluate our moral ideals and internal goods when there is “no possibility of stepping
outside the flux of history to obtain a purely objective perspective” (p. 31), or question all of our
assumptions at once? The virtue ethics perspective may afford a way to both appreciate deep
 8

human limitations and encourage thorough-going ethical critique. Cultural and moral values are
“multivocal and dynamic” and “tend to resist precise formulation” (Fowers, 2005, p. 31). Unless
our cultural traditions are dogmatically hardened into what might be termed “traditionalism,”
such traditions, Alasdair MacIntyre somewhere suggests, might be characterized as the
“temporal extension of an argument.” There are always tensions among our highest ideals, there
are diverse and never fully harmonized versions of them, and they always require reinterpretation
in the face of unique situations and unexpected challenges. Open and honest dialogue and
reinterpretation of this sort—a never-finished process—may be what most fully can bring
underlying assumptions to light and can compel a demanding reworking of them.

Ontological hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1989; Guignon, 1991; Heidegger, 1962; Ricoeur,

1992; Taylor, 1989), with its central conception of “dialogic understanding” (Warnke, 1987),
richly portrays this process. Thus, Charles Taylor (2002) argues that, in both everyday life and
human science inquiry, “understanding a text or event which comes to us out of our history
should be construed, not on the model of the ‘scientific’ grasp of an object, but rather on the
model of speech-partners who come to an understanding” (p. 126). This sort of coming-to-
understanding typically concerns clarifying and advancing the many kinds of meanings that
people live by. The end or goal, in Taylor’s words, is “being able in some way to function
together with the partner” (p. 128). In the hermeneutic view, the substance of our experience,
beliefs, practices, and institutions, indeed our very identity, is always mediated through culture,
self-understanding, and language. In this process of mutual influence and dialogue, on the one
hand, we harbor self-defining beliefs and values concerning things we care about greatly, in
which we have a “deep identity investment,” sometimes in “distorted images we cherish of
others” (p. 141). On the other hand, since our ideals and our images of others and events are
always partial or distorted in some way, we need not just to compromise or go along to get along
with others, but to learn from the past, others, or other cultures. Thus, we depend upon them
greatly in matters closest to our own hearts, a demanding and often taxing situation that may, at
times, entail a deeply personal, sometimes painful “identity cost” (p. 141).

This same kind of searching re-examination should extend to mutual influence and
dialogue across traditions when new ones are encountered. It seems fair to some of us that this
ongoing, living process of critique compares quite favorably with the approach of much
mainstream psychology, which tends simply to assume the correctness of some particular
modern ideology and then abruptly label any contrasting ideals as illiberal, oppressive, or
inauthentic. Often that ideology is some form of liberal individualism that can be dogmatic in its
own right. It presents its own core values of fairness, procedural justice, and individual rights as
primary and universal, exalting these kinds of “formalisms” (Taylor, 1985b, p. 231) while
treating more substantive notions of the good or right life (which would include the virtues) as
merely subjective and preferential, partly in order to prevent anyone from wielding them in a
dogmatic or dominating fashion. But it appears that liberal individualism, in fact, is promoting its
own vision of the good society, one that honors individual human dignity and rights, and good
person, who adheres to principles and practices that so honor them, a substantive ethical vision
of its own it now has no way to defend (Sandel, 1996; Sullivan, 1986). In the hermeneutic view,
open and honest dialogue and reinterpretation it elucidates, taking place in the teeth of a clash of
moral visions or treasured ends in living, is what most fully can bring underlying assumptions to
light and can compel a searching reevaluation of them. Thus it may do a better job than liberal
 9

individualism of exposing dogmatisms and dominations and thereby of preserving the best of
liberal ideals themselves (Richardson, et al., 1999, pp. 48 ff.).

