What Moral Saints Look Like 371CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 371
Volume 39, Number 3, September 2009, pp. 371-398
What Moral Saints Look Like
VANESSA CARBONELL
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH 45221
USA
I
Most of us have never met a moral saint, and so it may be difficult for
us to imagine what such a person would be like. Even before thinking
too deeply about what it takes to be a moral saint, we tend to think that
being a saint must be quite difficult. We might even think that the difficulty
of being a moral saint — the sacrifice it involves — is in fact a
burden, a project so all-consuming that it causes a person to be deprived
in certain important ways. If this deprivation is severe enough, the life
of the moral saint begins to look awfully bleak. Indeed, the most influential
philosophical account of moral sainthood paints a rather bleak
picture. But is it really so bad to be a moral saint? If we look more carefully
at just what is required for moral sainthood, and if we observe the
life of a living, breathing moral saint, we find that it is not so bad after
all.
In her famous paper ‘Moral Saints,’ Susan Wolf argues that it is not
rational to want to be a moral saint. A moral saint is someone who is ‘as
morally worthy as can be,’ and such a person, Wolf claims, would be
quite unattractive, because sainthood is incompatible with many of the
personalities and lifestyles we tend to find desirable (Wolf, 1982, 419).
This poses a problem for anyone who thinks that the life of the moral
saint is the best life, because it makes little sense that the best life could
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be so unattractive. Wolf’s thesis may even pose a problem for those
who think that the life of the moral saint must be a good life, for how can
an undesirable and unpalatable life be a good life?
There are two central claims in Wolf’s argument. The first is that the
life of the moral saint — that is, the morally best life — is not the best
life from what Wolf calls ‘the point of view of personal perfection’ (437).
The second claim is that a lack of correspondence between the morally
best life and the best life from the point of view of personal perfection is
problematic, because it presents us with a paradox of sorts: we are committed
to the idea that the life of the moral saint is the best life, all told,
and yet when we examine that life, we find that it is not a ‘palatable
ideal’ (419). In what follows I focus mainly on the first claim. I argue
that moral saints are not nearly as unattractive as Wolf claims, because
moral commitments do not grossly distort an agent’s personality to the
extent she proposes.
Wolf concedes that our discontent with the moral saint as the model of
an ideal life is at least partly motivated by ‘the egoistic, hedonistic side
of our natures’ (426). While it is widely acknowledged that being moral
is not necessarily always in our self-interest, Wolf seems to be making
a stronger claim: that leading the supremely moral life is necessarily not
in one’s self interest, or more broadly, that in virtue of its very nature,
this life does not and cannot accord with a model of a well-rounded life,
where a well-rounded life leaves room for at least some satisfaction of
our egoistic and hedonistic desires. In what follows, I argue that these
strong claims are not true. That is, I argue that even if we agree that the
moral point of view is not automatically more authoritative than the
point of view of personal perfection — even if we concede that the two
points of view draw on incommensurable criteria — still, the best life
from the moral point of view (the life of the moral saint) is not necessarily
unattractive from the point of view of personal perfection.
On Wolf’s account, a saint is someone we want neither to be nor to
be around, because the saint cannot devote himself to hobbies, cannot
tell certain jokes or laugh at them, cannot be cynical or pessimistic, and
must generally be so engrossed in his moral mission as to be almost
irritating. I respond to these claims in several steps. After giving a
brief summary of Wolf’s account, I introduce Dr. Paul Farmer, a reallife
moral saint who acts as a counter-example to Wolf’s view. With
the case of Paul Farmer in mind, I then challenge Wolf’s claims about
both the character traits and the activities of a moral saint. Next I argue
that if Wolf’s account of these traits and activities were correct, then
moral saints would be self-defeating. Finally, I suggest that much of
what underlies the claim that moral saints are irritating is a failure to
distinguish a motivation to act morally de dicto from the same motivation
de re.
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II Wolf’s Argument
Wolf equates moral saintliness with ‘moral perfection’ and thus defines
the moral saint as ‘a person whose every action is as good as possible,
a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be’ (419). She further
claims that our common sense, pretheoretical notion of moral sainthood
necessarily includes that ‘one’s life be dominated by a commitment
to improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole’ (420).
This commitment can be discharged in two ways. Wolf’s ‘Loving Saint’
helps others because his happiness ‘would truly lie in the happiness of
others, and so he would devote himself to others gladly, with a whole
and open heart’ (420). On the other hand, the ‘Rational Saint’ helps others
out of duty; he ‘sacrifices his own interests to the interests of others,
and feels the sacrifice as such’ (420).
These two conceptions of sainthood align quite nicely with our folk
notions of saints as being either unusually compassionate or unusually
dutiful. Indeed, Wolf’s ‘Loving Saint’ and ‘Rational Saint’ mirror the
two options first proposed in J.O. Urmson’s seminal paper ‘Saints and
Heroes’ (1958). According to Urmson, there are two ways to commit
a saintly or heroic action: ‘without effort’ (like Wolf’s ‘Loving Saint’),
or through ‘self-control’ in the face of countervailing self-interest (like
Wolf’s ‘Rational Saint’) (Urmson, 1958, 201). Of course, a Loving Saint
must also sacrifice personal interests, but perhaps does not feel such
sacrifices as sacrifices in quite the way that the Rational Saint does.
While Wolf acknowledges that the Rational Saint and the Loving
Saint present two quite different pictures of motivation, she thinks their
‘public personalities’ would be similar (421). Indeed, the bulk of Wolf’s
argument for the claim that moral saints are horribly unattractive proceeds
without reference to the distinction between Rational Saints and
Loving Saints. Moral saints may vary a great deal in certain cosmetic
details, but their core character traits will be constrained by sainthood.
It is only these essentially saintly traits that Wolf finds problematic. Joviality,
garrulousness, and athleticism, for example, don’t matter (421).
What does matter, however, is that the saint ‘will have the standard
moral virtues to a nonstandard degree’ (421). As such,
He will be patient, considerate, even-tempered, hospitable, charitable in thought
as well as in deed. He will be very reluctant to make negative judgments of other
people. He will be careful not to favor some people over others on the basis of
properties they could not help but have. (421)
These traits may seem uncontroversially saintly. As I shall argue in a
later section, however, these traits are problematic if we interpret them
in such a way as to make sense of Wolf’s ultimate claim that the saint
is unattractive.
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Wolf makes a helpful distinction between practical obstacles to moral
sainthood and logical obstacles. Having nonmoral interests or hobbies
is merely a practical obstacle, because these hobbies would eat up time
that would otherwise be spent benefiting others. So hobbies like ‘reading
Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving [one’s] backhand,’
which might seem to play an essential role in a ‘life well lived,’ are in
most cases prohibited for the moral saint, but only for practical reasons,
such as lack of time (421). If the moral saint could maximally benefit
others and have hobbies, this would be unproblematic. In reality,
though, Wolf thinks the moral saint will only have non-moral interests
when doing so allows him to further his moral project, as when a ‘a
good golf game is just what is needed to secure that big donation to
Oxfam’ (425). The moral saint cannot pursue the golf game for its own
sake; the fact that getting to play golf sometimes goes along with saving
the world is a mere ‘happy accident’ (425).
There are other sorts of traits, though, that Wolf thinks present logical
obstacles to sainthood. These traits are in ‘more substantial tension’
with being a moral saint (421). For example, Wolf argues that certain
sorts of humor would be off limits for the saint because they go ‘against
the moral grain’ (422).
For example, a cynical or sarcastic wit, or a sense of humor that appreciates this
kind of wit in others, requires that one take an attitude of resignation and pessimism
toward the flaws and vices to be found in the world. A moral saint, on the
other hand, has reason to take an attitude in opposition to this — he should try to
look for the best in people, give them the benefit of the doubt as long as possible,
try to improve regrettable situations as long as there is any hope of success. This
suggests that, although a moral saint might well enjoy a good episode of Father
Knows Best, he may not in good conscience be able to laugh at a Marx Brothers
movie or enjoy a play by George Bernard Shaw. (422)
These remarks about humor echo Wolf’s earlier claims about other
character traits: just as the moral saint must display positive traits like
patience and charity, he must also have an overwhelmingly positive
sense of humor. He must not only favor lighthearted humor but in fact
resist and oppose dark humor. In the sections that follow I argue that this
is simply not the case. Dark humor is not only permissible in a moral
saint, but in some cases desirable. And even if certain kinds of humor
were an obstacle to sainthood, it would be a practical obstacle, not the
stronger ‘logical’ obstacle Wolf describes.
