Comment on Sylvie Delacroix Habitual Ethics?

In her recent volume Habitual Ethics?,¹ Sylvie Delacroix writes that habits are the ‘black holes of social sciences’. These phenomena are not studied enough, she argues, and (for the little they are) are frequently misunderstood. Indeed, looking specifically at moral philosophy, it is undeniable that, in most traditions, habits are not just neglected – they are looked at with contempt. At first sight, there is some reason for that: it is because of bad habits that humans get diseases, often behave poorly in the social and political arena, and are very slow in changing their minds (if they ever do) even when that would be morally required. In this light, most moral philosophers have claimed that habits contribute to generating unethical behaviour and that – to understand the requirements of morality and behave accordingly – we should distance ourselves from our habitual tendencies.

In the background of such a view, there is the traditional idea that moral behaviour requires rational judgment, i.e., the conscious adherence to some (good) reasons for acting. Kristine Korsgaard – one of the leading advocates of this view – put this point in Kantian terms:

[W]hen an impulse presents itself to us, as a kind of candidate for being a reason, we look to see whether it really is a reason, whether its claim to normativity is true. But this isn’t an exercise of intuition, or a discovery about what is out there in the world. The test for determining whether an impulse is a reason is whether we can will acting on that impulse as a law. So the test is a test of endorsement.

Once you are aware that you are being moved in a certain way, you have a certain reflective distance from the motive, and you are in a position to ask yourself “but should I be moved in that way? Wanting that end inclines me to do that act, but does it really give me a reason to do that act?” You are now in a position to raise a normative question about what you ought to do.²

In this light, the impulses to act (including those deriving from habits) can incline us toward some actions but it is only rationality that – by distancing itself from the impulses – can evaluate if these inclinations are correct and should be followed: in one word, only rationality can legitimize habits. Therefore, as Delacroix notes, according to this rationalistic approach, an ethic centred on habits does not make much sense since, in order to be ethical, one must distance oneself from them.

Thus, rationalist metaethics presupposes a moral-psychological account according to which intentional (that is, conscious) processes have priority over automatic (including habitual) ones. Delacroix is highly critical of this metaethical view. In her view, even if the capacity of stepping back from the habitual is significant and has some relevance for our moral life, its importance has been widely exaggerated: ‘One needs …  to consider how infrequent such instances of pure deliberative agency are – compared to the bulk of our non-deliberative, yet intelligent existence’.³ This is obviously a quantitative point, not a qualitative one; still, it is a crucial one, and Delacroix presents it as characterising the whole book:

This book celebrates the habit-dependent, pre-reflective intelligence without which we would be incapable of all sorts of things – including ethical agency.⁴

The idea is that the largest share of our moral life is not based on slow rational processes – as the largest share of the rational philosophical tradition, from Kantianism to utilitarianism, has maintained –, but by pre-reflective fast processes, which are typical of habitual behaviour. To support this view, Delacroix claims that automatic (non-cognitive) and intentional (cognitive) processes are entangled. This claim is one that is supported by some cutting-edge neuroscience.⁵ For example, paradigmatic cognitive processes such as memory and attention involve emotion whether considered in terms of structure, function, or connectivity; conversely, paradigmatically emotional processes such as drives and motivations involve cognition.⁶ Delacroix also stresses how smoothly and usefully we can pass from non-intentional to intentional behaviour: ‘When we meet with unexpected road conditions we switch from automatic to conscious agency, and are immediately conscious of what we are doing’.⁷ In general, it can be argued that between cognitive and non-cognitive processes there is no hierarchical relation, and that ethics should hence be reconceived accordingly.⁸

Another important claim defended by Delacroix is that the same nature of habits is very often misinterpreted. In fact, not a few experts still take habits as nothing more than behavioural tics that do not interact with the teleologically oriented features of our lives and that, consequently, do not play a relevant role in our moral life (if they do not hinder it altogether). This stance, Delacroix claims, is wrong in several respects, starting from the fact that habits are much more pervasive in our life than usually thought:

From unconscious tics to social practices that are not only conscious of their habitual roots, but continually transform themselves in the light of some goal, the habitual vastly outstrips the behaviourist confines vainly imposed by some philosophical traditions.⁹

The habitual stretches all the way from unconscious tics to purposive, intentionally acquired habits.¹⁰

A crucial point here (which Delacroix takes from Iris Murdoch) is that if, in order to be formed, habits require repetitions, it is not true that this may only happen unintentionally, such as when a baby becomes able to clap. In not a few cases, habits can be learned intentionally, such as when one forces oneself to learn the best route for reaching one’s new job until that becomes a habit and is done effortlessly. Habituation, notices Delacroix, is a fundamental part of our mental life: ‘Our habit-reliant, pre-reflective intelligence normally supports our deliberative selves’.¹¹