Duty Ethics Versus Virtue Ethics. One of the most interesting facets of virtue ethics
highlighted in Virtue and Psychology is the idea that an ethics of duty or self-restraint in
response to temptation or egoistic desires is far from the highest or most desirable form of moral
excellence, even though Fowers (2005) shows in some detail that just such a view of ethical
maturity is enshrined in a great deal of theory and the interpretation of research findings in
psychology. An ethic of duty or self-restraint seems to reflect one of Aristotle’s four character
types, namely the “continent character” who knows “how to act well” and “decides to behave
ethically as an act of will” even though it is often contrary to his or her desires. This type of
individual is more praiseworthy, to be sure, than the “incontinent” character who may feel guilty
about it but just can’t practice self-restraint, or the “vicious” character who seems to have
developed a “second nature” of a “greedy, deceitful, exploitative, or self-indulgent” sort. But it is
possible to attain what Aristotle termed a “virtuous” character who “knows how to act well and
does so gladly,” who “wants to act for the best and generally experiences harmony between
desire and duty” (pp. 71 ff.)

Once again, it is odd how so much moral philosophy and social inquiry overlook this
mode of excellence when it is exactly what many of us most admire and aspire to in ourselves,
our friends, and our children. I am thinking of such qualities as habitual non-defensiveness in
response to thoughtless or hurtful behavior by a colleague or loved one; ingrained modesty;
patience and calm when one’s routine or plans are interrupted; instinctively turning toward rather
than away from someone who seems to be suffering; the ability to laugh at oneself with others;
generosity with little thought about appreciation or repayment; a sense of justice that is not
dulled by cynicism or discouragement; but also a lack of chronic anger or irritation at anything
one encounters, even injustice. All of these traits seem to assume a background understanding
and appreciation of one’s massive indebtedness to others and the cultural past, one’s
considerable insignificance as a single individual in the larger scheme of things, and the fact that
the pursuit and realization of “internal goods,” things truly worth doing for their own sake, are
rarely permanently hindered by misfortune, failure, or the perversity of others.

It seems to me that individually and culturally we stand in crying need of a fuller

understanding of and ability to cultivate such internal goods, of the “ability to act wholeheartedly
for the sake of what is worthwhile,” which can foster a remarkable kind of “emotional
concordance,” a “concordance of goal, desire, and action” (Fowers, 2005, p. 73). That includes
simply the achievement of things that seem truly worthwhile or make a contribution, and for no
other reason (Lasch, 1978). Perhaps, in our kind of individualistic and compulsively anti-
authoritarian society, the ongoing tension between duty and desire of the merely continent
character takes the form of a chronic clash between our own keenly self-interested striving and a
wish to respect the rights of others to the same mode of life. But this moral outlook and way of
being does seem steadily to unravel. We grow weary of the competitive striving, external goods
lose their ability to gratify, and our ethical ties to others become a burden rather than a joy.
Worse, we look for short cuts and begin the slide into a culture of narcissism, where the mere
appearance of success will do, a sense of being “special” promises escape from the ordinary, or
attaining the status of a “victim” makes one somebody, where fame and notoriety, or basking
 10

vicariously in the celebrity of “American Idols” and others, promises, but fails, to fill up the
“empty self” (Cushman, 1990, 1995). Virtue ethics offers a compelling diagnosis of and creative
response to this predicament.

“Strong Relationality” and Virtue Ethics

Finally, I suggest that the notions of virtue and moral excellence, or something very much like
them, would seem to be indispensible to filling out the picture of “strong relationality” sketched
by some theoretical psychologists. Slife (2004) argues that the vast majority of psychological
theories incorporate a model of what he calls “weak relationality” or “interaction,” consisting
mainly in reciprocal exchanges of influence or information “between essentially self-contained
organisms” (p. 158). By contrast, in strong relationality or “ontological” relationality,
relationships are “not just the interactions of what was originally nonrelational” but are
“relational all the way down.” Each person “is first and always a nexus of relations.” In this
view, in fact, all things “have a shared being and a mutual constitution” (p. 159). Appreciation of
strong relationality is reflected in the communication theorists Baxter and Montgomery (1996),
who draw on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to argue that we should not speak about
“communication in relationships” but about “relationships as dialogues.” They quote Bakhtin: “I
achieve self-consciousness, I become myself only by revealing myself to another, through
another and with another’s help.” They add that “the self of [Bakhtin’s] dialogism is a relation
between self and other, a simultaneity of sameness and difference out of which knowing
becomes possible” (p. 3).

The individualism and instrumentalism that color most models and theories in the fields
of psychology and psychotherapy presuppose a weak relational view of human action and
relationships. Their proponents may and usually do encourage respect for individual human
rights and dignity and encourage cooperative human endeavors. But such respect and
cooperation are in tension with and somewhat undermined by a primary emphasis on individual
separateness and self-interest.