After making these claims about the kinds of traits, activities, and
humor that conflict with a saintly disposition, Wolf argues that the
moral saint in no way resembles what we might call the ‘perfectly cool’
person. ‘A moral saint,’ she writes, ‘will have to be very, very nice. It is
important that he not be offensive. The worry is that, as a result, he will
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have to be dull-witted or humorless or bland’ (422). She then argues
that the moral saint is dull-witted, humorless and bland, because he
does not embody the sort of nonmoral ideals we admire in ‘athletes,
scholars, artists — more frivolously … cowboys, private eyes, and rock
stars’ (422). The moral saint cannot have ‘Katherine Hepburn’s grace’
or ‘Paul Newman’s ‘‘cool’’’ (422). These traits, Wolf argues, ‘cannot be
superimposed upon the ideal of a moral saint’ (422).
What Wolf is trying to show is that the ‘ideal moral agent’ is not ideal
insofar as he is not someone we would necessarily want to be. Wolf
claims that ‘a person may be perfectly wonderful without being perfectly
moral’ (436). Here she is introducing what she calls the ‘point of view
of individual perfection’ (437). This point of view is not exactly moral,
not exactly egoistic, but certainly contains elements of both of those
perspectives, as well as perhaps a strong aesthetic component. She
describes this point of view as follows:
Like moral judgments, judgments about what it would be good for a person to
be are made from a point of view outside the limits set by the values, interests,
and desires that the person might actually have. And, like moral judgments, these
judgments claim for themselves a kind of objectivity or a grounding in a perspective
which any rational and perceptive being can take up. Unlike moral judgments,
however, the good with which these judgments are concerned is not the good of
anyone or any group other than the individual himself. (436)
The problem, of course, is that we now have competing normative standards
for evaluating lives. From the moral perspective, one ought to
desire to be a moral saint, and from the perspective of individual perfection,
one ought to desire to be well-rounded in the ways Wolf describes.
Here it might be useful to revisit the analysis of Wolf’s argument I
gave earlier. Her argument, I proposed, is made up of two claims: first,
that moral saints are unattractive from the point of view of personal
perfection, and second, that their unattractiveness from this point of
view is problematic, because it means that the morally best life is not the
best life all told. My main task is to challenge the first claim, by showing
that moral saints can have all the traits that make for an attractive and
well-rounded life. In challenging the first claim, though, I will implicitly
challenge the second claim. After all, if saints are not unattractive, then
we don’t have to worry about their unattractiveness being problematic.
Nonetheless, my argument leaves untouched much of what is philosophically
interesting about the interplay between Wolf’s two ‘points of
view.’ While I challenge the claim that the personal point of view rules
out certain morally extraordinary lives, I am not challenging the claim
that certain personally interesting lives (e.g., that of the great violinist
or single-minded athlete) might be ruled out from the moral point of
view. I take it these are two different, though related, problems.
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III An Attractive Counter-Example
Some commentators have argued that Wolf’s conception of moral sainthood
gets it wrong by favoring moral perfectionism over a relationship
with the divine, or by setting the bar for sainthood far too high.1
I shall
claim, however, that we can challenge Wolf’s thesis about the attractiveness
of moral saints without departing from her underlying conception
of a moral saint as a truly extraordinary moral agent, an agent whose
uncommon qualities and achievements are not essentially religious.
Consider Dr. Paul Farmer, a man of extraordinary moral achievement
who serves as a counter-example to some of Wolf’s claims about
moral saints. I take Farmer to be an uncontroversial example of a
real-life moral saint, and yet he looks almost nothing like the person
Wolf describes. Her saint is irritating, obsessive, and bland; Farmer
is charismatic and funny. Her saint is holier-than-thou and no fun to
be around; Farmer attracts friends and followers like a magnet. Wolf
acknowledges that there are a ‘variety of types of person that might be
1 Robert Adams (1984) has argued that real saints (that is, Saint Francis, Mother
Teresa, etc.) are not bland, and thus a conception of moral saints according to
which they are bland cannot be correct. Moreover, he takes issue with what I
shall call Wolf’s ‘perfectionist rationality.’ He disagrees that perfection in moral
value ‘depends on the maximization of that type of value in every single action
of the person’ (393). This maximization ‘lies behind much that is unattractive in
Wolf’s picture of moral sainthood; but I believe it is a fundamental error’ (393).
Adams thinks the solution is to return sainthood to its religious roots. Real
saints are not single-minded, he argues. Rather, ‘they commonly have time for
things that do not have to be done, because their vision is not of needs that exceed
any possible means of satisfying them, but of a divine goodness that is more than
adequate to every need’ (396). For Adams, saints are not moral perfectionists, but
rather ‘people in whom the holy or divine can be seen’ (398). But the sort of saint
Adams describes is not necessarily a moral saint. While various historical examples
of religious saints might turn out to be moral saints as well, moral sainthood
itself is something we can describe without reference to the holy or the divine.
Whereas Adams responds to Wolf by appealing to a religious conception of
sainthood, Edward Lawry goes in a different direction in his article ‘In Praise of
Moral Saints’ (2002). He argues for a much more lenient, inclusive conception
of sainthood. ‘I have a sense,’ Lawry writes, ‘that [Wolf] is not talking about real
moral saints’ (1). In order to accommodate the several people he has known personally
and believed to be moral saints, Lawry develops a theory according to
which moral value is a ‘coming together of a life in integrity’ (1). Displaying a high
degree of integrity is what characterizes ‘good human beings, or, moral saints’ (1).
Notice that Lawry’s notion of sainthood is so weak that ‘good human being’ and
‘moral saint’ seem to be taken as synonyms. This strikes me as mistaken. We all
know some people who seem to display much more integrity than the rest of us.
Nonetheless there seems to be a notion of truly extraordinary moral achievement
that is worth exploring.
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What Moral Saints Look Like 377
thought to satisfy [the conditions for moral sainthood],’ but claims that
‘none of these types serve as unequivocally compelling personal ideals’
(419). Farmer, I shall claim, satisfies the conditions for moral sainthood
as well as perhaps any living person can, and yet also serves as
an ‘unequivocally compelling personal ideal.’ If there is any doubt that
he is sufficiently compelling, whatever minor tweaks he would need
are things that could be changed without sacrificing the quality of his
moral achievements.
Paul Farmer is a doctor and medical anthropologist at Harvard Medical
School. His non-profit organization, Partners in Health, runs clinics
that treat the world’s poorest, sickest patients. Farmer treats thousands
of these patients himself, and he is world-renowned as an advocate for
the poor and an expert on tuberculosis. In Mountains Beyond Mountains
(2003), Tracy Kidder’s celebrated book about Farmer, we are treated
to a magnificently rich case study of a contemporary moral saint. We
learn that Farmer grew up in an eccentric and unprivileged family. For
much of his childhood the family of eight lived in an old bus parked
in a trailer park, and later on a fishing boat moored in the shallows of
Florida’s Gulf Coast (Kidder, 2003, 47-54). Despite his odd upbringing,
Farmer’s stellar intellect drove him to Duke and ultimately Harvard,
where he excelled and earned both an M.D. and PhD in anthropology,
despite missing most of his classes to be in Haiti, working at the rural
health clinic he built from the ground up (84). That clinic was the beginning
of Partners in Health, which now oversees public health projects
all over the world.
What is most interesting about Paul Farmer is not what he has
accomplished but how he has accomplished it. Although he is almost
maniacally driven by morally good pursuits, he does not describe the
pursuits to himself as such. He simply wants to help the poor and the
sick, and he does so not with the angelic purity Wolf imagines, but
rather with an acerbic wit and a willingness to do what is necessary
to further his cause: curse the inaction of others, pay bribes to soldiers
at checkpoints, and accommodate the dangerous mythologies of his
patients. Farmer’s life is, to be sure, marked by asceticism: he takes no
salary (23); he sleeps no more than four hours a night (23); he lives alternately
in a hut and in the basement of his office (151); he does not buy
new clothes (255); he has little time to himself; he hikes for hours and
hours to make housecalls (36-41). Nevertheless, we don’t find his life
unattractive on account of this asceticism; on the contrary, we admire
him partly because of it.
