PRACTICAL NECESSITY AND MORAL HEROISM
DRAFT: New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility 2015
Kyle Fruh | Beloit College
Discussions of closely associated notions of practical necessity, volitional
necessity, and moral incapacity have profited from a focus on cases of agential crisis – a
mother deciding whether to give up her child for adoption, a reluctant cannibal with no
other source of nutrition, a revolutionary on the brink of personally executing a traitor to
the cause.1 This emphasis has produced an understanding of how an agent might find
herself bound not by chains nor by desires and aversions that assault her will, but bound
all the same – by features of her own identity that constrain and determine her
deliberations. Agents in these cases find that, despite in some sense wanting to do one
thing and despite being equipped with apparent reasons to consider doing that thing, they
are nonetheless not capable of doing it. The crises these agents face are the occasion of
discovering that something about themselves renders those desires and reasons spurious,
windows onto a path they cannot walk. I turn to agents in crises, rather than instances of
agential crisis, in order to connect this way of being bound to the phenomenon of moral
heroism. In these cases there is typically no deep conflict in the heroic agent, no pressing
set of desires and reasons that are simply rendered irrelevant. Instead, the heroic agent is
moved to act in a way that is at odds with reasons and desires we might generally expect
her to have, and that the rest of us usually do have: to remain safe, far from danger, free
from having to endure extreme risk and hardship. The connection is fruitful in both
directions: the context of moral heroism allows a fuller development of some features of
1
See Watson (2004), Frankfurt (1988), and Taylor (1995), respectively. See also
Frankfurt (1999), Williams (1981) and Williams (1995).
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the concept of practical necessity,2 and importing practical necessity into examinations of
moral heroism is a promising means of accounting for heroic behavior while preserving
its intuitively plausible status as supererogatory.
The warrant for thinking this way comes under two headings, which I pursue in
turn. First, practical necessity is a powerful tool for understanding key puzzling features
of moral heroism. It gives the best account of the frequent report of heroes that their
actions were somehow less than optional while nonetheless sustaining a plausible
grounds for responsibility attributions and preserving the intuitively plausible status of
heroic actions as supererogatory. Second, a closer look at moral heroism and moral
psychology of exemplars offers us a clearer view of the phenomenon of practical
necessity, plausibly identifying mechanisms in character that are at its root and that
explain the sense in which it is genuine necessity, in addition to clarifying the way in
which it could be true, in the words of Bernard Williams (1981, 1995), that practical
necessities are often both a decision and a discovery. I close by considering the prospects
of a moral duty to cultivate a character that would make some morally heroic actions
practically necessary.
1.0 MORAL HEROISM AND NON-OPTIONALITY
The first invitation to think that connecting practical necessity to discussions of
moral heroism will be fruitful is that at a frequency that should strike us as antecedently
surprising, there is a tendency among moral heroes to describe their heroic actions as less
than optional. This phenomenon is widely remarked upon and not infrequently
2
Where the territory in question might be covered equally well by volitional necessity,
moral incapacity or practical necessity, I use the latter term. Williams (1995, p. 48) seems
to have thought of practical necessity and moral incapacity as two sides of the same coin.
2
incorporated into psychological theory as an explanandum.3 Consider two examples of
what I’ll call the Non-Optionality Claim, the first from an anonymous living organ donor,
and the second from a Holocaust rescuer:
When the psychiatrist asked me why I was donating, I responded, “had I seen a man fall
on the subway tracks, I would like to think that I would do everything in my power to try
and save him…this man has fallen, and while the subway car is moving slowly, sitting
back and watching him deteriorate until death full knowing that I could do something
about it, is just not an option.”4
“‘One thing is important…I never made a moral decision to rescue Jews…I felt I had to
do it.’”5
The kind of necessity expressed here exhibits the twin features Gary Watson (2004)
ascribes to practical necessity: “it is at once a genuine incapacity [to do otherwise] and
yet in no way compromises one’s agency or self-control” (p. 100). Moral heroes6 are not
acting under threat or coercion, and neither are they subject to a corrosive influence on
their wills. Yet they consistently evince the feeling of having confronted a necessitating
lack of options in the circumstances of their heroic act. Taking up this phenomenon as an
instance of practical necessity accomplishes a number of worthwhile ends with respect to
the phenomenon of moral heroism. I elaborate on several of them after some introductory
remarks on the nature of practical necessity. A more complete account of practical
necessity is developed in the second half of this paper.
