The Path of Vice

Abstract

Being open and sensitive to moral feelings starts us on the path of virtue, as we have seen, but not all emotions are virtuous.1 Vice similarly has characteristic emotions as well as characteristically vicious modes of responding to emotions in oneself and others. Nevertheless, it would be misleading and potentially dangerous to suggest that there is anything less than a complex division between virtuous and vicious emotions. There is no third variable, as it were, that gives us a shortcut for a distinction. All we can do is evaluate whether or not certain emotions are vicious or virtuous, as we discussed in the last chapter with emotions that harbor selfishness and lack of respect. One such mistaken third variable is cognitive awareness. One might think that those emotions of which we are most cognitively aware are necessarily the most virtuous and those emotions with latently cognitive or unconscious causes are vicious. That is not the case. In fact, Kant’s account of vices—as conscious antimoral obsessions—are at the heart of his psychology of evil.