2
2 Farmer is not ascetic on principle. Though he does not seek them out, he seems to
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While Farmer may appear to have the drive of a perfectionist, he
doesn’t suffer from the sort of obsessive maximizing that makes Wolf’s
saint so unattractive. He certainly wants to help as many people as he
can, and often lobbies for the sort of efficient measures that make this
possible, like lowering the prices of drugs and following rational protocols
for treating infectious disease. But he also works with people
face-to-face and thus finds himself compelled to make gestures that
are more heartfelt than efficient. He sends a Haitian boy to Boston for
surgery at great expense (262-79). He spends hundreds of dollars to
replenish a malnourished man with vitamin shakes when the money
could have been spent otherwise (25). He signs an entire paycheck over
to a patient who is facing eviction (95). He buys a six-pack of beer for a
homeless alcoholic patient, wraps it in wrapping paper and delivers it
on Christmas Day (16).
Farmer doesn’t cultivate hobbies or personal interests to anywhere
near the extent that Wolf seems to find necessary for a well-rounded life,
but his life is far from ‘barren.’ Indeed, you might say that his work is
so consuming that it creates its own hobbies: travel, foreign languages,
and the study of religion and mythology in different cultures. While he
denies himself most of the creature-comforts available to someone in a
rich country, his self-denial is endearing; we can see that he gets satisfaction,
and often great pleasure, from the kind of work his self-denial
makes possible. He packs only three shirts for a two-week trip, but in
so doing he frees up space in his luggage to act as a courier for all manner
of objects that his patients ask him to deliver to family in the States,
a task that surely brings him great joy (190-2). He’s efficient without
being robotic. ‘Traveler’s tip number one thousand seventy-three,’ he
tells Kidder, ‘If you don’t have time to eat, and there’s no other food on
the plane, a package of peanuts and Bloody Mary mix are six hundred
calories’ (191). As unappetizing as this meal sounds, it doesn’t make
me ‘glad I’m not a moral saint,’ as Wolf might suggest. Rather, it makes
me wish I were so motivated to help poor people that I were willing to
subsist on airplane snacks, even for a day.
In fact, we ought to go further than simply to say that Farmer’s life is
not barren. On the contrary, he flourishes. What could be more interesting,
more fulfilling, more deeply satisfying than a life devoted to using
one’s talent and intellect to improve the lives of thousands of people,
enjoy the finer things in life on occasion, as when Kidder takes him to a restaurant
with fine wine (Kidder, 2003, 7). He also enjoys reading People Magazine in airports.
He claims he reads it in order to stay in touch with his patients, but one gets the
sense he finds some pleasure in getting lost in thoroughly unserious matters once
in a while. We also learn that he likes action-adventure movies.
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What Moral Saints Look Like 379
indeed to prevent people from dying, and to do so in places where no
one else is prepared to help them but you? Farmer’s life is, of course,
marked by great sacrifice, and we may wish, for his sake, that he had to
make fewer sacrifices. But a self-sacrificial life can still be a good life on
the whole. Indeed, we might even think Farmer’s lifestyle — in which
self-sacrifice makes possible staggering moral accomplishments and
countless meaningful human interactions — yields a net benefit of wellbeing.
This doesn’t mean that Farmer is blissful and content. Rather, he
is chronically unsatisfied, and that is what keeps him going.
Thus far I have argued that the life of a moral saint does not have all
the costs Wolf claims it does, and furthermore that the life of a moral
saint is attractive despite its costs. In other words, I have tried to show
that it would not be so bad to be Paul Farmer. But Wolf claims that
we prefer not only not to be a moral saint, but not even to be around a
moral saint. Farmer is a counter-example to this claim as well.
3
While
Wolf’s moral saint is annoyingly obsessed with ‘morality’ so described,
Farmer is obsessed with the content of his commitments. His obsession
is more comical than unattractive. For example, he speaks in his own
shorthand idiolect of acronyms and catchphrases. He wants to find an
‘O for the P’ (‘preferential option for the poor’) and he often exercises
an ‘H of G’ (‘hermeneutic of generosity’) (174, 217). He gets annoyed
when someone commits a ‘seven-three’ (‘to use seven words where
three would do’) or a ‘ninety-nine one hundred’ (‘quitting on a nearly
completed job’) (217). Yet his hyper-awareness of the endless task of
healing the world’s sick doesn’t render him fanatical. Rather, it displays
that he is vividly acquainted with a fact that escapes most people: that
the desire for a clean shirt or an extra hour of sleep pales in comparison
to the needs of the world’s sickest and poorest people. When Kidder
remarks on Farmer’s insane schedule, Farmer responds, ‘The problem
is, if I don’t work this hard, someone will die who doesn’t have to. That
sounds megalomaniacal. I wouldn’t have said that to you before I’d
taken you to Haiti and you had seen that it was manifestly true’ (191).
Clearly, Farmer is obsessed with his work — and how could he not
be, given that lives depend on it? Nevertheless, his obsesses about the
object of his concern — the poor, the sick — and not the moral goodness
of being so concerned. As I will argue in section VI, this distinction is
3 There are several instances in Kidder’s book where Kidder himself, and people he
interviews, express frustration at the fact that being around Farmer often makes
one feel guilty about one’s own shortcomings as a moral agent. Nevertheless, it
is clear that, on balance, Farmer is someone others want to be around. Indeed, he
seems to fare better on this criterion than the vast majority of people; not only do
others not mind being around him, but they seem to seek out time with him.
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significant when we evaluate the attractiveness of moral saints from the
point of view of personal perfection.
Farmer displays precisely the cynical and sarcastic sense of humor
that Wolf thinks the moral saint is not entitled to. When a Haitian
patient tries to pay him with ‘milk in a green bottle with a corncob
stopper,’ Farmer thanks her profusely in Creole and then turns to Kidder
and says, ‘Unpasteurized cow’s milk in a dirty bottle. I can’t wait
to drink it’ (26). He regularly refers to his poor patients as ‘the shafted’
and refuses to charitably accommodate the politically correct notion
that all suffering is equal, believing instead that there are important differences
in the ‘degree of hose-edness’ of various groups (216). When
Kidder asks him who is paying for his trip to Cuba, Farmer answers,
‘Capitalists, commies, and Jesus Christers’ [the Soros Foundation, the
Cuban government, and a church group] (184).
Farmer is also a counter-example to Wolf’s claim that moral saints
are not pessimistic. Before giving two speeches in Cuba, he tells Kidder,
‘One speech is for clinicians, how to deal with HIV and TB coinfections.
The other is why life sucks’ (198). This pessimism doesn’t seem
to make Farmer any less saintly. In fact, if anything it seems to make
him more saintly, because it shows that he has a certain hardened realism
in the face of grave challenges, rather than a cheery naiveté. Yet his
cynicism doesn’t degenerate into resignation. Instead of giving up in
the face of immensely difficult tasks, he simply expects others to rise
to the challenge. For instance, when other public health experts deem
certain patients too difficult to treat, Farmer simply ignores the experts
and finds a way. He takes day-long hikes to treat isolated patients in
their huts, bringing small items they have asked him for, even when the
link between these items and treating the disease is tenuous. ‘We can
spend sixty-eight thousand dollars per TB patient in New York City,’
Farmer says, ‘but if you start giving watches or radios to patients here,
suddenly the international health community jumps on you for creating
nonsustainable projects. If a patient says, I really need a Bible or nail
clippers, well, for God’s sake!’ (42).
As this brief glimpse has shown, if Paul Farmer is a moral saint, then
he causes quite a few problems for Wolf’s account. He is obsessed but
not fanatical, ascetic but not self-righteous. He is sarcastic and cynical
without being resigned. He is funny and fun, and no less morally
admirable for it. He thinks unconventionally, in a way that seems only
possible when a quirky, imperfect human mind is unleashed on a complex
problem. What makes him so interesting is that he is a distinctly
human moral saint, not a humorless robot. He proves that someone who
exhibits all of the important features of a moral saint can be the sort of
person we want to be.
