Creativity and the Value of Virtue

1. Introduction

This is the second in a two-part investigation of the relationship between virtue and value. It focuses principally on two questions that part 1 [Pettigrove 2022] left readers asking.¹ First, is there a problem with existing accounts of the relationship between virtue and value that needs to be solved? The answer I give below is that the proportionality principle I critiqued in part 2 reflects a significant trend in the contemporary literature that supports what I call the missile defence model (MDM) of the relationship between virtue and value. The view’s broad appeal is built on attractive assumptions. But it also occludes something important. So it is important both to acknowledge its attractions and to highlight its shortcomings.

Second, what do I mean when I claim the goodness of virtue is fundamental? Sections 3 and 4 aim to address that question. In section 3, I introduce the virtue of creativity and show that, like the traits discussed in part 1, it is out of step with the MDM. Thinking about creativity puts us in a better position to understand my preferred alternative to the MDM, namely, the modus operandi (M.O.) account, which I explain in more detail in section 4. I argue that the M.O. account retains the attractions of the MDM while also making room for a kind of value to which the MDM is blind.

2. The Missile Defence Model and the Proportionality Principle

Contemporary virtue theory and value theory have grown up more or less independently of one another. On those infrequent occasions when they have joined in conversation, theorists have portrayed the virtuous agent as something like a good missile defence system. The purpose of a missile defence system is to spot incoming projectiles and respond in accordance with their threat level. An ideal system will identify all threats and neutralize them before they do any damage. If there are more threats than the system can counter, they prioritize the most serious and respond to them first. Similarly, value theorists with an interest in virtue—and virtue theorists with an interest in value—have portrayed the virtuous agent as someone who accurately perceives value and responds in a way calibrated to its nature and degree.²

Although a number of theorists are attracted to a picture like the MDM, they do not all agree on what a well-calibrated response looks like. Consequentialists typically explain the virtuous response in terms of promoting value (see, e.g., Mill [1991]; Crisp [1992]; Railton [2003]).³ On this view, the virtuous agent identifies and promotes the most important goods that can be realized in the present context. She sees, for example, the child who is drowning and drops everything to come to the rescue [Singer 1972], thereby promoting life, health, pleasure, or the satisfaction of other relevant preferences. On another occasion, recognizing that a well-placed pun is optimally suited to amusing her companions, she makes the pun, thereby promoting companionship and the pleasure of good cheer.

Other theorists propose other modes of responsiveness as characteristic of the virtuous. Joshua Gert [2012] suggests desire is the merited response to goodness. Franz Brentano [2009] and Thom Hurka [2001] argue that loving the good and hating the bad are virtuous ways of responding to value. If the good in question is the excellence of a person and we find ourselves in similar circumstances with similar abilities, the virtuous response may be emulation [Adams 1999]. The need for an even wider range of responses becomes clear when we turn to historical goods: I cannot promote the long-gone beauty of the hanging gardens of Babylon or the courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there are still virtuous ways of responding to them. Often this takes the form of admiration (see Ewing [1948]). The need for a wider range of responses is not limited to historic goods. If the good in question is a recently published, masterfully written novel, what is called for is not that I appoint myself the author’s publicist (promotion) or imitate the author’s writing style (emulation). Rather, appreciation and, perhaps, gratitude are called for. When the good in question is another person’s agency, the virtuous will respect their independence [Swanton 2003: 104 ff.; Cullity 2018: 48]. The list could go on.

For all their differences, these theorists share an understanding of virtue as reactive. The virtuous agent sees existing goods and appreciates, respects, or protects them. She recognizes potential future goods and takes steps to promote them. Virtue’s goodness is explained by how it responds to the value of other things. Even theorists who distance themselves in various ways from the tradition represented by Brentano and Hurka define virtue as essentially reactive. For example, Swanton [2021: 221, emphasis added] writes, ‘A virtue [is] … a disposition of good or excellent responsiveness to evaluatively significant features of the world’ (similarly, see Swanton [2003: 19]).⁴

If a virtuous agent is an excellent responder to value, and this responsiveness is not accidental, then the virtuous agent is defined in the first instance as a knower.⁵ There are two respects, then, in which the agency of the virtuous is secondary on these accounts. What the virtuous know is more fundamental than what they do. And even their doings are merely reactive to the ‘evaluatively significant features’ of other things.

A similar picture of the virtuous agent is recommended by the convergence of work being done in three other areas of philosophy, namely, moral epistemology, moral motivation, and the philosophy of emotion. Moral empiricists from Francis Hutcheson [1725 (2004)] onward have contended that at least some evaluative beliefs are reliably formed ‘non-inferentially and a posteriori’ [Hutton 2022: 571]. Hutcheson [1728 (2002)] likened this process to perception, proposing a variety of ‘internal senses’ that we use to perceive value properties such as beauty, happiness, virtue, and honour. Following Hutcheson’s lead, several theorists have recently argued evaluative beliefs should be understood as arising from something like perception. And the perception-like experiences to which they have pointed are emotions. Fear, it is suggested, is a representation of its object as dangerous [Döring 2007: 372]. Aesthetic appreciation represents its object as beautiful [Poellner 2016: 261]. Gratitude, awe, amusement, and indignation represent their objects as generous, sublime, funny, or unjust, respectively [Pelser 2014: 112]. In each case, there is an experiential state that a) behaves like it is responding to things in the world, b) presents its object in a valenced way, and c) non-accidentally gets it right much of the time. This has led various theorists to treat emotions as perceptions of value [Döring 2007; Pelser 2014; Poellner 2016; Tappolet 2016; Mitchell 2017].

