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Dignity and Vulnerability: Strength and Quality of Character

University of California Press

Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

The peculiar beauty of human excellence just is its vulnerability.
—Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness

Moralists of various sorts use the terms "human dignity" and "human worth" often, but frequently these words have little more than rhetorical effect, even among professional philosophers. The fact is that we have a fairly vague concept of human worth and dignity, though there is a core that is instructive. What we value so much about ourselves is a question open to only somewhat vague answers, and admitting this is the first step in greater human understanding. Yet on the tradition I will criticize, the idea of human worth and dignity is perfectly clear. If I am right, this is a mistake. We need not only to rethink what our deepest values are in regard to ourselves, we need also to recognize that when rhetoric conceals the lack of understanding or creates the illusion of its presence philosophical inspiration is lost.

There is a view of the dignity and worth of persons that goes back through Kant and Christianity to the Stoics. According to this tradition, when character either weakens or succumbs to life's troubles, it fails because it lacks the kind of strength ideal character should have. To be sure, good people are almost always less than ideal. For this reason, we understand that certain failures of strength are compatible with being a good person. Still, we would be better were we to realize fully that which gives us our dignity, and if we did fully realize our dignity we would have unlimited strength to cope with life's troubles whatever they might be. Were we good Kantians and more rational, were we good Christians and more faithful to God, and were we good Stoics and less attached to

things external to our character, we would not be vulnerable to failures of strength. Being more dignified, we would be stronger.

The purpose of Dignity and Vulnerability is to challenge this view and to argue that on reflection we do not believe it. I will argue that this tradition does not capture our actual values regarding character and human dignity; indeed, it cuts deeply across them. Sometimes character breaks down, not because of some shortcoming in it, but because of what is good about it, because of its quality, because of the features of character that give us our dignity. Being more dignified, then, does not always make us stronger. Our most deeply held judgments about the worth of persons—vague as that concept is—are best accounted for on values indicative of pre-Hellenistic thinkers, particularly Aristotle, rather than on those views within the Stoic-Christian-Kantian tradition. In terms of what we actually value in ourselves and others, 1 will argue, we are far more Greek than Christian, despite the long tradition of Christianity and its more recent Kantian progeny. Moreover, our deepest values reflect the fact that we value ourselves as natural organisms, as animals, rather than as gods that transcend nature.

According to the Stoic-Christian-Kantian tradition, virtues are admirable character traits that enable us to control our contrary inclinations to living a good life or to doing our duty. On this view, any failure of character is a failure of strength. Nietzsche, who was in most ways unrepresentative of the tradition, once suggested that difficult events do not destroy those with the best character but only serve to make the admirable even stronger. The emphasis is on understanding the virtues in terms of their strength: inadequate virtue is inadequate strength of character, and inadequate strength of character is inadequate virtue.

Few who have this view, however, would argue that strength is the only good-making feature of character.1 Indeed, it is questionable that such a view is even coherent. That courage is the strength of character to control one's fear in the face of danger is both clear and coherent enough; but that loyalty in friendship is merely the strength of character to avoid the temptation to betrayal is puzzling at best. For loyalty includes not only a certain strength but also a quality of caring about one's friend. Moreover, the strength involved in loyalty and similar traits finds its virtue in the intrinsic value of this quality of caring. The more general evidence for this is the fact that the strength of charac-

ter to pursue malevolent ends in the face of contrary benevolent inclination is not a virtue.

Still one might admit that quality and strength of character are distinct features and nonetheless maintain that virtues are traits that enable us to control our contrary inclinations to doing the right thing or to living a good life. On such a view, it is still true that inadequate virtue involves inadequate strength of character: given any good-making quality of character, virtue increases with the strength of the capacity for controlling contrary inclination to acting on that quality. Thus any failure of character is either the lack of a good-making quality or the inadequate strength to act on that quality. Kant's view takes this form. Doing one's duty is not enough; it must be done from the proper motive. Yet any failure to do one's duty is either not one's fault at all or is a lack of strength of one's will. The good will, then, provides at once both the appropriate quality of character and adequate strength to resist whatever contrary inclination stands in the way.2

How could a view that sounds so plausible be wrong? I will argue that this conceptual model for understanding the virtues is mistaken because it puts too much emphasis on strength of character and too little on its quality. Specifically, I will pursue the possibility that fragility of character is essential to many of the qualities of character we value most. If I can establish this, then it will not be true that inadequate strength of character is always inadequate virtue.

That human character is sometimes fragile in ways that we lament is undeniable. "If only he or she had more courage," we sometimes say, implying the criticism that courage is lacking where it should be found. On other occasions, the same comment might not imply a criticism at all. Rather it might reflect the thought that, despite the understandable inability to control the fear of a truly horrifying danger, more courage would be exceptionally admirable. Prisoners of war facing threats of unbearable torture come to mind. These are two ways, then, in which a character can be fragile: one involves a vice, and the other, the absence of a truly exceptional quality. Yet in neither case is fragility a good thing; for in both cases it is a weakness that could be eliminated without damage to a person's character.

Therefore, if there is another kind of fragility that is good and admirable, it is not a vice and it cannot be eliminated without damage to a person's character. I can confirm that there is this third kind of fragility, I believe, by establishing two points. The first is that there are admirable character traits that can be the source of a person's self-destruction. The