3
See, inter alia, Lapsley and Narvaez (2014), Lapsley and Hill (2009) and Jayawickreme
and Di Stefano (2012).
4
International Association of Living Donors, Inc. (2013). Emphasis mine.
5
Monroe (1996), p. 210. Emphasis mine.
6 I note that in describing an agent as a ‘moral hero’ I take it as sufficient that the agent
has done some morally heroic act, such as donating a kidney or rescuing those threatened
in the Holocaust. In particular, I eschew any more global moral assessment of the agent
or her moral career, as such. Much of the argument that follows rests on stable
personality attributes, however, and as such, we might expect certain patterns of behavior
to emerge (see Monroe (1996)). That expectation must, of course, be tempered by the
observation that situational forces also play a role in producing the behavior, and
situations in which heroic affordances are salient are not totally common (cf.
Jayawickreme and Di Stefano (2012)).
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1.1 Practical Necessity, Roughly
Williams’s understanding of practical necessity reflected what he took to be a
common experience of simply having only one real option, despite the apparent existence
of alternatives.7 The emergence of a single option in these cases, whether because a
single option proves necessary or because all but one option prove impossible,8 is the
result not of a merely decisive balance of reasons or a settled preference; instead, features
of the agent’s character9 structure deliberation such that necessity sometimes attaches to
some options:
We are subject to the model that what one can do sets the limits to deliberation,
and that character is revealed by what one chooses within those limits, among the
things that one can do. But character…is equally revealed in the location of those
limits, and in the very fact that one can determine, sometimes through
deliberation itself, that one cannot do certain things, and must do others.
Incapacities can not only set limits to character and provide conditions of it, but
can also partly constitute its substance (Williams, 1980, p. 130).
Being the person one is means that some apparently possible actions will sometimes be
unthinkable,10 just as failing to act may also be made impossible by one’s character. Here
is Williams again: “Conclusions of practical necessity seriously arrived at in serious
matters are indeed the paradigm of what one takes responsibility for. That is connected
with the fact that they constitute, to a greater or lesser degree, discoveries about oneself”
(1981, p. 130). What one discovers is that a particular consequence of being the agent
you are is that there are acts that you simply may not fail to do and which you
nonetheless identify with and take responsibility for.
See Gay (1989, p. 551). I am concerned with uncommon instances of practical necessity
(heroic ones), but nothing about that focus is incompatible with the commonality of
practical necessity as a part of agential experience.
8 See Williams (1981, p. 127) and Williams (1995).
9 I mean to construe this quite broadly; more detail and specificity are subsequently
developed in the text.
10 Robert Gay uses the term ‘unreal’ to describe apparent alternatives to practically
necessary actions (1989, p. 555). Harry Frankfurt, in connection with the similar notion of
volitional necessity, also describes apparent alternatives as ‘unthinkable’ (1999, p. 111).
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1.2 Agency, Communion, and Responsibility
The first advantage of importing this notion of practical necessity into our
understanding of moral heroism and the Non-Optionality Claim in particular is that it
makes sense of the claim that the act is attended by a real sense of necessity without
diminishing the agency of moral heroes. Adverting to practical necessity thus shields us
from the challenging task of explaining away the Non-Optionality Claim11 while still
making grounds for the attribution of responsibility available so that we can take moral
heroes at their word when they say that they had to do what they did, but nonetheless
praise them for doing it.
