Moral Belief/Behavior Discordance and Prizing or Lessons from Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Jefferson

Abstract

The fictional character Huckleberry Finn and the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, provide rich examples of persons who sincerely hold and express a set of moral beliefs while behaving in ways that radically mismatch their moral beliefs. The moral beliefs that are of particular interest in this paper concern slavery. Finn’s moral beliefs do not condemn enslaving people against their will, treating them as property. (Bennett calls Finn’s a “bad morality,” but a morality nonetheless.) Slavery for Finn is, at minimum, morally permissible. Jefferson expressed beliefs regarding the immorality of slavery. Finn, however, abets a slave’s attempt to runaway from his owner and Jefferson not only was a slave owner, he based his economic wellbeing on the institution of slavery on his plantations. It might be thought that both Finn and Jefferson either did not really hold the moral beliefs they espoused (that they were hypocrites) or that when it came to acting, they were weak of will with respect to their moral beliefs. Rather than defend an account that they were weak of will or that, in Finn’s case, his moral beliefs were overridden by sympathy for a particular slave (Bennett’s position), the paper examines an account of moral belief/behavior discordance that purports to have roots in Hume’s dualistic conception of the architecture of mental states: the position taken by Tamar Gendler and Uriah Kriegel. For them, moral beliefs are not especially motivational and are typically trumped by what Gendler dubbed aliefs, mental states that produce associative chains that are affect-laden and inherently motivational. Gendler’s aliefs are “associative, automatic, and arational.” Although there are attractive aspects of the alief thesis, there are telling conceptual reasons not to adopt it to account for moral belief/behavior mismatching. The paper concludes by offering an alternative explanation of belief/behavior discordance. The suggestion is that what may be called prizings, a variety of what Frankfurt called cares, share characteristics cited by Hume in his account of passion and explain why people may both sincerely hold a set of moral beliefs while acting in ways that violate those beliefs. For example, Finn prizes his personal relationship with the runaway slave and Jefferson prizes the economic aspects of running his plantations on slave labor. What they prize connects more directly and with more force to their wills than the moral beliefs they sincerely hold regarding slavery. The moral belief/behavior discordant cases strongly suggest that volitional attitudes should be at the core of moral appraisals of character and epistemic states, such as beliefs (even moral ones), are not central to or dependably efficacious in forming a person’s volitional attitudes and so his or her behavior. The paper may be viewed as supporting an adage: “Believe whatever you will, it is what you will that counts morally.”