CHARACTER.

The word character, when applied to persons, has two sources, distinguished lexically in ancient Greek by the terms êthos and charaktêr. Êthos, originally referring to a disposition or custom, from Aristotle on refers to the stable dispositions that guide a person's actions and that are suitable objects of moral praise and blame. The earliest uses of charactêr in Greek, like the earliest uses of character in English, refer to an impression such as would be carved or stamped onto a coin or tablet; metaphorically, "characters" are signs (actions, facial features, social positions) that reveal something about a person's soul. During the seventeenth century, the sense of "character" in English came to include a person's psychological traits themselves.

Aristotle and Virtue Ethics

The fourth-century b.c.e. philosopher Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, understands character (êthos ; or hexis êthikê, "moral disposition") to be a disposition of the appetitive and emotional faculties, which leads its possessor to act and feel in particular ways. This disposition is acquired through habituation, a process that develops the intellectual as well as the appetitive and emotional faculties. Aristotelian virtues are such dispositions informed by practical wisdom—a capacity for judgment developed through experience and reflection, which guides conduct where technical knowledge cannot. This is one point of convergence between Aristotle's ethics and the thinking of contemporary virtue theorists, for as Aristotle rejects the claims of his teacher Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 b.c.e.) and Sophists such as Protagoras (c. 485–410 b.c.e.) that there is some art or science that can guide conduct, contemporary virtue theorists reject the claims of deontological ethics that conduct is well-guided by rules, such as "maximize utility" or "act only upon a maxim you could without contradiction will to be a universal maxim." Aristotle and contemporary virtue theorists also share the view that characters are appropriate objects of moral praise and blame; Aristotle reasons that this requires that our characters be voluntary, and argues that this is so on the grounds that our actions are voluntary and our characters are the products of our actions.

Aristotle's Ethics focuses on the cultivation (or acquisition or promotion in others) of virtuous character. When Aristotle describes the courageous or liberal person, he does so from the inside, showing us the person's concerns so that we see how, given the person's values, it makes sense for him to do as he does. But Aristotle's Rhetoric uses characterization to dispose audiences to trust a speaker, and his Poetics, to effect an appropriate fit between a person and his words and deeds; here, words and actions are signs by which we may know someone's character. Subsequently, Aristotle's student Theophrastus (c. 372–c. 287 b.c.e.) sketched representative vicious types by enumerating their typical words and deeds, in a work that came to be known as the Êthikoi Charaktêres (English trans. Characters of Theophrastus, or Moral signs), which was much imitated in English literature from the seventeenth century on. In Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608), by the English prelate Joseph Hall (1574–1656), "character" for the first time refers to a type of person, rather than just to the signs that reveal that type. A "character" genre evolved in various directions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adding to moral types, types of men and women in various stations of life (perhaps influenced by the Stoic notion that human beings are given personae, or roles to play in this world), and using their sketches to satirize individuals and societies. Although this literature interacts richly with popular ideas about character, it has generally not been taken up in philosophical ethics.

Kantian Ethics

An ancient tradition in natural philosophy, and particularly medicine, sought to explain an individual's character (ēthos ) in terms of the four humors, or bodily fluids—namely the melancholy, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) sweeps such speculation to one side by distinguishing character from temperament: Temperament is given one by nature or habituation. People may vary in their temperaments, and indeed be classified by their dominant humors; however, character, which one either has or lacks, is the property of the will by which one binds oneself to self-prescribed rational practical principles. Kant's most influential ethical work, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, identifies character with the good will, a will motivated solely by duty or principles of practical reason that it legislates to itself; Kant gives character the role of making use of such qualities as courage, resolution, and perseverance—which belong to temperament and might be bad if not in the control of a good will, the only thing good without qualification. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant likewise describes virtue as self-constraint, a power to withstand those of our inclinations that oppose morality—not merely some habit of morally good actions, virtue requires acting on "considered, firm and continually purified principles."

Neo-Aristotelian critics have charged that Kant's emphasis on acting on principle results in his neglecting the roles character and virtue play in both a good ethical life and morally praiseworthy action, and Kantian defenders often reply by pointing to Kant's doctrine of virtue. But the criticism can be raised anew with respect to Kant's conception of character and virtue itself, for these replace appropriate feeling and the sensitivity it affords with a commitment to acting on principle. One source of apparent disagreement between Kant and Aristotle is terminological: Aristotle defines moral character as a disposition of appetite and emotion, but he insists that it cannot exist without practical wisdom. So Aristotle does not consider an act or person guided solely by appetite and emotion, however well trained these may be, to be virtuous or praiseworthy. For Aristotle, practical wisdom is necessary for appetitive and emotional dispositions to be good (this is what distinguishes virtue proper from natural virtue), just as for Kant, the good will is necessary for courage, resolution, and perseverance to be good. Still, principle is not practical wisdom, and Kant has less faith in the ability of developed capacities of judgment and feeling to result in right action, and more faith in the ability of principles to do so, than does Aristotle. This may be one reason for Kant's restriction of character to one's commitment to the ends that practical reason prescribes itself; presumably another is that, to the extent that character is the appropriate object of praise and blame, it ought to be voluntary, and Kant takes only our resolutions, but not our natural and habituated inclinations, to be voluntary.

Utilitarianism

Not himself a utilitarian, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) characterizes virtuous character traits as those that tend to the good, of mankind or at least of their possessor, and vicious ones as those that tend to the bad. Hume thus shares with utilitarians the view that the moral value of a character trait depends on its nonmoral value for people. Given its first widely influential formulation by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in the nineteenth century in The Principles of Morals and Legislation, utilitarianism focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions: the principle of utility deems that action right that, of the available alternatives in any given situation, tends to maximize the happiness of those affected. Utilitarianism's critics fault it for being insensitive to the importance of character evaluation for moral evaluation, but John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), a second-generation utilitarian, already stresses that acts ought to be evaluated for their consequences on character and character formation and includes as ingredients of happiness or utility such diverse intrinsic goods as friendship and virtue. A utilitarian may also subject character-traits and rules, and not only acts, to utilitarian assessment.

Challenges

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, questions have been raised about whether there is such a thing as character at all. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) charged that to explain a person's (one's own or someone else's) action in terms of his or her character is to assimilate the action to an event in the natural world (for which the character is an ad hoc explanation), denying the person's freedom and refusing the rational understanding that human action demands. In a separate development, a research tradition in experimental social psychology, "situationism," holds that people's behavior is not distinctive or consistent across a range of situations. These criticisms may apply more to the conception of character as revealed in signs than to the conception put forth in philosophical ethics.

See also Aristotelianism ; Good ; Kantianism ; Moral Sense ; Person, Idea of the ; Utilitarianism ; Virtue Ethics .

bibliography

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Rachana Kamtekar