Moral empiricism and the perceptual theory of emotions don’t automatically entail any particular theory of virtue, let alone one that fits the MDM. However, when combined with other plausible assumptions about virtue, that is the direction they point. The first assumption is that the virtuous are insightful: they see things for what they are worth [Hursthouse 2006; Russell 2009; Annas 2011]. Many theorists go further, arguing that this is true not only of the virtuous agent, in general, but also of each virtue. In this spirit Paul Bloomfield [2014: 290] contends that ‘each virtue has its own intellectual structure’. Courage, for instance, ‘requires more than the ability to manage one’s fears: at the barest minimum, it will require both an ability to discern real from apparent danger and knowledge of what is of value in life’, so that one knows ‘what to risk for the sake of what’ [ibid.: 295]. Similarly, temperance involves knowing ‘which pleasures are innocent and which are harmful’ [ibid.: 298] and justice ‘involves knowing what people deserve, in terms of resources, rewards, and punishments’ [ibid.: 291].

A second assumption is that value judgements are motivating [Hume 2000]. Judging that one can pull a companion out of harm’s way—thereby avoiding something bad—moves one to assist him (other things being equal). Judging that the tale one might tell would betray a friend’s trust motivates one to bite one’s tongue. One attraction of emotion-based accounts of value judgement is that emotions have motivation baked into them. Love, hate, pride, shame, hope, and fear are states that move us to act in characteristic ways when the opportunity presents itself [Poellner 2016: 266].

Third, a more virtuous agent’s value judgements are more reliably motivating than a less virtuous agent’s. The less virtuous, will be more inclined to let less important things outweigh what they believe more important. For example, they allow minor inconvenience to dissuade them from doing something that would be very beneficial. We expect virtuous agents’ motivations to be admirable, then, both because their value judgements are insightful and because their motivations reliably follow their judgements.

Putting these pieces together, we get a picture in which a) we expect virtuous agents to reliably judge good things good, bad things bad, better things better, and worse things worse. b) We expect them to care about what they see in ways that are commensurate with their worth. And c) we expect their actions to be consistent with and to follow from their judgements. Within such a picture, the value of the virtuous agent’s motivations follows from the accuracy of their judgements about what is valuable. By adding little more than the assumption that virtuous agents are insightful to the perceptual theory of emotion, we seem to arrive at something like the MDM.

The upshot is that, from different starting points, contemporary value theorists, virtue theorists, emotion theorists, and metaethicists converge on a shared understanding of the relationship between virtue and value. The virtuous agent recognizes actual and potential value in their environment. And they react to it in ways commensurate with its nature and importance—appreciating, loving, respecting, desiring, emulating, promoting, pursuing, or producing it as befits the object and value.

I agree with (a), (b), and (c). Virtuous agents are good judges, who care about the good, and whose actions are guided by their judgement. However, I find the MDM deeply unsatisfying. There are three broad reasons for this. First, the goodness of some virtues is not fully explained by the goodness of knowing—or knowing and caring about what one knows. Even if we can reasonably say the virtuous person is an excellent knower, knowledge is not what makes each of her virtues shine. Second, virtue is not merely reactive. Third, even when virtue involves reacting to the agent’s environment, the reactive dimension is not always what is most interesting about it. Virtue adds more to the value landscape than just tracking and reacting to other things of value. I went some way toward defending each of these claims in ‘What Virtue Adds’. My aim in what follows is to reinforce and expand on that defence.

The strategy I pursued for challenging the MDM in ‘What Virtue Adds’ was to focus on a principle that contributes to the popularity of the model in its various guises, namely, the proportionality principle. Brentano [2009: 20] articulates the principle as follows: ‘Any given good, whether in ourselves or in others, is to be loved in proportion to its value and is to be loved equally wherever it may be found’. I argued that our actual judgements about familiar virtues are at odds with the proportionality principle. Admirable forms of love, ambition, and forgiveness each display attitudes and actions that are neither merely reactive nor proportional to their objects’ actual or perceived value. How, then, do we resolve the tension between our judgements about these familiar virtues and the proportionality principle? In ‘What Virtue Adds’ I suggested we do so by modifying our understanding of both the proportionality principle and the relationship between virtue and value.