The issuances of practical necessity are to be seen not as constraints imposed on
an agent, but as expressions of the core characteristics of the agent. Since the necessity
comes about as an expression of one’s agential identity, there is no special reason why
attributions of responsibility, normally in tension with necessitating influences, should be
withheld in these cases.12
In experiments that included lengthy narrative interviews and subsequent coding
for personality variables, moral exemplars evidenced dramatically elevated frequency of
themes of both agency and communion as compared with ordinary comparison groups.13
Agentic aspects of personality are communicated in “self-control and self-awareness,
independence, assumption of responsibility, relentless pursuit of goals, and a sense of
empowerment” (Walker and Frimer (2009), p. 246). Combined with the claim that one
“had no choice”, the elevated emphasis on agency in moral heroes would be bizarre were
it not for an account of practical necessity. It is only if the necessity in question is not an
See Fruh (2014).
Of course, there might be standing general reasons – if, for example, genetic
determinism were true, perhaps we’d be right to doubt whether being responsible for
anything were possible. I return to some considerations bearing on responsibility and
practical necessity below.
13 See Walker and Frimer (2009), and Frimer et al. (2011).
11
12
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affront to agency that this combination makes sense, and this is precisely what practical
necessity captures. The fusion of themes of agency and communion (“sustained
orientation to others, concern for their welfare and well-being, interpersonal sensitivity
and connection, openness, and positive emotionality” (ibid.)) in the narratives of moral
exemplars is also unusual, but also finds explanation in a practical necessity account of
morally heroic action. Customarily agency and communion manifest as opposed
programs of interest advancement: those of oneself and those of others. Moral exemplars
simultaneously emphasize both themes far more than their ordinary counterparts, and
they also emphasize the integration of these themes at a similarly elevated clip.14 When
we understand morally heroic action as a form of practical necessity, the claim (to be
more fully elaborated below) is that the bindingness has its roots in some features of the
agent’s character or personality. Moral heroes are constituted in such a way so as to find
themselves bound to act in certain ways in certain situations that produce benefits for
certain others in stark need. This suggests that we should find that it is both common and
possible for heroic agents to have the needs of some others integrated into their
experience of agency such that part of their enduring personality is a strong attachment to
pro-social ends. This is just what the experiments mentioned indicate.
1.3 Practical Necessity and Supererogation
The second virtue of practical necessity in the context of moral heroism is that it
allows us to explain the putative sense of non-optionality of many heroic acts while
simultaneously preserving their moral status as supererogatory by creating a category of
morally good actions that agents might be bound to perform without being bound by
moral duty to perform them. Practical necessity does not (necessarily, or even generally)
14
See Walker and Frimer (2011), pp. 158-159.
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merely reflect theoretical moral requirements. Instead, practical necessity emerges from
the confluence of situational exigencies and agential characteristics. It is thus a deeply
personal fact, such that a hero’s utterance of the Non-Optionality Claim doesn’t
necessarily have implications for the rest of us. This allows us to hold that moral theory
may face limits on the sacrifices it requires while also saying it is true that heroes are in
some sense required to act as they do, including even in making their heroic sacrifices.
Practical necessity doesn’t create generalizable grounds for problematic demands.
This non-generalizable, highly personal kind of necessity tallies well with both
the testimony of moral heroes and some data psychologists have produced. Some form of
generalizability is arguably an essential feature of moral duty,15 yet the requirement claim
is often issued together with a policy of non-reproach toward the bystanders who did not
do as the hero did.16 An emphasis on the personal nature of the entanglement shows up in
a number of ways: as a focus on oneself rather than the recipient of heroic aid, as a
special kind of private achievement, or as a way of honoring especially dear aspects of
personal history.17 Schlenker at al. (2009) have found that agents who score high on
measures of integrity are more attuned to commitments to principle in those they identify
as admirable and in fictional characters, describe greater purpose and meaning in their
own lives, and are more likely to evince pro-social attitudes. The model of integrity
features agents who demonstrate a “strong linkage between self and principles [that] have
been both internalized and appropriated as part of one’s identity” (p. 319). Moral
exemplars tend to view “ethical conduct as expressing identity rather than following
external rules” (ibid.). Practical necessity’s provenance, located as it is in the interaction
Special duties are of course an exception here, but understanding the Non-Optionality
Claim as a kind of special duty is implausible, not least because many actual moral heroes
are not plausibly bearers of such duties. See Fruh (2014).
