Virtue and Vice

Content: some rambling thoughts on the particulars of a vast psychological construct; dense with lists.

A lot of virtues/vices concern treatment of others. General distinctions of treatment toward others include praising vs. blaming, complimenting vs. insulting, welcoming vs. shunning, helping vs. interfering with, caring for vs. hurting, giving to vs. taking from, expressing gratitude vs. contempt toward, and forgiving vs. remembering transgressions.

Depending on your social roles/titles, others will think that you have a duty to treat certain people/groups well, and depending on whether you do a supererogatory or insufficient job of this, they may designate you with corresponding virtues/vices, like respectful/disrespectful, loyal/disloyal, reciprocating/exploitative, trustworthy/manipulative, and scrupulous/prejudiced.

I don't have a good grasp on what sort of standard relationships exist in human societies. There are some more reciprocal/bidirectional relations like kin, partners, friends, fellows, members, citizens (with nouns for the corresponding standards of behaviour generated by adding the suffix "-ship"), and then there are more asymmetric relationships like between (omitting the second party of the relationship for brevity) designers, producers, lessors, rulers, judges, guardians, caretakers, representatives, mediators, advisers, teachers, managers, investors, patrons, and employers. Maybe these relationships are all like vendor/customer pairs, and they each detail a different set of social goods provided - tangible goods, information goods, designs, advice, transferable resource access rights, domain expertise, services, loans, insurance, stable trade opportunities under the employer's conditions, persuasive/prestigious/impartial decision making, protection, repairs, improvements, customization, et cetera.

Ownership and stewardship are commonly thought of as relations between a person and an inanimate object or resource, but these relations also have normative consequences for other parties - just as much as the other relations detailed so far¹, and the presence of these relations in a community/society also contributes to communal/institutional judgements of what preferential treatment an actor should perform toward which parties.

That sketches some conceptual content surrounded virtues/vices which are based on interpersonal treatment viewed through role obligations derived from established social relations. Another large swath of virtue and vice falls under the heading of willpower: patience and caution vs. recklessness, diligence and high standards vs. carelessness and neglect, abstinence and moderation vs. desire and indulgence, and regulated emotional stability vs. unregulated emotional volatility.

One commonly finds words with positive connotations on both sides of the pairs in this section, but largely the trend in moral rhetoric is to endorse more self-control.

Also, people can get virtue/vice credit through the abstinence/indulgence facet based on whether they engage in or avoid acts that evoke disgust or indignation in an ordinary human observer, regardless of whether the actor feels tempted or resists temptation. Standard elicitors of disgust are things associated with pathogens (bodily effluvia, symptoms of transmissible disease, body envelope violations, corpses, spoiled food, vermin), some sex acts (often based on the partner, and often having an interpretations as being costly to the one's reproductive fitness), and some atypical/abnormal physical/psychological conditions (where the emotive force probably comes from a mix of the disease-avoidance and costly-mate avoidance heuristics).

The largest remaining part of virtue/vice construct as it appears to my introspection at this late hour is competence/incompetence. When there is no large harm or temptation or indecency surrounding an act, then we apply somewhat less morally charged labels for judging conduct, like elegant/inexpert, productive/wasteful, clever/hackneyed, versatile/limited.

I  don't have any good idea of why some personality descriptors seem (to me tonight) like virtues/vices, while some others have positive/negative connotations, but do not seem like virtues/vices. I should probably check these ideas against my rambling notes on the topic from previous years. Maybe that will be a future post.

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1. For example, full owners can manage the access and use that others make of a resource, can revocably transfer rights for trustees to manage others' use and access of the resource, and can irrevocably alienate their title of ownership to another party. In the absence of these acts or in the other party's absence of particular knowledge as to how the owner has parcelled out jural rights to other parties, then parties usually have in rem duties to respect the owner's reasonably-assumed exclusive access, use, and management of the resource without term limit.

Valuing Names and Learning to Care

I intended to put these ideas in a post called "Living in Your Name" (which I might finish writing someday for all you know!), but they stand alone pretty well, so I'm posting early.