The kind of proportionality it is reasonable to expect between an object’s value and an agent’s attitudes and actions is much looser than its most vocal advocates assume. A defensible commitment to proportionality picks out a range of attitudes that fit certain kinds of values. But within that range, it offers at most only rough guidance regarding the degree of the attitude a person should have. Thus, it may say my fondness for my favourite book should be less than my fondness for my favourite person. But it does not tell me to tamp down my enthusiastic appreciation for the book I just finished reading on the grounds that it is not the best book I have read. Nor does it tell me to drum up more enthusiasm for the best book I have read, to ensure that my appreciative attitudes remain proportionate to the comparative merits of the two works.

Once we modify the proportionality principle in these ways, loosening the fit between the value of an object and the attitudes a virtuous agent may have toward it, a recursive account of virtue like Hurka’s looks less attractive. Neither the attitudes of the virtuous nor the goodness of their attitudes is fully explained by the lower order goods to which they respond. Virtue adds something of value beyond just tracking and reacting to other things.

3. Creativity

Looking at creativity will advance our discussion in two ways. First, it will illustrate why one might be dissatisfied with the MDM. Second, it will suggest an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between virtue and value, which fits nicely with the M.O. account. I will say more about the virtue of creativity shortly.⁶ But for starters it will be sufficient to point to exemplars.

Whoever else might exemplify the virtue of creativity, Flannery O’Connor, Marilynne Robinson, Haruki Murakami, and George Saunders clearly do. Each of these authors has been widely celebrated for the creativity of their fiction. O’Connor won the O. Henry Prize in 1963 and the National Book Award in 1972. Robinson was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, won it in 2005, and was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009. Murakami’s numerous honours have included the Tanizaki Prize (1985) and the Yomiuri Prize (1995). In 2013, Time magazine named Saunders the ‘best short-story writer in English’, crediting him with holding this honour ‘for more than a decade’. And that was before he wrote the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo. Widely celebrated for the creativity of their work over a span of decades, if anyone has the virtue of creativity, surely Murakami, O’Connor, Robinson, and Saunders do. One need not be a writer of fiction to be creative, of course. But if one were to produce an account of creativity that failed to apply to several of literature’s most celebrated authors then one’s account would need to be revised.

What might the MDM say about virtuous creativity? According to the MDM, the virtuous agent sees value and responds to it in a way that is commensurate with its nature and degree. Unlike the mere appreciator, the creator does not just respond to existing goods; rather, she brings new things of value into the world.⁷ She tells the story, makes the movie, casts the sculpture, paints the canvas, designs the building, and so on. As a productive virtue, then, the value to which creativity is responsive is potential value. The person with the virtue of creativity will recognize that potential, desire its realization, and take steps to produce it. And they will reliably succeed in achieving this aim.⁸

As an account of some instances of virtuous creativity, the picture just sketched is unproblematic. Sometimes a creative endeavour begins with awareness of the good to be brought into existence, a desire for that good, and reliable success in bringing it into being. However, as an account of all instances of virtuous creativity, it is implausible.

One problem with the MDM’s account of creativity is that the knowledge condition is routinely not met. The creative writers mentioned above have each indicated their creative endeavours often begin, not with a clear vision of the good to be achieved, but with a confused image of they know not what. Perhaps not even that. O’Connor [1979: 5] noted of her own writing, ‘I have to write to discover what I am doing … I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again’. Saunders observes that, in the process of writing, he learns things about how he feels that he was unaware of when he began [Gordon 2022]. His vision of the truth his story tells takes shape as the story does. Robinson’s description of the birth of her novel, Gilead, is that it began with a voice. It was only in the process of writing that she discovered whose voice it was and what the speaker was like [Obama and Robinson 2015: 8]. For each of these authors, awareness of the good their creative endeavour will realize does not precede their creative activity but emerges through the creative process from steps taken when they are still in the dark.⁹

The experience of these authors is consistent with the ‘Blind Variation and Selective Retention’ (BVSR) theory of the creative process [Paul and Stokes 2018]. According to this theory, the first stage of the process involves the creator blindly generating ideas or material conditions that provide candidates for creative development. These possibilities are generated spontaneously in ways independent of intentional control. Murakami describes this beginning stage as one in which he lets the invisible ‘Automatic Dwarfs’ under the hood drive the car [Murakami 2022]. The second stage involves selecting which of the spontaneously generated candidates to keep, develop, or delete.¹⁰

If a virtuous creator does not see the potential good she will produce before she begins creating, her activity cannot be a response to it, let alone a response that is commensurate with its nature and degree. She can, of course, judge and choose in proportion to value in the second stage of the process (more on this in a moment). But in the first stage, she does not have a clear sense of the project’s merits. And what we appreciate about the virtuously creative is not limited to the second stage of the process. It also includes the options they generate spontaneously.

In cases of what Margaret Boden calls ‘transformational creativity’ it is not just that the creator does not see in advance the potential good her creativity will produce; it is that she cannot see it in advance. Transformational creativity opens up new conceptual spaces, making it possible to think what we previously could not [Boden 2010]. In the initial stages of a transformational process, the creator is not able to see and respond to the, as yet unrealized, value of her creation. If she were, the conceptual space she is preparing to explore would already be open and her activity would not be a case of transformational creativity.¹¹

Someone might wish to insist that, even in the first stage, exemplary creators display a deep form of knowledge. Their cognitive contact with reality may not yet be conscious, but they connect with the world in a way that leaves them reliably disposed to form true beliefs. As a claim about some cases of excellent creativity, such an appeal to a pre- or sub-conscious awareness of value seems plausible.¹² However, as a claim about all instances it is not.