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IV The Traits of Sainthood
With the case of Paul Farmer in mind, we can now examine Wolf’s
account of the traits and activities of sainthood in more detail. Recall that
she claims the saint must be ‘patient, considerate, even-tempered, hospitable,
charitable in thought as well as in deed’ and also ‘very reluctant
to make negative judgments of other people’ (421). Some of these traits,
like even-temperedness, strike me as uncontroversially conducive to
benefiting others. Others may be problematic. Patience, for example,
seems virtuous only when it is warranted. In my view, the moral saint
should have no patience for the person preaching hatred on the street
corner, unless patience could eventually conduce to changing his mind.
Nor should the saint have patience for corruption or incompetence in
government if outrage would better conduce to ending it. In fact, public
displays of impatience might be obligatory in many cases. We would
expect the moral saint to display impatience when fear or self-interest
would cause most people not to. Paul Farmer, for example, seems to be
an incredibly impatient person. (Of course, being impatient does not
require being rude or belligerent; one could express one’s impatience
in a polite and patient manner, and perhaps we should expect a moral
saint to do this.)
Similarly, it seems that the moral saint should be ‘charitable in
thought’ only when charity is warranted. To be sure, charity of thought
is often helpful in guarding against premature dismissal of other’s
views or premature conclusions about their motives. But automatically
or universally interpreting the words or deeds of others in the most
favorable light seems downright naïve and certainly inimical to the
project of benefiting others. The same goes for being ‘very reluctant
to make negative judgments of other people.’ If Wolf means this as
a general virtue, then perhaps she is failing to recognize that making
negative judgments when they are warranted is an essential component in
the project of benefiting others. Of course, there can be reasons not to
display an attitude, even if it is warranted or fitting. For example, you
might have a moral reason not be angry at the person preaching hatred
on the street corner, if your anger might provoke him to become violent
against innocent bystanders. But this is merely a reason not to display
your anger, not a reason to refrain from feeling it, as Wolf’s view seems
to demand.
We might charitably assume that Wolf means for all of the above
exceptions to be built into her notions of patience, charity, and the
like. Perhaps she means, not that a saint should always and automatically
be patient and charitable, but rather that a saint would be particularly
good at discerning when patience and charity are called for.
Farmer, for example, surely exercises more patience when dealing one-
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382 Vanessa Carbonell
on-one with a sick person than he does when navigating the bureaucracy
that determines how quickly that person can get a needed drug
or treatment. Perhaps this is all that Wolf means: the saint should be
patient and considerate when it comes to legitimate needs (say, a sick
person’s need to understand important medical instructions and not
be condescended to), but need not display these traits in response to
illegitimate demands (say, the demands of the bureaucracy to receive
multiply redundant paperwork). Yet this interpretation, according to
which the moral saint displays these positive traits only when they
are warranted, is simply inconsistent with the conclusions Wolf draws
about her patient and charitable saint. For she considers these traits to
be so saintly that they make the saint ‘too good’ (421). Here we get the
first taste of Wolf’s ultimate thesis: that these saintly traits ‘are apt to
crowd out the nonmoral virtues, as well as many of the interests and
personal characteristics that we generally think contribute to a healthy,
well-rounded, richly developed character’ (421). But Wolf has not yet
provided any good reasons to think that the moral saint can’t be wellrounded.
A well-honed ability to know when positive traits are warranted
and to display them accordingly doesn’t seem to make a person
too good, nor does it seem to be at odds with well-roundedness.
Perhaps Wolf is simply calling for a reluctance to be negative, as a
way of compensating for the human tendency to be too negative. But
this reading also fails to support Wolf’s conclusion. For surely a reluctance
to be negative — surely any trait that is fostered as a way of
moderating tendencies toward extremism — is not the sort of thing
that would prevent someone from being well-rounded. A healthy,
compensating dose of reluctance would not make someone ‘too good,’
where ‘too good’ refers to the notion that too much of a good trait can
be a bad thing. So it seems that Wolf faces a dilemma. Either the saint
is so positive and charitable that it interferes with his well-being and
renders him irritating, or he is only moderately positive and charitable
(that is, he displays these attitudes mainly when they are warranted).
If the first is true, then Wolf’s conception is too extreme, since kneejerk
positivity and unrestrained charity of thought do not seem to be
requirements of sainthood, and indeed may be in tension with sainthood.
Yet if the second horn of the dilemma is true — and I think it is
— then the saint no longer comes across as unattractive, and Wolf’s
thesis suffers.
What is true of patience and charity is true also of most of the other
character traits Wolf attributes to moral saints. Take, for example, the
qualities of ‘looking for the best in people’ and giving others ‘the benefit
of the doubt.’ Either the moral saint limits how much he gives others
the benefit of the doubt, in which case he does not appear unattractive,
or he rampantly and indiscriminately gives others the benefit of the
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What Moral Saints Look Like 383
doubt, in which case his blind optimism is likely to undermine his ability
to effectively pursue morally good projects.
It might be objected that I have interpreted Wolf’s list of character
traits too harshly. According to this objection, saints don’t ‘look for the
best in people’ merely because doing so is conducive to performing
good deeds. Rather, saints ‘look for the best in people’ (and are patient,
charitable, etc.) because to do so is the mark of a truly virtuous person.
That is, there are certain traits that essentially moral, just as there are others
that, as Wolf puts it, ‘go against the moral grain’ (422). On this view,
there are certain traits a moral saint must have even if it means, as I
have argued above, that she is not accurately responding to the features
of the world. In fact, not accurately responding to the features of the
world might be an essential component of these virtues.
Julia Driver (1989) argues that some moral virtues do involve this sort
of blindness to the facts of a situation.
4
These virtues — modesty, blind
charity, and the refusal to hold a grudge — ’involve ignorance in an
essential way’ (Driver, 1989, 374). Modesty, for example, involves ignorance
of one’s worth. Driver claims that it would be ‘counterintuitive’
to suggest that these traits are not virtues (384). ‘We value the virtues of
ignorance’ she claims, ‘because of the psychological states that underpin
them, but we value these psychological states for instrumental reasons’
(383). So, for example, we value modesty because it involves an underlying
psychological state (‘reluctance to take in one’s own accomplishments
fully’ (383)) that tends to improve social interaction by reducing
jealousy and envy. To be modest is to be ‘less troublesome’ (384).
We ought to examine Driver’s analysis of the virtue of ‘blind charity’
in a bit more detail. If Driver’s argument succeeds, it lends credence to
Wolf’s claim that a moral saint must ‘look for the best in people’ and be
‘charitable in thought’ and ‘very reluctant to make negative judgments
of other people’ to such an extent that she becomes unattractive as a
result (Wolf, 1982, 421-2). According to Driver,
A person who is blind in charity with others is a person who sees the good in
them, but does not see the bad. Blind charity differs from charity in that it is
usually the case that, when one is merely charitable toward another, one favors
that person in some respect, in spite of perceived defects or lack of desert. For
example, in employing the principle of charity, one interprets a person’s views in
the best possible way, even though one perceives certain possible defects. Blind
charity is a disposition not to see the defects, and to focus on the virtues of persons.
(381)
4 I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting that I engage with Driver’s argument
here.
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I find it rather difficult to understand just why blind charity is meant to
be a good thing, and even more difficult to understand how it could be a
morally good thing. As Driver points out, blind charity requires a kind of
ignorance: the inability to see the bad in people. This sort of charity ‘cannot
be reflective’ (382). On the face of it, unreflectiveness does not seem
like the mark of a virtue. Of course, if we suppose that most people are
mostly good, and that their defects are not usually important, then perhaps
blind charity is useful in most cases. The blindly charitable person
may have more pleasant, and more productive, interactions with most
people; she won’t perceive their flaws, and so she won’t be hung up on
them. Yet our appreciation or admiration for blind charity in such cases
seems almost aesthetic rather than moral. We find the person who is
blind in charity to be endearing, innocent, and pure; we admire such a
person for her ‘sweetness,’ as Driver says of the character Jane Bennett
in Pride and Prejudice. But what happens when the blindly charitable
person interacts with people whose bad qualities are relevant, significant,
and not to be ignored? It seems that blind charity could cause one
to trust the untrustworthy, to rely on the unreliable, or worse, to ally
oneself with evil. In such cases, blind charity seems indistinguishable
from naiveté. Naiveté is only rarely an admirable quality in an adult,
and so it would be odd if it were supposed to count as a moral virtue.