In our cultural climate, it is natural to worry that a strong relational view of human action
and relationships will dissolve the individual in the relationship and undermine human agentic
capacities, human rights and dignity, and personal responsibility. I would suggest that the
opposite is the case. Weak relational views limit human activity to instrumental action and either
ignore important kinds of cultural and ethical meaning or reduce them to mere subjective
preference. They narrow and somewhat debase human dignity and undercut personal
responsibility for nurturing important ends in living. That kind of meaning and those ends are
nurtured, critiqued, and deepened in constituent-end human practices such as the kind of
hermeneutic dialogue and “coming-to-understanding” (Taylor, 2002) described above.

In such practices, profound sensitivity and vulnerability to the influence and views of
others go hand in hand with the capacity and courage needed to form one’s own honest
conclusions and heartfelt convictions and hold to them, albeit with civility, in the face of possible
difference or disagreement with enemies or friends, until there seems to be good reason to do
otherwise. One cannot be had without the other. Of course, there are exceptions, but this seems
to me to be a territory that has been little explored by psychology. Here are three brief examples,
 11

characterizations or instances of morally excellent practice that do begin to explore this territory
and, it seems to me, to invite virtue ethics into the dialogue in any effort to more fully understand
strong relationality and excellent or successful living.

First, Christopher (2007) remarks that “authentic encounters with difference” may
require “psychological capacities or a certain kind of character” (p. 17) that we often overlook.
For example, the capacity to remain open to having one’s authentic convictions challenged in
dialogue seems to require almost a kind of “spiritual surrender” or ability to make a “leap of
faith” (p. 18). In any case, it is an arduous practice. It requires a kind of “letting go” of
attachment to oneself and one’s beliefs that doesn’t readily make sense or register as important to
the common sense of an individualistic age. Drawing on Buddhist perspectives and the
burgeoning literature today on mindfulness in psychology (e.g., Rubin, 1996; Germer, Siegel, &
Fulton, 2005) Christopher suggests that we might think of such genuine openness to others or
authentic dialogue as “mindfulness in action” (p. 17).

Second, recent writings of the distinguished sociologist Thomas Scheff (1994, 2000,
2004) offer an interpretation of rage, shame, and depression in much less individualistic terms
than usual. Scheff takes concrete steps toward analyzing human experience in more deeply
relational, I would say strong relational, terms. He argues (2004, p. 25-29) that much of the
prevalence of depression and other ills in our society may stem from the fact that “human
interdependency” and experiences of shame are “routinely denied” by us, reflected in the fact
that “our public discourse is in the language of individuals, rather than relationships.” For
example, he offers an original, penetrating reinterpretation of rage, shame, and depression
according to which some kind of hurt, insult, psychological wound or nick, a common enough
occurrence, produces feelings of rejection or inadequacy that are not acknowledged, to others or
often even to oneself. An essential part of this injury is that it threatens or severs a social bond. It
is followed by a continuing spiral of “intense emotions of shame and anger” which is
“experienced as hate and rage.” This spiral of hatred and rage, rather than “expressing and
discharging one’s shame,” masks it with rage and aggression. A “loop of unlimited duration and
intensity,” in which one may be angry that one is ashamed and ashamed that one is angry, can
serve as the “emotional basis of lengthy episodes or even life-long hatred and rage.”

Scheff’s (2004) approach involves a kind of ontological shift in stressing the primacy of
the “social bond.” ”Shame” is not so much an individual’s emotional reaction to an untoward
outer event or its meaning as it is the damaged condition of a bond that essentially links and
defines two or more people. What is often the best, sometimes the only, cure for estrangement or
hostility between individuals or groups, then, is an “apology/forgiveness transaction.” Healing
through apology begins with acknowledgement of our profound “human interdependency.”
When the bond is threatened, both parties are in “a state of shame,” one for injuring, one for
being injured. A successful apology allows both parties to acknowledge and discharge the shame
evoked by the injury. The apology “makes things right” between the parties, both emotionally
and cognitively. It repairs the breach in the bond (p. 30).