Saunders amusingly illustrates how blind both early and late stages of the creative process can be in ‘The Mom of Bold Action’. The story’s main character is a writer who is trying to begin her next story. She spins out one hare-brained idea after another before recognizing—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly—that they are ‘Crap. Blah. Stupid’ [Saunders 2022: 75]. Late in the tale, inspiration finally strikes. The words flow. She produces something she judges ‘the most honest, original thing she’d ever written’ [ibid.: 77]. Her husband reads it and is likewise impressed. However, before the story’s end she re-reads her ‘perfect’ composition and realizes, ‘It was so bad. So harsh. It made no sense’ [ibid.: 84]. It was false. If Saunders’ depiction of the writer’s experience rings true, then it is implausible to think that what happens in the first stage of the creative process—or even frequently in the second—is necessarily a mode of knowing and responding appreciatively to value. They don’t even need to believe their activity will produce something valuable. At various stages in the process, early and late, their activity may be guided by thoughts like, ‘Let’s try this out and see what happens’.¹³ We expect virtuous creators to want what they create to be good.¹⁴ We expect them to be ‘for the good’ as Robert Adams [2006] puts it. But that is compatible with being in the dark at various stages in the process about whether their creative activity will amount to something and, if so, what.

Creativity also fails to fit the MDM’s reliability condition. Finding that an idea does not pan out is a common experience for exemplars of creativity [Hills and Bird 2018]. In fact, many creative people will tell you their ideas fall short more often than not. As Berys Gaut [2014] observes, ‘Creative actions are, by ordinary standards of reliability, often highly unreliable: they involve going beyond established outcomes, procedures or techniques, so are more likely to fail than routine actions’. What distinguishes the virtuously creative from those lacking the virtue is not that the virtuous have and pursue good ideas more reliably than the average person. Convention steers many less creative souls in the direction of successful pursuits more reliably than creativity steers the innovator toward good outcomes [Rendell et al. 2010].

Might we save the MDM by substituting bespoke standards of reliability for ordinary ones? Reliability is domain-specific.¹⁵ A professional basketball player who scored 35 per cent of their shots would be extremely unreliable,¹⁶ a baseball player who hit the ball 35 per cent of the time they were at bat would be extraordinarily reliable,¹⁷ and a footballer who scored 35 per cent of their shots in the English Premier League would be a legend. However, even granting reliability’s domain specificity, it is hard to make a case for the reliability of creativity. Thomas Edison is famous for his creativity, but his attempts to design a functional light bulb are equally famous for their unreliability. He designed 1,000 light bulbs that didn’t work before he came up with one that did. To refer to such a track record as reliable stretches the concept to the breaking point. What sets Edison apart as an exceptional creator is not that he reliably produced good outcomes, but rather his imagination, resilience, and perseverance.¹⁸ The latter qualities are especially important: he did not give up trying new things even when initial attempts failed.

Another difficulty for someone wishing to maintain that virtuous creativity is reliable is the fact that reliability is, in no small part, a function of how long a particular field has been a recognized domain of inquiry or artistic endeavour. Edison’s success as an inventor is partly due to the fact that he was working in the early days of an emerging technology. Had he arrived on the scene a century later, his attempts to come up with new ideas for valuable ways to use electricity would have been even less reliable. So if reliability is written into the conditions for the possibility of creativity then, without any other changes to his character, Edison in 2000 would be less creative than Edison in 1900.¹⁹ This seems an unsatisfactory way to map the conceptual landscape.²⁰

A related reason to be dissatisfied with the MDM is that virtuously creative efforts and enthusiasms are not always commensurate with the value of the item produced. Consider, for example, the efforts of a great novelist who decides to try their hand at a different literary form such as a poem or a play. Some, like Thomas Hardy when he turned his hand to poetry, succeed in both forms. Others don’t. Measured by the MDM, Iris Murdoch’s experiments with poetry would count against the claim that she possessed the virtue of creativity. If virtues respond to value in ways commensurate with their worth, then Murdoch should have directed her efforts to writing another novel, according to the MDM, rather than to writing poems, since her outstanding novels pushed the genre in important new directions whereas her poems are forgettable.