16 See (Monroe, 1996, p. 86) for example.
17 See (Monroe, 1996) at p. 238, p. 150 and p. 90, respectively.
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between an agent’s enduring personality and the situation in which she contemplates
acting, carries no problematically demanding prescription for the rest of us. It leaves open
the possibility of deriving the supererogatory status of heroic actions18 while nonetheless
accounting for the important binding sense of the Non-Optionality Claim.
1.4 Perseverance and Personality
Finally, the question of how heroes persevere through trying circumstances in
which we can scarcely imagine persevering is well answered when we say they had no
choice.19 How is it that people who perform morally heroic actions pull it off in the face
of dramatic risk and difficulty? How is it that they manage to jump in while the rest of us
shrink away? One view might be that moral heroes are a species of genius, able to see the
truth of moral requirements where the rest of us are benighted.20 Another view might be
that they are slightly crazy or daft, and, as if on instinct, just bang their heads against
moral walls wherever they find them.21 The more plausible view is that moral heroes are
persons whose suite of traits positions them to respond in characteristic ways to
challenging situations. The act/judgment gap – an explanatory problem for views of
moral behavior that exclusively privilege rational moral cognition – is an especially
yawning chasm in cases of prolonged risk and engagement that moral heroes often
confront. The best candidate to fill the gap is some combination of personality, character,
and identity. Practical necessity is an especially strong way of bringing features of the
agent into the gap to explain both how heroes initiate and persevere in actions that few of
See Archer (2015) for a different challenge to the compatibility of practical necessity
and supererogation, however.
19
Cf. Furrow, 1998, p. 213.
20 The view that enshrines a narrowly rationalistic view of moral cognition as the only
aspect of agents relevant to moral functioning is a favorite target among psychologists
working on moral personality. See Walker and Frimer (2009), pp. 250-251, Walker
(1999), and Lapsley and Hill (2009), p. 185.
21 See MacFarquhar (2015) for some plausible cases of this kind.
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us would contemplate. Even in cases where citing an excuse would hardly be seen as a
self-serving rationalization (because the risks involved in acting are serious and elevated,
for example), moral heroes don't avail themselves of the excuse.22 This has to do with
their distinctive fusing of agency and communion, their internalization of moral
commitments, and their integrity. This is to say that there are multiple ways, some of
which will be discussed below, in which the moral personality of moral heroes is
developed to dispose them to respond in ways we who are not heroes generally don’t.
In sum, practical necessity makes excellent sense of a host of psychological data
on moral exemplars and fills out our conception of moral heroism more fully. It
establishes a sense of necessity compatible with the agency of heroes such that we can
make sense of the Non-Optionality Claim even while we continue to attribute
responsibility to heroes. It preserves the supererogatory status of heroic acts, while also
providing a plausible view of what must bridge the gap between the judgment most of us
have about morally heroic action (that it’s good) and our own failures to act in light of
that judgment. What most of us don’t have is a heroic personality. In the remainder of the
paper, I develop a more complete account of practical necessity in light of findings in
studies of moral personality.
2.0 PRACTICAL NECESSITY AND MORAL PERSONALITY
Given a rough sketch of the idea of practical necessity, its appeal in the context of
moral heroism should be clear. But there are a number of questions lingering around the
very idea of practical necessity. Bernard Williams (1981), who launched discussion of the
idea, wrote about it sparingly and in characteristically suggestive rather than systematic
fashion. Harry Frankfurt’s (1988, 1999) closely related idea of volitional necessity is
22
See Schlenker et al. (2009), p. 334.
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rather more worked out, but it’s also more narrowly tied to a technical notion of love as a
way of caring about someone or something. Williams’s notion of practical necessity is
tied less narrowly to love as a species of caring about something than Frankfurt’s
volitional necessity, and although an unusual capacity for empathy in moral heroes might
turn out to be a very nice example of caring about others, it seems there are other relevant
features of the characters of moral heroes that might also be importantly tied to the way
they come to be bound to act. This is one reason I have chosen to emphasize practical
necessity over volitional necessity.23 We are left with gaps in our understanding of
practical necessity. I argue that recent work on the psychology of moral heroes can help
us fill them in. The first task is to say more about what it means that practical necessity is
rooted in character. The second task is to clarify the relation between practical necessity
and deliberation. The final task is to better establish the sense of necessity that is being
defended.
