Compulsive Behaviour and Sympathetic Concern

Abstract

Many moral philosophers and no doubt many people generally believe that why a person does what he does is morally more fundamental than what he does; that a man's essential moral worth can be properly characterized only in terms of his reasons, motives and intentions. The belief is advanced as a self-evident truth: what usually gets stressed is the idea that it would be clearly wrong to describe a man as morally good if, no matter how optimific his actions were, he acted solely or primarily from self-interest. This purist view is rarely supported by careful analysis of concrete cases and there is a consequent tendency to ignore or play down the important differences between a self-interested person who regularly does good and a self-interested person who regularly does harm.' If self-interested people were solely of the former kind, the importance of the purist's insistence would be considerably diminished, since nobody would suffer from the activities of the selfinterested, or at least nobody would have to put up with anything worse than the basking of the self-interested in self-congratulation. In this paper I shall deal not with the self-interest issue but with a cluster of issues closely related to it. Richard Norman has recently expressed the view that it is quite possible that some optimific actions which are apparently morally good in the sense that they are not done for self-interested reasons are in fact done for no reasons at all, that is, compulsively.2 Norman introduces the concept of compulsive behaviour in order to explain, inter alia, how it is that anyone could come to act purely from a sense of duty in Kant's sense. Compulsive behaviour of the kind relevant to this discussion is defined as the product of love for and/or fear of some external authority (parent, teacher, policeman, etc.) whose commands, orders, advice etc., have become internalized, funding a conscience. According to Freudians, the genesis of compulsive behaviour of this kind is to be generally described as follows: a person, A (usually a child or young person) is brought to act in a certain way, say, to tell the truth at all times, by a person or groups, B, not because of any unmediated desire to tell the truth at all times, but because of love for and/or fear of B. If, after some time, A comes to feel that he must tell the truth at all times when he is not even thinking of B, then, if A has not since found that he wants to tell the truth at all times for reasons quite independent of his relationship with B, his acting on that internalized imperative is a piece of compulsive behaviour.