However, as a matter of fact, there is an ethical conception that – differently from utilitarian and deontological ethics – traditionally stresses the relevance of habits in our moral life, i.e., virtue ethics. Delacroix is certainly close to this view as shown in some memorable pages of her book, in which she quotes the disturbing remarks of two Germans professionals (a pharmacist and a doctor) who willingly contributed to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. They could not help being nauseated by what they see and by the actions they willingly perform:

At noon was present at a special action in the women’s camp …  the most horrible of all horrors … Thilo, military surgeon, was right when he said to me today that we are located here in the anus mundi.¹²

Delacroix notices that this discomfort was due to the habits that had characterised these two professionals’ previous lives, both in their professional and non-professional environments. They, however, put a strong intellectual effort into winning such an attitude of discomfort because they were completely imbued by the Nazi’s ideology. In fact, they rationally (and painfully) detached themselves from older habits in order to adhere to their new vision of life:

As I said, I am in a very gloomy mood. I must pull myself out of it. The sight of the dead (including women and children) is not very cheering. But we are fighting this war for the survival or non-survival of our people … [I]t is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people; the best way of overcoming it is to do it more often. Then it becomes a habit.¹³

The SS physician primarily designated for liquidation [by injection] those prisoners whose diagnosis was Allgemeine Körperschwäche [general bodily exhaustion]. I used to observe such prisoners and if one of them aroused my interest, owing to his advanced state of emaciation, I asked the orderly to reserve the given patient for me and let me know when he would be killed with an injection …  The patient was placed on the dissecting table while he was still alive. I then approached the table and put several questions to the man as to such details which pertained to my research.¹⁴

Contrary to what is claimed by most ethical views, in cases like these habits are the carriers of morally correct attitudes, while rationalisation brings to atrocious decisions. Consequently, in these situations, the attempts to escape from habits are extremely detrimental to the moral standing of a person.

This point will make the advocates of virtue ethics happy. However, Delacroix also has some objections (which are justified and constructive, in my view) to that ethical view. As she convincingly notices, when they insist on the fundamental role of habits in our moral life, virtue ethicists tend to ‘underestimate the extent to which habits do need to change, whether it is because they were bad habits in the first place or have become so through lack of adaptability’.¹⁵ Therefore, besides the empowering feature that virtue ethicists strongly emphasise, habits may also hinder our moral life. This happens when there is a rigidification of the patterns of behaviour that habits produce – and the interesting examples that Delacroix offers in this sense are those of the legal systems when they ‘get out of touch with the needs and aspirations they are supposed to answer to’¹⁶ and the ‘transformation-hindering effect’ of habits that social media may have.¹⁷

The main purpose of Habitual Ethics? is, on the one side, to investigate how and why there can be rigidification of habits (which is a very detrimental social phenomenon) and how to increase their plasticity (which instead is a precious source of moral development):

This book can be read as an endeavour to delineate the conditions under which habits remain plastic enough to be at the service of (rather than hampering) our ethical life.¹⁸

The plasticity of our habits (both individual and collective) is essential for morality because our needs and aspirations do change. It is true that – in some cases such as those of the Nazi professionals mentioned above – habits are able to keep us on the right side of morality, and so it would be morally wrong to try to change them. In many other situations, however, if one wants to be moral, one should try to modify one’s habits. Think, for example, of people who grew up in a racist environment but later become convinced that racism is an immoral attitude that should be expunged from our practices altogether. In this new light, they may try to painstakingly fight the residual influence of their racist habits. As Delacroix writes, ‘It is high time we paid attention to the conditions under which the possibility of habitual ethics becomes compromised’.¹⁹

In a convincing framework of a liberal, non-reductive view of naturalism, in which habits ‘gradually acquire normative significance’, Delacroix sets the basis of an interesting new agenda for moral philosophers, in which they should focus on how, in different situations, habits may either keep us on the right moral track against the misguided judgments of rationality or be the burden that makes it difficult for us to progress morally.²⁰ This is a very stimulating proposal. Regarding it, however, I have two questions.

First, in order to evaluate if a person is right in deciding to keep or change their habits, one has obviously to presuppose the correctness of some moral values (Nazi and racist values are obviously wrong and should not be embraced, for example). In this respect, an issue immediately comes to mind, i.e., what is the nature of these values? Moral philosophers have given different answers to these metaethical questions, shaping very different views. Judging from some hints in the book, I suspect that Delacroix may sympathise with the pragmatist view that values are instantiable only in concrete situations (that is, they do not exist as abstract Platonic entities, but only as evaluative properties exemplified in agents’ behaviour). Also, still in a pragmatist spirit, Hilary Putnam convincingly argued that evaluative properties globally supervene on physical properties, which means that for their existence the former properties depend on the latter without being identical to them.²¹ I’d be interested in hearing more from Sylvie on this issue.