The naiveté of blind charity might enhance a large number of relatively
insignificant social interactions, but this would be outweighed by the
fact that it could spoil a small number of quite significant interactions,
potentially causing a great deal of harm.
Wolf’s version of charity might not be as ‘blind’ as Driver’s blind
charity. Where Driver’s charitable agent has a true perceptive defect — a
blind spot, as it were — Wolf’s moral saint may simply have a tendency
to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. But Wolf’s moral
saint faces the same problem whether she is completely blinded to the
flaws of others or only partly blinded. As I argued earlier, Wolf’s claim
that positive character traits like charity make a moral saint unattractive
leads us to a dilemma: either the saint is charitable in an undiscriminating
way (roughly, blind charity), in which case she will be much
less effective, and much less admirable, as a moral agent, or she is only
charitable when charity is called for, in which case she is not unattractive
on account of this trait. The first horn of the dilemma is only a problem
if blind charity does cause a person to be less effective and less admirable
as a moral agent. Driver has suggested the opposite: that virtues of
ignorance, like blind charity, can ease social interaction, and that such
traits are so admirable that it would be ‘counterintuitive’ to suggest
they are not virtues. But as I have argued, the considerations that count
in favor of blind charity don’t seem to be moral considerations, and in
many contexts blind charity would in fact undermine moral goals. In
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What Moral Saints Look Like 385
any case, the second horn of the dilemma represents the more plausible
account of moral saints. Moral saints should indeed be charitable, but
not blindly charitable. Paul Farmer calls his own principle of charity
his ‘hermeneutic of generosity’ (‘H of G’). He exercises it toward Kidder
when he says, ‘I know you’re a good guy. Therefore I will interpret
what you say and do in a favorable light’ (214). Nevertheless, Farmer’s
‘H of G’ is not a type of blind charity. He does not lack the ability to see
the bad in people. In fact, Farmer is a particularly astute moral critic.
This allows him to shame others into action when leading by example
does not work on its own.
Wolf’s argument about character traits extends to humor. She claims
that a cynical and sarcastic wit requires ‘resignation and pessimism
toward the flaws and vices to be found in the world,’ and that a moral
saint could not have these attitudes (422). It seems reasonable enough
that cynical wit involves pessimism, but why can’t the moral saint be
pessimistic? Insofar as pessimism is simply a belief about how things
tend to work out, it could actually be to the moral saint’s advantage to
be pessimistic.
5
Indeed, Paul Farmer is surely more saintly on account
of his pessimism. He is motivated to help the poor precisely because, as
he says, ‘life sucks,’ and his patients are ‘the shafted.’ He is pessimistic
about how his patients will fare without his help, but this allows him
to do more good.
We might also call into question Wolf’s claim that cynical wit requires
an attitude of ‘resignation.’ Is an attitude so extreme as resignation
really necessary for cynical or sarcastic humor? Resignation seems to
connote hopelessness or futility. But if cynical and sarcastic humor were
built on hopelessness and futility, then cynical or sarcastic commentary
about bad situations would come out sounding sad or mean rather than
funny. That is, if in referring to his patients as ‘the shafted’ Farmer were
resigned to the notion that their plight was permanent, or hopeless, we
would consider his use of the term to be mean-spirited. But he’s not
resigned. Quite the opposite: he fights to treat his sickest patients when
the world’s public health authorities are resigned to letting them die.
5 Now, perhaps we ought to clarify what sort of attitude pessimism is. If pessimism
is just having the negative attitudes and beliefs that are warranted by the evidence,
then this certainly poses no problem for the moral saint, unless it brings her down
and thus makes her less productive. However, on this conception, pessimism is
really just another world for ‘realism.’ Suppose pessimism is instead the tendency
to have negative attitudes and beliefs regardless of the evidence. This, I concede,
might be (practically, not logically) problematic for the moral saint. But only the
first, weaker sort of pessimism seems necessary for a cynical wit.
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V Wolf’s Moral Saints Are Self-Defeating
By appealing to Paul Farmer as a case study, I have tried to suggest that
Wolf’s account of moral sainthood places unnecessary restrictions on
the sorts of traits and attitudes a moral saint can have. Lurking beneath
my analysis, however, is an argument for an even stronger claim: that
if we granted all of these restrictions, Wolf’s moral saint would be selfdefeating.
Here I want to make that stronger argument more explicit.
Following Wolf’s distinction between ‘logical’ and ‘practical’ obstacles
to sainthood, I will argue that her moral saint is both logically and practically
self-defeating. We’ll call a saint ‘logically self-defeating’ if two or
more necessary components of sainthood cannot consistently be instantiated
in the same person. A saint is ‘practically self-defeating’ if, as a
contingent matter, it often happens to be the case that the real-world
exercise of one component of sainthood gets in the way of the exercise
of another component thereof.
Wolf’s moral saint is logically self-defeating insofar as this saint must
display a vast repertoire of positive, optimistic traits, some of which
conflict with each other. Wolf describes the moral saint in the following
way: she is patient, considerate, even-tempered, hospitable, charitable
(in deed and in thought), reluctant to make negative judgments, always
looking for the best in people, very nice, not offensive, not pessimistic,
not resigned, not cynical, humorless, dull-witted, and bland. Wolf
doesn’t mention that moral saints must be sincere. But surely sincerity
is a virtue that belongs on the above list, and perhaps on any plausible
list of the virtues of a moral saint. After all, if a moral saint cannot be
pessimistic, then she certainly cannot be insincere — surely insincerity
goes ‘against the moral grain.’ But the virtue of sincerity is in tension
with the other traits Wolf attributes to moral saints.
The problem, it seems, is that it would be quite difficult to display all
of Wolf’s positive traits without being insincere. Now, one might reply
that I have not sufficiently idealized my moral saint; the average person,
who is not perfectly positive and optimistic, could not display all of
these positive traits without being insincere. But the moral saint really
would be optimistic, patient, charitable, nice, and so on, and thus would
not have to be insincere to display such traits. But this would dissolve
the inconsistency only if the moral saint displayed the positive traits
exclusively when they were warranted. As I suggested earlier, a sincere
person can be considerate of the needs of others when those needs are
deserving of consideration: when they are genuine, legitimate, consistent
needs. So, for example, Paul Farmer ought to be considerate of his
patients and their legitimate demands, but he ought not be considerate
or patient when it comes to arbitrary and harmful bureaucratic practices.
Thus, if Wolf demands that her moral saint always be considerate,
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What Moral Saints Look Like 387
regardless of whether this attitude is fitting, then she is also demanding
insincerity. The moral saint cannot sincerely be considerate of illegitimate
demands, unless she is completely unaware of their illegitimacy.
As I argued earlier about the ‘virtues of ignorance,’ it is difficult to see
how being accommodating in such an unthinking, undiscriminating
way can be a positive moral trait. It may be positive in the sense that
so accommodating a person would be very nice and agreeable, but it
seems also negative insofar as such a person would be neither responding
to the normatively relevant features of her environment nor helping
to counteract the effects of harmful policies.
6
My argument that Wolf’s moral saint is logically self-defeating succeeds
only if (1) sincerity is a necessary condition of sainthood, and
(2) saints display positive traits even when they are unwarranted. The
argument that Wolf’s moral saint is practically self-defeating is more
straightforward. Her moral saint is practically self-defeating because,
in not allowing himself any of the pleasures of life that normally keep
a person sane, he deprives himself of the very rejuvenation that would
make extended good works possible. It is widely acknowledged that
in order to maximize his pleasure, the hedonist ought not seek it, and
that in order to maximize the good, the utilitarian ought not calculate
the relative utility of every possible action.
7
Similarly, in order to maximize
moral goodness, it is best that one not always aim at doing the
most morally virtuous thing possible, if for no other reason than that
the deliberation that must go into determining which action is as morally
good as possible itself takes up time that could better be spent doing
morally good actions. Wolf’s moral saint, who exhibits a brute maximizing
perfectionism, is thus self-undermining. After all, her saint is
someone ‘whose every action is as morally good as possible’ (419), and
as I shall argue later, she expects the saint to be driven by this fact de
dicto.
Thus there are perhaps two different ways in which Wolf’s moral
saint is practically self-defeating. The requirement of moral perfection
is self-defeating in the short run, since it would result, at best, in a sort of
deliberative inefficiency, and at worst in what Peter Railton (1984) calls
a ‘paralyzing regress’ of deliberating about whether to deliberate (154).
