Character

An ancient tradition in natural philosophy, and particularly medicine, sought to explain an individual's character (ēthos) in terms of the four humors, or bodily fluids—namely the melancholy, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) sweeps such speculation to one side by distinguishing character from temperament: Temperament is given one by nature or habituation. People may vary in their temperaments, and indeed be classified by their dominant humors; however, character, which one either has or lacks, is the property of the will by which one binds oneself to self-prescribed rational practical principles. Kant's most influential ethical work, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, identifies character with the good will, a will motivated solely by duty or principles of practical reason that it legislates to itself; Kant gives character the role of making use of such qualities as courage, resolution, and perseverance—which belong to temperament and might be bad if not in the control of a good will, the only thing good without qualification. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant likewise describes virtue as self-constraint, a power to withstand those of our inclinations that oppose morality—not merely some habit of morally good actions, virtue requires acting on "considered, firm and continually purified principles."

Neo-Aristotelian critics have charged that Kant's emphasis on acting on principle results in his neglecting the roles character and virtue play in both a good ethical life and morally praiseworthy action, and Kantian defenders often reply by pointing to Kant's doctrine of virtue. But the criticism can be raised anew with respect to Kant's conception of character and virtue itself, for these replace appropriate feeling and the sensitivity it affords with a commitment to acting on principle. One source of apparent disagreement between Kant and Aristotle is terminological: Aristotle defines moral character as a disposition of appetite and emotion, but he insists that it cannot exist without practical wisdom. So Aristotle does not consider an act or person guided solely by appetite and emotion, however well trained these may be, to be virtuous or praiseworthy. For Aristotle, practical wisdom is necessary for appetitive and emotional dispositions to be good (this is what distinguishes virtue proper from natural virtue), just as for Kant, the good will is necessary for courage, resolution, and perseverance to be good. Still, principle is not practical wisdom, and Kant has less faith in the ability of developed capacities of judgment and feeling to result in right action, and more faith in the ability of principles to do so, than does Aristotle. This may be one reason for Kant's restriction of character to one's commitment to the ends that practical reason prescribes itself; presumably another is that, to the extent that character is the appropriate object of praise and blame, it ought to be voluntary, and Kant takes only our resolutions, but not our natural and habituated inclinations, to be voluntary.