This post is by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, on her recent paper 'The Know-How of Virtue', published open-access in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
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| Kathleen Murphy-Hollies |
How can we be good people who do things for the right reason, when we very often confabulate a good reason for our behaviour after the fact?
Imagine, for example, that I do not give money to a person
in need on the street, and instead rush home. But then, later on, my friend mentions
seeing the person who needed help and I express that I saw them too. Then they
ask me, ‘why didn’t you help them?’.
In these circumstances, we might confabulate. This means
that, only upon being asked, do we start formulating an answer to that
question. In that way, confabulation is post-hoc. We come up with reasons for
our behaviour which protect our positive self-conceptions. So I might say to my
friend, ‘Oh I was in a rush and the street was too busy for me to stop!’. This
explanation protects my self-concept of still generally being kind and helpful.
I explain away this instance with an ill-grounded claim, because in fact the
street was not busy at all. This is a core feature of confabulations; they are
not appropriately based on the relevant evidence, so they usually make false
statements about the world (it is not impossible for them to be true by
accident/mere luck).
Importantly, people confabulate with no intention to
deceive. So, we believe our confabulations to be an authentic account of
why we behaved in the way we did. In a way, this is surely what makes confabulation
so worrying. When we are prompted to look more closely at our behaviour,
confabulation seems to hide our shortcomings from us, because we immediately
come up with a self-protecting story. We don’t notice that we’re doing this,
and we don’t notice that we don’t actually have a good understanding of why we
acted in some way.
So it would seem that confabulation is surely a worry for
virtuous behaviour, which ought to be ‘for the right reason’. Virtuous
behaviour should be a response to the values inherent in a situation,
and the agent should have this right reason at the forefront of her mind when
acting. But, in confabulation, we reverse this story and posit those ‘right
reasons’ after the fact, believing that we were responding to those reasons at
the time.
In my recent paper, I argue that confabulation is not
necessarily such a barrier for virtuous behaviour, and is actually probably
involved in the development of virtue a lot of the time. This is because
confabulation actually has some benefits, which can be applied in the
development of virtue. In seeking to protect our positive visions of ourselves,
we can give them a more explicit space in our ongoing self-narratives. These
self-conceptions are not passive, but also guide and influence future
behaviour. So, engaging in the construction of good self-image, even at the
expense of getting all the facts of the matter right, can be efficacious in
making that image a reality. And therefore, in a sense, making it true. Maybe
next time, you’ll actually respond to the reasons which you had previously
only posited post-hoc in a confabulation.
This is quite an optimistic outlook for confabulation,
though. Surely for some people, confabulation will mean that they just continue
masking their bad behaviour to themselves, indefinitely. I agree that gaining these
benefits from confabulation is far from guaranteed. I argue that what makes the
difference, is having certain self-related skills and attitudes. These include attitudes
such as being open-minded to what other people say to you in response to your
confabulations, being curious about other explanations of your behaviour to the
one you’ve given, and being attentive to your thoughts, feelings, and desires
for your idealised self.
I use a mindshaping framework to flesh out how these attitudes,
which require a skilful know-how rather than propositional knowledge about the
self, play an extremely valuable role in the fundamentally social enterprise of
sharing reasons for behaviour. Not only does this bring self-knowledge, but the
process shapes and thus constitutes it. Due to our cognitive limitations
and desires to have an understanding of our actions, the reasons that we share
may well often be confabulatory. However, that doesn’t mean that this process of
social shaping can’t take place and be valuable, particularly for the formation
of consistent virtuous behaviour.
Finally, I posit that this know-how is a meta-virtue because
the skills encompassed by it could be applied to the development of any other particular
virtue. Patience, generosity, compassion, will all require the development of
capacities to see specific values and needs in a situation, and we will need
the help and input of others in the development of these capacities. Then, we
can come to respond to them appropriately, as reasons for action. In essence,
if you’re interested in being a virtuous person who acts for the right reasons,
you should work on having these pro-social attitudes, rather than on trying to
somehow never confabulate.