6 I presume Edward Lawry (2002) is referring to this same phenomenon when he
writes ‘But the inoffensive niceness of a person seems surely to be an objectionable
moral trait when righteous indignation is called for. It seems that even trying
to characterize the moral saint in this way is a self-defeating enterprise’ (Lawry,
2002, 4).
7 For a particularly lucid and concise explanation of the ‘Paradox of Hedonism’ see
Railton (1984), 140-1.
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In the short run, the saint would miss opportunities to do the morally
right thing. The requirement that the saint ‘justify every activity
against morally beneficial alternatives’ is also self-defeating in the long
run, because it would mean systematically deciding to forgo personal
interests in favor of morally beneficial alternatives; over time, the saint
would become burned-out, thus undermining her ability to do the morally
right thing (Wolf, 1982, 422).
Now, it seems natural to argue that the moral saint must take time for
personal hobbies and pursuits because she would need to account for
the potential of becoming burned-out. Moreover, these personal hobbies
and pursuits must be undertaken for their own sake — not instrumentally,
as in the case of Wolf’s donation-seeking golfer — otherwise
they might not yield any genuine rejuvenation. Perhaps, however, it is
better to argue that the saint can enjoy personal interests because a more
plausible picture of a moral saint will not require that she justify each action
against morally beneficial alternatives. For although it is true that a wellrounded
life might better conduce to improving the welfare of others
than an exhaustively single-minded life, it might be difficult for a moral
perfectionist to alter her deliberative habits in light of this fact. For
she would have little reason, in any particular instance, to prefer wellrounded
pursuits to moral pursuits, as long as she were confident she
could carry out the very next moral pursuit without dire personal consequences.
In other words, preventing oneself from becoming burnedout
might require a sort of foresight and long-term thinking that is in
tension with particular act-level decisions.
Peter Railton (1984) has offered a way out of these kinds of deliberative
problems, which are often considered to be particularly problematic
for consequentialists.8
He distinguishes between ‘subjective consequentialism’
and ‘objective consequentialism’. Subjective consequentialism
demands that one aim to maximize the good in every action by using
a distinctively consequentialist mode of decision-making — weighing
the expected consequences of acts and carefully choosing the act that
appears optimal (Railton, 1984, 152). Objective consequentialism, on
the other hand, ‘is the view that the criterion of the rightness of an act
or course of action is whether it in fact would most promote the good of
those acts available to the agent’ (152, emphasis added). It might turn
out that the course of action that would in fact most promote the good is
not the action that a subjectively consequentialist decision-making procedure
recommends. So, for example, it might turn out that a moral saint
8 I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting that I make use of Railton’s distinction
here.
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What Moral Saints Look Like 389
ought in fact to allow himself the pleasure of personal hobbies, because
it prevents him from becoming burned out and unable to do any good.
This is true even if subjective consequentialism would not have recommended
personal hobbies. Railton thus coins the term ‘sophisticated
consequentialist.’ A sophisticated consequentialist is ‘someone who has
a standing commitment to leading an objectively consequentialist life,
but who need not set special stock in any particular form of decision
making and therefore does not necessarily seek to lead a subjectively
consequentialist life’ (153). Sophisticated consequentialists might seem
a little odd in any particular situation — they often choose actions that
seem far from optimal — but they are more effective overall.
Railton’s framework is useful because it allows us to think more carefully
about whether Wolf’s moral saint really is self-defeating. Perhaps
Wolf’s saint is actually a sophisticated moral agent. A ‘sophisticated
moral saint’ can play golf even when a big donation to Oxfam does
not depend on it, because playing golf keeps her sane, and staying
sane means doing more good in the long-run. Recasting Wolf’s moral
saints as sophisticated in this way would certainly defeat my objection
that these saints are self-defeating. But this would only push the
problem back one step further. For sophisticated moral saints would
not be unattractive in the ways Wolf claims, and so her argument would
still be on shaky ground. After all, a large part of the saints’ unattractiveness
hinges on their decision-making procedure — their need to
‘justify every action against morally beneficial alternatives’ (422). This
causes them to forego personal interests, become bland, and turn into
the sort of people we don’t like to be around. If we replace this decision-procedure
with a more sophisticated one, the unattractiveness
disappears. Here we arrive at yet another dilemma: Wolf’s saints are
either ‘naïve’ deliberators or ‘sophisticated’ deliberators.
9
If naïve, they
are self-defeating, and if sophisticated, they are not unattractive in the
ways necessary for her argument ultimately to succeed.
In the end, it matters little whether Wolf’s requirement that the saint
justify all actions against morally beneficial alternatives can be shown
to accommodate personal interests, or whether this requirement should
be abandoned altogether, for Wolf includes the lack of personal interests
as an additional feature of a moral saint. In other words, she seems
to think that the moral saint is essentially dull-witted, humorless, and
9 As I’ve tried to indicate, it seems rather clear from the text that Wolf intends them
to be ‘naïve’ deliberators. So the dilemma here is really between the characterization
given in the text and an alternative characterization we might offer as a
charitable modification of her view. It’s not a choice between two equally plausible
interpretations of the text.
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390 Vanessa Carbonell
bland. He is this way by his very constitution, not simply as a consequence
of his perfectionist rationality. It is not merely that his project
of benefiting others leaves him no time to be well-rounded, but rather
that well-roundedness is itself antithetical to moral perfection. This
is what Wolf means, presumably, when she says that certain pursuits
are ‘against the moral grain’ (422). Such pursuits don’t run against the
grain because they take up time that could be spent otherwise; they run
against the grain by their nature. This is why her saint is self-defeating:
he must be both ascetic and maximally beneficial to others, but being
ascetic would likely undermine his ability to help others.
VI Passion for Morality De Dicto
Despite the arguments I have made so far, Wolf’s picture of the moral
saint as horribly unattractive might remain plausible. Here I want to
offer an explanation for that nagging plausibility, by arguing that part
of the reason we think of moral saints as being so boring and irritating
is that we are confusing different types of moral motivation. Wolf
describes the moral saint as someone whose life is ‘dominated by explicitly
moral commitments’ (423). There is a way of reading this according
to which it is a bad thing, and that is the reading Wolf intends. Among
the heroes of history and literature, Wolf argues, we ‘prefer’ those whose
characters are mixed rather than uniformly saintly. From this preference
Wolf draws the conclusion that ‘there seems to be a limit to how
much morality we can stand’ (423). This seems right, but I shall argue
that it is only true in the following limited sense: once a person becomes
obsessed with ‘morality’ de dicto, we can no longer stand it. However,
morality de re — in the sense of morally good actions — strikes me as
something for which we have an almost limitless appetite. Perhaps this
distinction will help us to interpret Wolf’s claim that
[T]here is something odd about the idea of morality itself, or moral goodness, serving
as the object of a dominant passion in the way that a more concrete and specific
vision of a goal (even a concrete moral goal) might be imagined to serve. Morality
itself does not seem to be a suitable object of passion. (424)
Wolf’s distinction here between ‘morality itself’ and ‘a concrete moral
goal’ is precisely the distinction between a motivation to do ‘what is
right’ read de dicto and that same motivation de re. She seems to think
that a moral saint must be motivated by ‘morality itself’ under that
description, as an abstract concept, rather than being motivated directly
by those things in the world that the concept picks out, like the relief
of suffering.
Passion for ‘morality itself’ would be rather odd. Imagine approaching
a stranger and asking him ‘What’s your life’s passion?’ and getting
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What Moral Saints Look Like 391
the answer ‘Morality.’ Or asking ‘What are you going to do today?’
and getting the answer ‘Morally good things.’ But is that how a real
moral saint would answer? The moral saint as I conceive of him would
answer with the content of his moral commitments, not the fact that
he is so committed. To ‘What’s your life’s passion?’ he would answer
‘healing the sick’ or ‘eradicating tuberculosis.’ To ‘What are you going
to do today?’ he would answer, in similar fashion, ‘see patients’ or
‘raise money.’ Although I can imagine a person who answers instead
‘do morally good things,’ I can only imagine him giving this answer
facetiously or ironically, or as some sort of pep talk to himself, to stay
motivated in the face of obstacles. To give the answer ‘do morally good
things’ sincerely, one would have to be, oddly, a little cold. After all,
describing one’s commitments to oneself as moral is perhaps a consequence
of being committed to them as moral. Yet in most cases what
makes someone saintly is a commitment to various moral pursuits for
their own sake.