2.1 Persons and Situations, Character and Necessity
Recent work in moral psychology has emphasized personological analysis of
moral exemplars.24 The emerging emphasis on personality and character comes in
response to the perceived failings of both a historically influential and minimal view of
the moral reasoner, on the one hand, and of situationism, on the other. As I have in some
ways already suggested, personological studies of moral heroes create a natural home for
practical necessity in an account of moral heroism – indeed, insofar as practical necessity
Cf. Watson (2004).
See, inter alia, Walker et al. (2010), Walker & Frimer (2007, 2009), Frimer et al.
(2011), Hill & Roberts (2010), Jayawickreme and Di Stefano (2012), Lapsley and Hill
(2009), Lapsley and Narvaez (2014), Rees and Webber (2014), Zimbardo (2007),
Zimbardo and Franco (2006-2007), Franco et al. (2011), Becker and Eagly (2004), and
Schlenker et al. (2009). Much of this work has its roots in prior work mostly focused on
rescuers in the Holocaust such as Oliner and Oliner (1992), Monroe (1996), and Colby
and Damon (1994).
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23
24
offers something of explanatory value with respect to moral heroism, as I affirm it does,
such studies are precisely where we should hope to find an answer to questions like, why
do some people jump in to help others who are in danger, and why do others only stand
by? If we locate the answers to these questions in features of an agent’s character, as
practical necessity and the relevant work in psychology direct us to, this would support
the contention above that the necessity in question isn’t so much a threat to the agency of
moral heroes as an expression of it, such that praising them is not fundamentally
misguided.
In his account of practical necessity, Williams (1981) consistently envisions the
source as being in an agent’s character: “the incapacities in question are, in a broad sense,
incapacities of character” (p. 130). I have nonetheless helped myself to talk about both
character and personality. There are two challenges here, and meeting them will improve
our understanding of the relation between practical necessity and character. First, it may
seem that there is something illicit about willfully conflating character and personality.
As far as I can tell, this turns out not to be the case, however. Personality is a broaderranging term, related to all manner of stable functioning and dispositions. Character is
generally restricted to more overtly moral contexts. Studies of moral personality, then,
are largely studies of character. There remains a difference inasmuch as character traits
are sometimes exclusively thought of as being in themselves highly morally valenced:
they’re virtues and vices, for example. Moral personality traits aren’t always so neatly
categorizable: for instance, consider the trait of openness to experience, one of the traits
in the highly influential Big Five view.25 It is positive in a host of ways, but not all of
those ways are moral in any important sense. It is also worth noting that moral
personality is generally taken to not consist solely of traits, but instead to include layers
McAdams (2009), p. 13. The other four are extraversion, neuroticism,
conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
25
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of traits, characteristic adaptations, and life narrative/identity formation.26 These layers
reflect a developmental trajectory of increasing sophistication and awareness of one’s
own personality, such that traits emerge from a pre-personality temperament, are then
wielded to form personal goals and projects, all of which is eventually incorporated into a
narrative self-understanding or moral identity.27 In averting to moral personality in
searching for the roots of practical identity, it seems I am not out of line with Williams’s
broad understanding of character. In any event, it is in this more encompassing notion of
an agent’s traits, adaptations and projects, and moral identity that we find promising
materials out of which to fashion a necessitating influence on the will that nonetheless
does not undermine it.
The second challenge facing any account’s reliance on character comes in the fact
that influential thinkers have challenged the importance and even the existence of
character.28 The pressure on personality psychology generated by situationist challenges
has had a salutary effect, forcing refinement in the going views of the basic units of
personality.29 As researchers in different sub-fields of moral psychology have improved
their views, positions formerly thought to be competing to capture personality have
begun to more closely resemble one another, such that efforts at consensus and
integration are now the norm.30 All sides acknowledge that situational factors influence
behavior. The atomistic picture of the agent as securely defined by immutably and totally
predictive traits that functioned to determine behavior independently of the agent’s
environment is broken beyond repair. But no less broken is the hardline situationist view
of agents as the feckless, mechanistic plaything of situational forces. The space between
Ibid.