The example of Murdoch highlights the fact that there is more than one aspect of virtuous creativity that can elicit our admiration.²¹ The successful production of something good is one aspect. Reliability can be another. Tenacity, as we saw in Edison’s case, is a third. And to this we might add an impulse to stretch oneself and test one’s limits. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, contends that ‘virtue is about the difficult and the good’ [Aquinas 1981: Q137, A1]. A creative disposition that includes an inclination to stretch oneself, then, is more likely to meet with their approval than one that limited itself to modes of creating that the agent has comfortably mastered. And in this matter I’m with Aristotle and Aquinas. The justification for trying something different that might be challenging—either in itself or for the agent trying it—need not be derived from a) relieving boredom or heightening interest, b) producing something better than one would have produced otherwise, or c) learning something new. Being disposed to challenge oneself in one’s creative endeavours is itself something we appreciate. But being so disposed will also increase the probability of creative flops. So the more the agent is disposed to challenge themselves, the less reliable we should expect their creating to be. Happily, our admiration for virtuous creativity does not depend on the success of the creative endeavour. One can fail to accomplish what one set out to do and still warrant admiration for making the attempt. One can pursue what one expected to be challenging and discover it isn’t. Neither reliable success in producing something good nor even reliable success in challenging oneself need be present in those whose creativity we admire.

4. The Modus Operandi Account

The MDM fails to offer an adequate account of virtuous creativity. By its lights, none of the exemplars we have discussed has the virtue of creativity. If a model rules out Edison, Murakami, Murdoch, O’Connor, Robinson, and Saunders then, whatever else it might be, it is not a model of virtuous creativity.

Part of what is problematic about the MDM, as I noted above, is that virtuous agents on its account are merely reactive. Alasdair MacIntyre [1999: 46] observes that higher-order animals engage in a range of activities—like exploring, imagining, and playing—that involve more than just responding to their environment. What I have been suggesting is that a similar point applies when the environment of which we speak includes our evaluative environment.

The alternative model of the relationship between virtue and value that I am proposing is the modus operandi account. In ‘What Virtue Adds’ I construe a person’s ‘mode of operating’ (M.O.) broadly, using the term to refer to their characteristic way of being. This includes what they see and how they see it, what they care about and how they care about it, what they think about and how they think about it, what they do and how they do it, their ongoing projects, their personality, and their individual style. Noticing that some agents’ M.O.s are similar to others in certain respects, we group them together conceptually and linguistically. Some of these groupings—ones that elicit our reflective admiration—we call virtues. For example, we notice that John, Jane, and Jemma are distinguished from their colleagues by the degree to which they challenge their students to acquire difficult new skills and realize their academic potential. We might call John, Jane, and Jemma ambitious teachers. Being ambitious for their students is part of their M.O.

The structure of the M.O. account is meant to do three things for us. First, it is meant to help us avoid the temptation to think of traits of character as analogous to chemical elements in a periodic table of the psyche. John’s, Jane’s, and Jemma’s ambition may have very different motivational structures. John may be fond of people and his inclination to challenge his students may stem from a deep desire to see people thrive. Jane may love her subject. Her inclination to challenge students may stem from a deep desire to see her subject thrive. Jemma may be moved by a conscientious concern to discharge her role responsibilities to a high standard. Similarly, the manner in which they challenge their students might differ. John may get the best out of his students by constantly encouraging them, Jane by inspiring them, and Jemma by fostering a good-natured rivalry among them. The upshot is that even when we are thinking about a quality being displayed in the same domain (e.g., teaching), we cannot immediately assume that the quality we have identified picks out a single, underlying psychological-behavioural structure. The quality of being ambitious for one’s students may be constituted by very different M.O.s.

The second thing the M.O. account is meant to do is draw attention to the value of the personal. Their commitment to facilitating student achievement to a high level does not exhaust the value of John’s, Jane’s, and Jemma’s ambition for their students. Nor is that value fully captured by pointing to other generic traits, such as love or conscientiousness. It also includes the light-hearted way John responds to silly mistakes, the way Jane waxes lyrical when speaking about her favourite subject, the way Jemma builds rapport with her pupils, John’s great belly-laughs, the twinkle in Jane’s eye, Jemma’s thoughtful pause before answering a question.

The third thing the M.O. account is designed to do is provide a way of seeing a value in agents that is not (fully) explained by how they respond to the value of other things. Here, too, thinking about virtuous creativity can help. Often the best way to describe virtuous creativity is as an expression of who the creative person is, an idea that runs through the western tradition from early Hebrew stories of creation through the romantic and expressivist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Christian doctrine of creation, for example, the goodness of God’s creative activity is wholly explained by something about the creator, rather than something about the cosmos created [Brunner 1952; Pannenberg 1994; Hart 2003; Davenport 2007]. God’s creating originates in and is an expression of who God is and what God is like. And since God is good, God’s creative self-expression and the product of that self-expression are likewise good.

While it will seldom be plausible to think all the goodness of what a human has created is simply a reflection of its creator’s goodness, two other thoughts are eminently plausible: a) some of what we appreciate about some creations is accounted for by features of their creators and b) sometimes what we appreciate about creative activity is how it expresses a particular individual’s way of being. To illustrate (a), consider a story that draws attention to an ugly moment in a group’s past—be that group a nation, a religious community, a football club, or a high school choir—such as Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Whether the author is a member of the group can make a difference to how we read the story. Is this work a confession, an apology, an expose, a dismissal, a condemnation, an expression of loathing, or a loving invitation to improve?²² To take another example, consider the difference it might make to our appreciation of a work if we learned that what we thought was an author’s final novel was actually their first. It could alter whether we consider the work innovative or derivative, hopeful or despairing, playful or earnest, naïve or wise.²³

Let us turn, then, to (b) the question of whether some of what we appreciate about some creative activity is the way it expresses a particular individual’s M.O. Part of what I appreciate about Marilynne Robinson’s work is the way she loves her characters. Even when they make flawed, self-destructive choices, she tells their story in a way that expresses her unshakeable affection for them. When reading Flannery O’Connor, one encounters a very different personality. She does not suffer fools lightly. Both authors are remarkable storytellers. Each is exceptionally creative. Each has a distinctive M.O. that they express in their writing, such that one would not mistake either for the other. And their M.O.s, I contend, are part of what readers appreciate about their writing.