10
One problem with people who are committed to or obsessed with
‘morality’ so described is that whatever it is they are describing as
‘morally right’ might not actually be morally right. Many of us associate
an obsession with morality de dicto with the tendency to have false
beliefs about what morality demands. Think, for example, of Jerry
Falwell’s ‘Moral Majority’ or any organization that describes itself
as being on a ‘moral crusade.’ At the very least, there is a correlation
between the tendency to have fanatical moral beliefs and de dicto moral
obsession. Indeed, Wolf acknowledges that her view seems to paint the
moral saint as a ‘disgusting goody-goody or an obsessive ascetic’ (425).
10 Indeed, Wolf acknowledges this exact same problem — the problem of de dicto
commitments — in a different context. When discussing what might be unattractive
about a utilitarian moral saint (as opposed to the common-sense morality
version of the moral saint, to which the bulk of her criticisms are directed), Wolf
claims that, insofar as this saint can have any sort of hobbies or interests outside
of helping others, ‘he values these things only because of and insofar as they are a
part of the general happiness. He values them, as it were, under the description ‘‘a
contribution to the general happiness’’’ (429). Here Wolf is arguing that the sort of
means-end reasoning that allows the utilitarian moral saint to engage in enjoyable
activities renders those activities less legitimate or genuine. They are valued de
dicto and not de re. She’s right that enjoyable activities ought to be enjoyed for their
own sake. But I’m not sure that the utilitarian moral saint can’t enjoy them for their
own sake. After all, if the utilitarian moral saint needs to build leisure pursuits
into his life so as not to become burned out (that is, so as to remain a productive
utility-maximizer), it is probably necessary that he enjoy them for their own sake,
otherwise they might become less enjoyable. We can grant that leisure pursuits are
a strategically optimal part of a utility-maximizing life without thereby rendering
the relationship the saint has to those pursuits merely instrumental.
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But what is disgusting about a goody-goody is not that she does morally
good things, but rather that she describes them as morally good,
takes their moral goodness as a mark of her own superiority, basks in
the glory that accompanies doing good things, and is concerned more
about the appearance of moral goodness than the actuality. We don’t find
a goody-goody by looking for someone who makes a significant moral
impact on the world; we find her by looking for someone whose selfimage
is unhealthily tied to her reputation for making such an impact.
Thus in addition to confusing genuine de re moral motivation with de
dicto moral motivation, Wolf’s saint has the further problem of being
concerned about her moral self-image rather than about her moral projects
themselves. Her superficial de dicto moral motivation is perhaps
derived from her desire to improve her moral self-image.
The same goes for the obsessive ascetic. What is unattractive about
such a character is not that he sacrifices his own desires to help others
— helping others is rarely unattractive — but that he elevates the selfsacrifice
to the level of an obsession, and that he thinks the sacrifice itself
intrinsically good. Thus the underlying problem with a commitment to
morality de dicto is that, even if the person with this commitment has
obsessions that actually are morally good, he seems to have them for the
wrong reason. He seems to be benefiting others because it’s the ‘moral
thing to do’ (and because the outward appearance of concern for the
‘moral thing to do’ will increase his moral self-image) and not for the
beneficiaries’ own sakes. Paul Farmer calls these misguided people ‘dogooders.’
People of this sort — fanatical, obsessive, ascetic, goody-goody
— tend to behave in such a way as to provoke others to refer to them as
‘saints,’ where ‘saint’ is an epithet. But we are not interested in people
who can only be described as saints if ‘saint’ is an epithet. Looking for
real saints among the goody-goodies would be like looking for excellent
fathers by rounding up men who wear ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ t-shirts.
11
Thus we can see that a moral saint whose life is ‘dominated by the
motivation to be moral’ is much less unattractive when we interpret
this motivation as being toward doing morally good things de re rather
than solely de dicto (431). If the saint is motivated by precisely the things
the term ‘morally good’ picks out, rather than being motivated by the
concept morally good itself, he will do all the things Wolf’s moral saint
does without being annoying or fanatical. No one seems to find an
obsession with healing the sick, by someone who is actually working to
do so, unattractive. In fact, the moral saint need not even think of himself
11 I assume something like this is underlying the worry that Railton’s character Juan
has when he says, ‘I haven’t met any real saints lately, and I don’t trust people who
think they are saints’ (Railton, 1984, 150).
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What Moral Saints Look Like 393
as being wholly devoted to moral perfection. ‘Morality,’ de dicto, need
not even be on his radar screen.
Michael Smith (1994) has taken this point even further. Though he
does not consider moral saints in particular, he claims that the motivation
to do the right thing de dicto is so implausible as part of a moral
theory that metaethical externalists are in trouble insofar as their theory
entails such a motivation. Common sense, he claims, tells us that ‘good
people care non-derivatively about honesty, the weal and woe of their
children and friends, the well-being of their fellows […]’ etc. (Smith,
1994, 75). Since moral saints are the limiting case of ‘good people,’ we
would expect that they, too, are motivated non-derivatively to heal the
sick or help the poor. Otherwise, moral saints would be, as Smith says,
motivated by ‘just one thing: doing what they believe to be right, where
this is read de dicto and not de re’ (75). Such de dicto motivation is, he
argues, ‘a fetish or moral vice, not the one and only moral virtue’ (75, emphasis
added). The idea here is that de dicto motivation is alienating. It disconnects
the agent from her actions by acting as a filter through which
her otherwise direct concern for moral projects muss pass, rendering
that concern merely derivative and hence illegitimate.
Wolf’s moral saint is so unattractive precisely because she exhibits the
sort of moral obsession that can be called a fetish or a vice. And as I
have argued above, Wolf’s conception of sainthood clearly involves a
de dicto motivation to be moral. On the basis of Smith’s argument, we
might then conclude that it is the de dicto motivation itself that is causing
the fetishism. What I would like to suggest, however, is that it may not
be the de dicto commitment itself, but rather the notion that it must exist
in the absence of a corresponding de re motivation, that is problematic.
Wolf’s account seems to rely, as does perhaps Michael Smith’s, on the
idea that de re and de dicto motivations to be moral are to some extent
mutually exclusive. We can see this in her discussion of the difference
between ‘morality itself’ or ‘moral goodness’ being the object of a dominant
passion and ‘a concrete moral goal’ being the object of that passion
(424). It seems that she disapproves of a person whose dominant
passion is for morality itself at least partly because she is assuming that
this person cannot also have a passion for concrete moral goals. But
why must this be the case?
Several commentators have responded to Smith’s argument by
defending de dicto moral motivation, and by pointing out that de re and
de dicto motivation are not mutually exclusive.
12
Sigrun Svarvarsdottir
(1999) argues that there is no reason to conflate a genuine concern
12 See Lillehammer (1997), 191-2; Copp (1997), 49-50; Svarvarsdottir (1999), 199-206;
and Olson (2002), 91.
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394 Vanessa Carbonell
for morality (de dicto) with an obsession or moral fetish. De dicto moral
motivation does not rule out also having a direct, non-derivative concern
for moral projects for their own sake. Indeed, de dicto motivation
conveniently fills in the gaps when such direct concern is missing,
especially after we have changed our moral judgments. Svarvarsdottir
explains this connection as follows:
Admittedly, we expect a good person to develop a deep commitment to an end
she has come to see as morally valuable and to pursue it for its own sake.… The
presence in the good person of the desire to be moral certainly does not prevent
her from forming such a commitment. Although her desire to  may initially be
derived from her desire to be moral, it may subsequently come to operate psychologically
independently of the latter. (Svarvarsdottir, 1999, 205-6)
In the morally best people, we will want to say not just that the desire to
 may develop into an independent, underived desire, but that it must.
That is to say, a de dicto desire to be moral by itself is not sufficient in the
morally best people.
While de dicto moral motivation may never be sufficient on its own,
it may in some instances be necessary. Consider an essentially moral
value like justice: it may indeed be necessary or even admirable not only
to respond to the features which make an act just or unjust, but also the
fact that it is ‘just’ or ‘unjust.’