I would amend Scheff’s account to suggest that the tendency to deny human
interdependence he highlights is not just a mistake made by our culture, one that could be
straightforwardly corrected by adopting a more communitarian attitude or polity. Rather, I
 12

suggest that particular form of the spiral of rage and shame he astutely analyzes is a symptom of
the confusion and quandaries concerning living well in a culture slanted significantly toward
individualism and instrumentalism. That way of life reflects a profound commitment to
advancing personal freedom and human rights but does so in a way that tends to undercut the
possibility of a sufficiently “thick” social order characterized by some “shared moral
convictions” (Etzioni, 1996), without which neither a coherent sense of personal identity nor
social peace are really possible. We struggle to find a way to harmonize personal liberty with
meaningful “social connectedness” (Schumaker, 2002, p. 5). It should be obvious at this point
that the notion of strong relationality at least speaks richly to this challenge. Still, Scheff gives us
a profound meditation on how only a morally excellent practice can address certain familiar,
painful interpersonal tensions.

The example of Iulia de Beausobre (Allen, 1981), a Russian peasant woman who was
tortured and made the subject of medical experimentation in one of Stalin’s prisons in the early
1930’s, powerfully illustrates how virtues such as love, courage, and forgiveness play a crucial
role in coping with an extreme life situation, perhaps thereby shedding additional light on how
they function and can provide a sense of purpose in everyday life. de Beausobre eventually wrote
two books, The Woman Who Could Not Die and Creative Suffering, describing her redemptive
suffering in the face of such cruelty and sadism. She states that one way to survive is to cause the
torturer to lose interest by becoming completely passive and indifferent (“clod-like,” she puts it),
but the cost of doing so is losing a humanity one will never recover. However, there is an
alternative kind of “invulnerability” (her word for it) that involves intense, creative engagement
with the situation. It requires close attention to one’s surroundings and the examiner, trying to
gain insight into his mind, even cultivating a kind of sympathy that has nothing to do with
sentimentality or excusing responsibility. Passions like “self-pity, fear, and despair must be
controlled because they severely upset clarity of perception” (Allen, p. 63) and interfere with the
job or purpose at hand of relating as honestly and kindly as possible to one’s tormentor. One has
to let go of any protection those passions might provide, as well as the illusion of most ordinary
possibilities for influence or control. Apparently, de Beausobre inspired many of her fellow
prisoners and a number of her captors were unable not to view her with and show her great
respect.

These examples of strong relationality underscore Fowers’ (2005) argument that the
virtues, moral excellences, and constituent-end practices have a “social core,” which means that
“human flourishing is deeply dependent on social relatedness and the individual’s participation
in culture” and that “individual character and all of the specific virtues are profoundly social in
their origin, enactment, and ends” (p. 93). Woodruff (2001), drawing on virtue ethics, illustrates
this point by noting that a soldier cannot be courageous individually because doing battle without
the support of others, even in the most honorable way possible, means likely being killed in a
way that amounts to foolish recklessness, not courage. Fowers adds that the “virtues of loyalty
and generosity cannot be unilaterally practiced in families or communities” where others behave
in a ruthlessly self-interested manner. In that situation, “attempts at loyalty or generosity will
amount to inviting exploitation and disrespect, not demonstrating virtue” (p. 95).

I have tried to suggest a few ways in which key conceptions of virtue ethics such as
constituent-end practices and moral excellence, along with idea of strong relationality, might
 13

have a beneficial impact on the efforts of psychological theory, with social and psychological
research following in their wake, to better understand and facilitate the search for a good or
successful life. The details concerning how a realigned psychological inquiry might profitably be
pursued will have to wait for another occasion. It is worth noting, however, that a very large
portion of 20th and 21st research and theory in the field is shaped by taken-for-granted
assumptions of individualism and instrumentalism that, from a virtue ethics perspective,
significantly distort their subject matter, opening up what has often been termed a “gulf between
theory and practice” that troubles a great many psychotherapists, serious researchers, and
interested citizens or consumers of research alike. Hermeneutic philosophy and virtue ethics
perspectives seem to offer a fresh start at more sensitively and accurately characterizing human
practices (Richardson & Bishop, 2004; Slife, 2004) and contributing to a greater wisdom about
the art of living.
 14

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