Is there more that can be said to motivate this contention? I think so. Consider the tinge of sadness one often feels when one finishes reading a great book to which the author has not written a sequel. One will miss the book. Sometimes this is because one will miss the characters or the story world, in which case one’s next book choice might be fan fiction that continues the tale. But often what one misses is the author’s voice. On finishing The Dispossessed, it is not the character of Shevek or the planet of Anarres that I shall miss. It is Ursula Le Guin’s vision and voice. It is her sense of what matters, her way of developing characters, her way of exploring economic and political problems, her portrayal of brokenness and recovery. It is her willingness to experiment with unconventional forms of storytelling. It is her spare sentences that do so much with so little. So I follow her from a wall on Anarres that ‘an adult could look right over … and even a child could climb’ [Le Guin 2017: 619] to a cellar in Omelas, whose ‘floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is’ [Le Guin 2015: 226]. I farewell the grieving envoy of an intergalactic civilization as I close The Left Hand of Darkness and, opening Voices, am introduced to a child in an iron-age society whose first memory is of entering a secret library. Such cases highlight that sometimes part of what we appreciate about excellent creativity is the way it expresses a particular person’s M.O.

I am hoping by this point you will be persuaded that the expression of a person’s M.O. is part of what we appreciate in at least one trait of character that we admire, namely, excellent creativity. In a moment I will suggest the same is true of other virtues. But first I should address a reader I will not have persuaded. Garrett Cullity [2022] has proposed that we account for virtues not in terms of responsiveness to value but responsiveness ‘to the evidence of our reasons’. He might, then, try to explain the various value-conferring qualities I have been attributing to the agent’s M.O. in terms of such responsiveness.

One reason I am unpersuaded by this proposal is that several of the examples that speak against the MDM apply to his view, as well. As we saw above, it is often a mistake to describe early stages of the creative process as ‘responsive’. Early, generative stages are often similar to playfulness. What we appreciate about playfulness is not its responsiveness to evidence, or to reasons, or to evidence of reasons; it is its expressiveness of a certain quality of spirit. At various points in the creative process, the creator’s imagination flies ahead of their awareness of evidence. Cullity might insist all this shows is that the excellent creator responds to different reasons at different times. Early in the process, the creator responds to reasons like, ‘The only way to discover something new is to try something new’ or ‘The only way to find out whether doing X will lead somewhere good is to try it’. At later stages in the process, they respond to valuable features of the emerging creation itself, rather than to the potential value of exploration: ‘This way of phrasing it is more colourful’ or ‘That’s how I might say it but not how Ruth—the story’s narrator—would’. And no doubt creators respond to both kinds of reasons. What I am denying is the claim that this accounts for all they do.

At its inception the creative process may be a daydream. It may be a noisy thought the creator keeps absent-mindedly tonguing like a loose tooth. It may be a progression of notes that pop into their head. They begin playing with those notes, running with that thought, or indulging that daydream much like one might begin worrying at a loose thread without really noticing one is doing it, just because they’re a dreamer, a wonderer, a whistler, a hummer, a fidgeter. They dream et cetera not in response to the evidence of reasons, but simply because dreamers dream, whistlers whistle, hummers hum, wonderers wonder, and fidgeters fidget.²⁴

What distinguishes the daydreaming of the excellent creator from that of the simple time-waster? Some of it will eventually be channelled, shaped, and disciplined. At some point it will become discriminating as some developments of the story are judged better than others. It will be incorporated into or filled out by someone’s M.O. in ways we admire. Something similar will happen as the fidget grows into the dance, the whistle the score, the hum the song. This process will be shot through with responsiveness to value and other reason-giving factors. What I am denying is that the dreaming only adds value once it is channelled, shaped, and disciplined. Discriminating responsiveness to reasons will often make what started as an undisciplined dream into something better. But it need not be what gives birth to the dreaming nor need it be what makes that dreaming good. What we appreciate about the excellent creator includes their refined judgement and their disciplined investment of the time and effort required to turn a half-baked daydream into a finely crafted screenplay. But it also includes their pre-reflective musings and spontaneous imaginings. It is not just Saunders’ discriminating selection of historical texts that we admire as we read Lincoln in the Bardo or his sense for when a moment of levity might make the telling of a tragic tale both sweeter and more profound. It is also the imagination that dreamt up the astonishing idea of turning quotes from history textbooks and nineteenth-century American newspapers, a Buddhist image of the afterlife, and a Washington D.C. cemetery into a convention-defying novel. The imagination (of this particular creator) is also a crucial ingredient of (this particular creator’s) creative excellence. But it is not an ingredient that fits neatly under the heading of ‘responding well to the evidence of our reasons’.