13
When we respond to justice or injustice,
it may be impossible to respond directly (de re) to the features that make
an act just or unjust without at the same time responding to the act
under the description ‘just’ or ‘unjust.’ If, for instance, I am working to
counteract voter disenfranchisement, I may be motivated directly by
concern for the disenfranchised, but at the same time I may be responding
to what Wolf would call the ‘abstract and impersonal consideration’
because it is unjust. In other words, the object of my motivation might
be that people in one neighborhood had ample opportunity to vote, but people
in another neighborhood were intimidated from voting. But does this motivation
differ from a concern to fight an injustice? The disenfranchisement
would obviously be unjust whether I described it that way or not,
but in responding to what is morally significant about it, I cannot help
but respond to it under the description ‘injustice.’ Indeed, if I fought
13 There are a few instances where Paul Farmer seems to display de dicto moral motivation,
but never at the expense of de re motivation, and never in a way that is
fetishistic, self-righteous, or otherwise objectionable. One is that he keeps a screen
saver on his laptop computer that says ‘Seek Justice’ (Kidder, 2003, 207). The other
is that he and his colleagues often discuss ‘areas of moral clarity.’ These ‘AMC’s’
are ‘situations, rare in the world, where what ought to be done seemed perfectly
clear’ (101).
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What Moral Saints Look Like 395
injustice de re, without being able to describe it or conceptualize it as
‘injustice,’ I would seem to be lacking a crucial deliberative mechanism
— the mechanism that picks out, in a non-arbitrary way, the special
force of this wrong.
Justice seems to be an extreme case of this phenomenon, though. In
many cases, an agent — even the moral saint — need not be interested
in the ‘rightness’ of her action. If the saint helps sick people because
they are in pain and she can make it go away, this seems sufficient for
praiseworthiness even if she does not think of what she is doing as
‘morally good.’ We would hope, of course, that with some reflection she
could come to recognize her work as morally good. And we would be
troubled if, upon reflection, she came to recognize her work as morally
bad, but did it anyway. But we would not expect her to be motivated,
at least not primarily or dominantly, by the fact that her action could be
described as ‘morally good,’ and we would be disappointed if she were
overly concerned about the way her actions were labeled or rewarded.
We can now see where Wolf’s account of moral saints goes wrong.
There is a benign, perhaps even admirable, way of caring about the
rightness of your actions de dicto — it manifests itself in reflective people
who are concerned about how their actions can be classified in the
abstract, while being primarily motivated by their moral projects themselves.
While it is beyond the scope of this article to explore this point
in greater depth, I have suggested that there is reason to think that this
sort of de dicto motivation need not result in moral fetishism. However,
Wolf builds a far less admirable and far more common way of caring
de dicto about the rightness of one’s actions into her notion of a moral
saint. Her saint cares more about the description of his actions as ‘right’
than the right-making features of the actions themselves, indeed cares
about the former at the expense of the latter, since Wolf implies he cannot
care about both. Furthermore, Wolf’s saints are prone to a constellation
of troublesome behaviors — what I call ‘moral imposterisms’ like
fanaticism and do-gooderism — that tend to correlate with the presence
of this de dicto motivation, and hence to be automatically associated
with it, even if they are not in fact caused by it. But there is no reason
to attribute to the moral saint a general de dicto moral motivation in the
absence of corresponding de re motivations. Nor is there any reason to
attribute to the moral saint an annoying, self-righteous asceticism or
a superficial concern for his moral image. Since there is no reason to
think moral saints must be motivated in these ways, there is no reason
to conclude that saints are unattractive on that basis.
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VII Conclusion
Wolf’s paper is wide-ranging and full of important arguments. I’ve tried
to show that just one small part of her paper — the substantive account
of what moral saints look like — is overly restrictive. My criticisms of
this part of the paper do, of course, have implications for her broader
argument: if saints can be attractive and well-rounded after all, then
there is less conflict between the morally best life and the optimally
well-rounded life. Yet I agree with Wolf that there is still substantial
tension between moral ways of evaluating a life and other normative
standards for evaluating lives, like the point of view of personal perfection.
Indeed, I agree with so many of Wolf’s big-picture claims that one
might wonder whether she and I are talking past one another when it
comes to the traits of sainthood. Are we simply talking about different
things when we use the term ‘moral saint’?
Perhaps the definition of moral saint that Wolf was intending
all along was something like ‘a person who only responds to moral reasons,
and cannot respond to non-moral reasons, except when doing so
either augments her ability to respond to moral reasons or has no effect
whatsoever on this ability.’ If this is the definition Wolf intends, perhaps
many of my criticisms fall flat. After all, this sort of moral saint would
surely be unattractive, and no one as interesting as Paul Farmer could
meet this standard. A person who was incapable of responding to the
rich variety of non-moral reasons in the world, or was simply prohibited
from responding to them, would be robotic and humorless. As far
as hobbies and leisure pursuits are concerned, this person could only
spend time on an activity if it were absolutely necessary for reducing
stress and making it possible to continue responding to moral reasons,
or if it directly served those moral reasons, as in Wolf’s example of the
golf game that is used ‘to secure that big donation to Oxfam’ (425).14
This notion of sainthood as reason-responsiveness captures many of
Wolf’s concerns, but it cannot be exactly what she intended. The problem
with treating an ideal moral agent as an ideal moral reason-responder
is that it treats moral motivation as if it were an isolable, removable part
of human psychology. But a moral saint is a person, not just a deliberative
faculty. When asking what a perfect moral agent would look like,
we are asking what happens when we plant optimal moral motivations
in a real person, with all the nuances and flaws of human psychology.
After all, if we are interested in examining and evaluating the many
14 Things would be more complicated, of course, from a broadly virtue-ethical standpoint,
where virtues like perfecting your talents might count as moral reasons.
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What Moral Saints Look Like 397
ways in which one could choose to live one’s life, we probably ought to
eliminate at the outset any paths that require turning us from humans
into androids. So it seems unlikely that Wolf is interested in anything
other than the sort of moral perfection that can plausibly be instantiated
in real people without stripping them of what makes them human.
Thus it seems unlikely that we are talking past each other. Rather, we
simply disagree about what it looks like when a real person approaches
moral sainthood. Using Paul Farmer as a paradigm case, I have argued
that real-life moral saints are not irritating, dull-witted, or bland. Rather,
such people can be charismatic, cynical, and darkly witty. They can be
the kind of people we admire and even aspire to be, and the kind of
people whose company we enjoy.
15
References
Adams, Robert M. 1984. ‘Saints.’ The Journal of Philosophy 81, 392-400.
Copp, David. 1997. ‘Belief, Reason, and Motivation: Michael Smith’s ‘‘The Moral Problem.’’’
Ethics 108:1, 33-54.
Driver, Julia. 1989. ‘The Virtues of Ignorance.’ The Journal of Philosophy 86:7, 373-84.
Kidder, Tracy. 2003. Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House.
Lawry, Edward. 2002. ‘In Praise of Moral Saints.’ Southwest Philosophy Review 18, 1-11.
Lillehammer, Hallvard. 1997. ‘Smith on Moral Fetishism.’ Analysis 57:3, 187-95.
Olson, Jonas. 2002. ‘Are Desires De Dicto Fetishistic?’ Inquiry 45, 89-96.
Railton, Peter. 1984. ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality.’
Philosophy and Public Affairs 13:2, 134-71.
Smith, Michael. 1994. The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell.
Svarvarsdottir, Sigrun. 1999. ‘Moral Cognitivism and Motivation.’ The Philosophical Review
108:2, 161-219.
15 I wish to thank Stephen Darwall for helpful discussion and thoughtful comments
on earlier drafts of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented to
the Working Group at the University of Michigan in 2006, where I received helpful
feedback from the commentator, David Dick, and the audience, in particular
John Ku, Howard Nye, and Dustin Locke. Thanks also to Aaron Bronfman and
Ivan Mayerhofer. Finally, I must especially thank the anonymous referees for this
journal; their suggestions were enormously valuable and are reflected on nearly
every page of the paper.
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Urmson, J.O. 1958. ‘Saints and Heroes.’ In Essays in Moral Philosophy, A.I. Melden, ed.
Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Wolf, Susan. 1982. ‘Moral Saints.’ The Journal of Philosophy 79:8, 419-39.
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