The previous question has an ontological flavour. My second question, which is epistemological in spirit, concerns how we can determine whether a habit should be maintained notwithstanding the social pressure to abandon it (such as, say, the pressure that came from a Nazi-dominated environment) or should instead be abandoned even if the social context pushes one to keep it (such as in the case of racists attitudes). In these kinds of situations, the role of rationality seems crucial: isn’t rationality that can tell us what route we should follow if we want to be moral? That is, don’t we need a rational analysis of the situation in which we find ourselves to decide whether we should follow our old habits or try to change them?

In this light, one can wonder if the relevance of rational deliberations in our moral life is as Modest as this book claims when it celebrates the ‘the habit-dependent, pre-reflective intelligence’.²² It may be true that this kind of unconscious, habitual intelligence is much more frequent than the reflective one, but the latter seems involved in most of the morally crucial decisions of our lives – those in which we ‘switch from automatic to conscious agency’.²³ To put it differently, I think that Delacroix’s quantitative point is correct, but I wonder whether we should not also acknowledge that, from a qualitative point of view, reason plays a crucial role in our moral lives. Let’s, for example, consider the case of Jim, a person who was born in a very racist environment but later in his life came to realise that racism is a very immoral attitude; still, there are situations in which he has to fight against his old habits. One day, Jim encounters a wounded woman who belongs to an ethnic group different from his own.²⁴ His immediate reaction is one of repugnance and, on the basis of the habits he grew up with, Jim feels the urge to run away without helping the person. However, Jim is now a convinced antiracist, thus he makes a rational effort to win his immoral tendency and ends up with helping the wounded woman. In this scenario, the interplay between conscious reasoning and habitual tendency certainly favours the former (if one wants to behave morally, obviously).

Of course, Delacroix is right in claiming that the plasticity of habits is crucial for understanding these kinds of cases; however, they also show the relevance of the rational deliberations of the kind that Korsgaard mentions in the above-mentioned passage from her book, in which agents have to critically detach themselves from their automatic (habitual) tendencies to understand if they are going to behave correctly. These kinds of cases may not be very frequent, but certainly are extremely relevant for us since they make our moral growth possible.

Let me be clear about this point. I am not claiming that Delacroix is wrong in insisting that the role of habits in our existence, and especially in our moral life, has been unjustly neglected and that the interplay between conscious and unconscious mental acts is so strict that we may not even notice when we switch from the one to the other (since they are entangled). Sylvie is perfectly right, I believe, in arguing for these claims, and I think that, for this reason, her book may have a fecund effect on contemporary discussions on these topics. Rather, what I am saying is that, in rightly celebrating the role of habits for our morality, we should also stress the role that reason plays in the not-very frequent but morally crucial situations in which we must change our outworn habits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sylvie Delacroix, Habitual Ethics? (Bloomsbury 2022) 1.

2 Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press 1996) 108.

3 Delacroix (n 1) 5.

4 ibid 134.

5 Ricardo De Oliveira-Souza, Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman, ‘Emotion and Social Cognition: Lessons from Contemporary Human Neuroanatomy’ (2011) 3 Emotion Review 310.

6 Luiz Pessoa. ‘On the relationship between emotion and cognition’ (2008) 9 Nature Reviews Neuroscience 148–158.

7 Neil Levy and Tim Bayne, ‘Doing Without Deliberation: Automatism, Automaticity, and Moral Accountability’ (2004) 16 International Review of Psychiatry 214; cit. in Delacroix (n 1) 39.

8 Mario De Caro, Massimo Marraffa, and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, ‘The Priority of Phronesis: How to Rescue Virtue Theory from its Critics’ in Mario De Caro and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (eds), Practical Wisdom (Routledge 2022).

9 Delacroix (n 1) 8.

10 ibid 1.

11 ibid 1.

12 Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (Old Saybrook 1991), cit. in Delacroix (n 1), 65.

13 ibid 64.

14 ibid 65.

15 Delacroix (n 1) 8.

16 ibid 111.

17 ibid 113.

18 ibid 8.

19 ibid 6.

20 ibid 102.

21 Hilary Putnam, ‘Reply to Stephen White’ (2008) 4(2) European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 29.

22 Delacroix (n 1), 134.

23 Levy and Bayne (n 6) 39.

24 Mario De Caro and Massimo Marraffa, ‘Debunking the Pyramidal Mind: A Plea for Synergy between Reason and Emotion’ [2015] The Journal of Comparative Neurology 1695.