A similar structure can also be seen in other virtues. Lovers are going to love. It’s part of their characteristic way of being. Likewise, the gentle, kindly, gracious, cheerful, and forthright will have a characteristically gentle, kindly, gracious, cheerful, or forthright way of being that they bring to the situations they encounter, which is not fully explained by either the value or the reasons to which the agent reacts in those situations. Here, too, a person’s M.O. can contribute something of value to what we appreciate about their virtue. The gruff kindness of Tom Barnard (a character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, The Wild Shore) cannot be confused with the gentle kindness of Miss Honey (from Roald Dahl’s Matilda).²⁵ Indeed, were Tom to try and emulate Miss Honey’s gentle manner, his kindness would lose one of the qualities we appreciate about it.

If what I am claiming is right, then we need to make space in the ground floor of our value theory for the value virtue adds. Its value is not merely derived from, wholly explained by, or adequately defined in terms of its responsiveness to other, more fundamental evaluative features of the world—as it is in Tom Hurka’s, Christine Swanton’s and Garrett Cullity’s very different accounts of virtue. That is what I mean when I claim that the goodness of virtue is fundamental. I am not claiming virtue is the only thing in the ground floor of our value theory. Other types of value can also be fundamental and virtue can be partly defined in relation to them.²⁶ But its goodness is not wholly derived from or explained by its responsiveness to something else that is more fundamental. That is the conclusion that the critiques of the MDM and of Hurka-style proportionality are meant to recommend. What the M.O. account adds to the story is a framework that doesn’t filter out or ignore the goodness that agents bring to the value landscape. The specific goodness of Tom Barnard’s way of being kind need not disappear or be replaced by some more general quality when we group it together under the same conceptual heading as Jennifer Honey’s way of being kind, any more than the distinctive excellence of Marilynne Robinson’s way of being creative disappears when we include it under the same conceptual heading as Flannery O’Connor’s or, to change media, Robin White’s (as painter) or Astor Piazzola’s (as composer). The distinct flavours of their kindness or creativity remain and contribute to the excellence we appreciate in them.

5. Conclusion

Popular models of virtue have overemphasized the importance of the virtuous agent’s knowledge and underemphasized her agency, limiting the scope of her actions to reactions. The M.O. account seeks to rectify these problems. Rather than trying to explain all the goodness of virtue in terms of its relation to something else—such as knowledge, reliability, or a proportional responsiveness to some other evaluative feature—I have argued for an account that puts virtue in the ground floor of our value theory. A virtue is an admirable trait of someone’s characteristic way of being. Not all features of a person’s M.O. need be admirable. Some, such as vices, will elicit our reflective disapproval. But those that are admirable possess a distinct kind of goodness, a goodness which is occluded if we try to define all virtues as responses (or dispositions to respond) to something else of value.

Notes

1 I am grateful to the contributors to this volume who engaged with part 1, ‘What Virtue Adds to Value’, with such care and depth. They have given me much to think about. Unfortunately, I lack the space to address all their questions. The challenge of responding to everyone is compounded by the fact that several contributors disagree with each other about fundamental assumptions. Rather than trying to a say a little about a lot, I have decided to focus on the two most frequently voiced questions. But in the course of answering them, a number of other concerns will also be addressed.

2 David Sobel [2016: 217], e.g., recommends an account of virtue that ‘would seek to explain why virtue is admirable on the basis of the value of the attitudes that are intrinsic to virtue, including attitudes to right action and to moral goods and bads, and … explain the value of these attitudes on the basis of the values of their objects. In this sense it would take the goods and bads and rights and wrongs that are extrinsic to character as more basic than the admirability of character’.

3 The term ‘value’ encompasses both positive and negative, good and bad qualities (conditions, objects, attributes, states of affairs). But when we speak of ‘promoting value’ we only have the positive end of the value spectrum in view. Thus, ‘promoting value’ and ‘promoting [the] good’ will be used interchangeably.

4 Swanton [2021: 221] parts company with Hurka by arguing that value is only one of the ‘fundamental bases of ethical response’. The others are bonds, status, and the good for an individual. However, when value is in play, virtues are defined in terms of a disposition to respond to it (and similarly for the other ‘evaluatively significant features’).

5 The priority of the epistemic over the ethical is reflected in Garrett Cullity’s reasons-responsive account of virtue, as well. According to Cullity [2022: 186], virtues are ‘states of responding well to the evidence of our reasons’ (compare Russell [2009: 371]).

6 For detailed defences of the claim that creativity is a virtue, see Zagzebski [1996], Gaut [2014], Kieran [2014], and Swanton [2022].