I. Valuing names 

Consider a type of impression management, where you select your conduct with regard to descriptions and designations that people might plausibly apply to that conduct. This might be termed "acting with regard to names-in-general."

You might concern yourself determining the applicability of conduct labels because:

1. Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are fairly terminal, ex. you want to hear compliments, or you want others to think well of you (perhaps even if their beliefs are mistaken). If you had no other terminal preferences but these, it would perhaps be desirable to intervene directly on (to force the value of) your beliefs, or others' speech, or others' beliefs about your conduct, at any given time.
2. Evidential-Terminal: Your preferences over conduct label applications are based on the evidence they give about your conduct, about which you have relatively terminal preferences. If you had no other terminal preferences in this case, hearing a person apply some preferred label to your conduct would generally be good news, but you would be indifferent about it if you learned that the person was uninformed/misinformed about your conduct, or that they were being dishonest, or even if you realized that you'd already accounted for their information about your conduct by conditioning on other indicators. Likewise you would be indifferent about label application if you were certain about the character of your conduct. Unless you (the rhetorical subject, momentarily assumed to have evidential preferences over label applications) also had terminal preferences over label applications, you would probably be indifferent to making, or would want not to make, a direct intervention on others' speech or on your beliefs in regard to labels, unless you had good reason to believe that doing so would improve your conduct, or unless you were sure that your conduct would not suffer but that you could receive some other gain.
3. Evidential-Instrumental-Terminal: Here again, the contours of your preferences over applied labels come from how those labels inform/constrain your beliefs about the desirable character of your conduct, but then those desirabilities in turn are derived from how you expect your conduct to achieve terminally desirable conditions (which, in full generality, might include preferences over your conduct beliefs, others' beliefs about you, your actual conduct, et cetera ad infinitum). Psychologically, many of our more-terminal-seeming preferences seem not to make reference to manners of conduct, and instead focus on ....momentary, local material conditions of individual experience? Those words aren't quite right, but some kind of temporal independence gets close to the issue. I dunno. Here's a dumb example of a solely instrumental preference over conduct: you want to be good at chess because you're playing Death for your soul, but external conditions held equal, you don't care about your chess competence, and absent the causal contingencies which make the manner of conduct useful, you wouldn't trade desirable external conditions for greater chess competence.

I don't know if these are exhaustive in any interesting sense, but it seems like the terminal / instrumental value distinction is commonly established, while (non-instrumental) evidential preference is somewhat neglected in rationality rhetoric, while being of comparable status. Perhaps notably, I'm missing Instrumental-Terminal and Instrumental-Instrumental-Terminal categories, where learning that a conduct label reasonably applies to you helps you to perform more effectively, according to the standards associated with the conduct label (I hope to extensively detail ways that this happens in the full post on Living in Your Name). And then, of course there's {evidential preference over conduct label applications derived from evidential preferences over actual conduct derived from terminal preferences over outcomes}, whose behavioural incidents should be obvious.

Learning to care:

Preferences are often not easily categorized into just one of these three templates, especially not in the presence of stable causal contingencies. For example, if an indicator (like a person's verbal judgement) is reliably informative about something that you care about (your conduct), then, as you become accustomed to that contingency, you may find yourself caring about the indicator value even when it's not informative about the value of the indicated thing. Likewise, if good chess performance reliably protects your soul (or is exhilarating, or trains your rationality, or whatever), then the desire to be (more) competent at chess at any moment will start to feel more terminal, and perhaps it does in fact become a more terminal preference. If so, then the establishment and extinction of stable causal contingencies is a potent source of value drift in humans, but in a totally uninteresting way.

Edit: If phenomena like the endowment effect and sour grapes are not merely instrumental or performative - if we learn through habit of motivated focus to more strongly and terminally prefer those world conditions (outcomes, experiences, stable attributes of moral character, ...) that reliably hold, and to more strongly and terminally dislike conditions that we reliably can not easily achieve - that suggests there are a few more kinds of adaptive preference formation worth including in a rich classification of issues that prevent a clean factoring of preferences over applicability of conduct labels according to paths of derivation from stable terminal preferences. Maybe? Hmm.