7 In recent years there has been a lively debate about whether the objects produced by the creative person must be valuable. The standard position has been the one expressed by Boden [2013: 432]: ‘creativity is the capacity to generate ideas or artifacts that are both new and positively valuable’. And one finds this thought echoed by numerous others (see, e.g., Novitz [1999]; Stokes [2016]; Audi [2018]; and Kieran [2018]). However, Hills and Bird [2018], Livingston [2018], and others have ‘reject[ed] the requirement that what is created has value’ [Hills and Bird 2018], arguing that one could be a creative torturer or a creative thief. The way some have tried to resolve this is by arguing that the creativity of the torturer still achieves goodness of a kind, even if it is not all-things-considered goodness [Gaut 2018]. Wherever one lands with respect to this debate, one might think the value condition plausible in the case of virtuous activity. Unlike the torturer, one might expect the object at which the virtuously creative aim to be not only good of a kind but also of a good kind.

8 The idea that a virtue reliably succeeds in achieving its aim is common even in theorists who would not endorse the MDM. Swanton [2003: 233], for example, makes success in hitting its target a defining feature of a virtue. If the target of the virtue of creativity is the production of novel items of value, then success in achieving this aim will be a defining feature of having the virtue. Linda Zagzebski [1996: 137] defines virtue as ‘a deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end’. However, she appears to drop the reliability condition for creativity and other ‘virtues of originality’ [ibid.: 181–2].

9 Larry Briskman [2009: 29–30] suggests that a process of figuring out what you are up to as you go, such O’Connor, Robinson, and Saunders describe, is a common part of creating.

10 ‘The conscious mind plays an important role in scrutinizing, rejecting, or approving the ragbag of ideas thrown up by the unconscious’ [Elster 2000: 213].

11 Berys Gaut [2018] argues that what he calls ‘the ignorance principle’ applies to all creative endeavours: ‘If someone is creative in producing some item, she cannot know in advance of being creative precisely both the end at which she is aiming and the means to achieve it’.

12 Friedrich Kekulé’s dream of a snake eating its tail, which provided the breakthrough in his search for the structure of the benzene molecule, is such a case.

13 For a discussion of different ways in which virtuous creativity might be motivated, see Kieran [2014].

14 And, as Christine Swanton [2003: 167] notes, expecting the result to be harmful, either to oneself or to others, would ordinarily rule an activity out as an exercise of virtuous creativity.

15 I am grateful to Fiona Macpherson for pressing me on this point.

16 In March 2023, DeAndre Jordan leads the NBA with a career field goal percentage of 0.6748. The worst shooting percentage by a player in the 2022–23 NBA season is 0.372.

17 Ty Cobb is the current record-holder with a career batting average of 0.366.

18 Christine Swanton [2022: 106] observes that ‘self-confidence, resilience, perseverance in the face of obstacles, and persistence in getting the job done’ are all ‘virtues essential to successful creativity’.

19 I am grateful to Nicolas Côté for bringing this point to my attention.

20 One reason it would be unsatisfying is because of how much luck it would write into the conditions for the possession of the trait. To some degree, every trait will be subject to luck. Whether one learns to face one’s fears or hide from them will depend, in part, on who one’s teachers are and how dangerous one’s environment is. Creativity will be subject to such luck. But the kind of luck envisioned above is not just affecting the psychological dispositions Edison develops in 1900 and 2000. Even developing the same dispositions to the same degree, Edison in 2000 will be less creative than he was in 1900. And this will be due not to qualities of Edison but solely to qualities of his environment.

21 If, as Peter Goldie [2007] contends, many virtues are best thought of as ‘clusters of interlocking traits’ then we should expect something similar to be true of virtues other than creativity, as well.

22 Group membership may also affect whether we trust the author. As Daniel Abrahams and Gary Kemp [2022] argue, this trust is more than just a matter of whether we think the author has access to the relevant facts.

23 I have highlighted why one might think some of an author’s qualities influence how we view some qualities of their works, but I doubt I have persuaded those who insist we evaluate works completely independently of their makers. And that is okay. Those who accept (a) will find (b) more plausible, but one could endorse the latter without endorsing the former. Since (b) is what is crucial for the argument I am developing here, one could find the overall case I am making persuasive even if one wishes to draw a sharp line between the qualities of an artwork and those of its artist.

24 Another reason I don’t follow Cullity comes into focus when we think about those qualities of a creator’s M.O. that I have suggested contribute to their creative excellence. In many cases it is implausible to think these are the reasons for which they act or to which they respond. They are not thinking, ‘It would be good to develop this character in my distinctive way’ or ‘Let me introduce my signature plot twist on page 321’. They are just developing the character or spinning the yarn. Indeed, were it pointed out to them that they pursue their artistic ends in a recognisable manner, some of them might take that as a reason to create differently than they characteristically do. The upshot is that at least some of what we appreciate about their creativity cannot be explained solely in terms of their responsiveness to (the evidence of) reasons.

25 If you don’t know Robinson’s story, substitute Tom Oakley from Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom, who displays a slightly different flavour of gruff kindness.

26 In Pettigrove [2018], I argue that this is the best way to interpret Robert Adams’ virtue theory.