See McAdams (2009), Lapsley and Hill (2009), and Cervone and Tripathi (2009).
28 See most notably Doris (2002) and Harman (2000).
29 See Flanagan (2009), for example.
30 See Lapsley and Hill (2009), Lapsley and Narvaez (2014), and Caspi et al. (2005).
26
27
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these polar views is where current work is unfolding, and what we find there are ways of
describing stable patterns of interactions between personalities and their environments.31
For our purposes, the upshot here is that in looking to anchor practical necessity
in features of agents, there is a rich array of psychological insight to draw on. Consider
Walker and Frimer’s (2007, 2009) experiment, in which they assembled 50 agents that
had been given a national award in Canada for either heroic bravery (as in dangerous
rescues) or heroic caring (as in prolonged and admirable commitment to some cause or
service). Each moral hero was matched with a demographic (age, race, sex, education,
economic attainment) counterpart that had not received any such recognition. All 100
participants then completed a series of questionnaires and interviews designed to reveal a
personality profile. Walker and Frimer made comparisons between the different hero
groups (the brave and the caring) and between all the moral heroes as a single group and
the ordinary counterparts. Both comparisons yielded pronounced differences. In lengthy
narrative interviews later coded for personality categories, moral heroes exhibited starkly
elevated emphasis on both Agency and Communion (discussed earlier), Redemption
(seeing bad events as being redeemed by later good events, and not seeing good events as
corrupted or spoiled by later bad events), and early life advantages such as the presence
of Helpers (role models, caring benefactors) and Attachments (secure and nurturing
relationships).32 This result shows that personality differences between moral heroes and
others are empirically ascertainable.33 There is promise, therefore, that in anchoring
Lapsley and Narvaez (2014), pp. 144-145, Jayawickreme and Di Stefano (2012), p. 166.
Walker and Frimer (2009), p. 239.
33 There are limits to the power of the study – it was retrospective, for example. Walker
and Frimer (2009) note the logistical hurdles involved in arming a prospective
longitudinal study along similar lines (p. 253). One difficulty there is related to earlier
points about treating personality as interactive with situations – it would be very difficult
to separate personality deficits from lack of environmental affordances. Also worth noting
is that the differences are largely revealed by coded narrative interviews, and what is
obtained by that means is an agent’s own understanding of her life, not necessarily a
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31
32
practical necessity in features of an agent’s character, we can offer an explanation for
why moral heroes experience their heroic actions as practically necessary while the rest
of us are not similarly moved to act heroically: They inhabit a kind of character that we
do not.
We can, somewhat tentatively, fill out some of the differences. Practical necessity
attaching to morally heroic actions might be housed in a personality profile roughly
matching what McAdams (2009) has called the redemptive self:
Midlife American adults who score especially high on self-report measures of
generativity – suggesting a strong commitment to promoting the well-being of
future generations and improving the world in which they live – tend to see their
own lives as narratives of redemption…in which the protagonist is delivered
from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In addition, highly generative
American adults are more likely than their less generative peers to construct life
stories in which the protagonist enjoys a special advantage or blessing early in
life; expresses sensitivity to the suffering of others or societal injustice as a child;
establishes a clear and strong moral value system in adolescence that remains a
source of unwavering conviction through the adult years…and looks to achieve
goals to benefit society in the future (p. 21).
Another way of talking about a personality profile is as a kind of moral identity. What
studies like Walker and Frimer’s suggest is that moral heroes inhabit a particular kind of
moral identity that houses practical necessity the rest of us do not experience in situations
calling for heroic action. The function of moral identity is understood in part to generate
its own motivations: “[I]dentity figures centrally in motivated action. It does so through a
principle of self-consistency: ‘the motivational basis for moral action lies in the internal
demand for psychological self-consistency.’ The person with a strong moral identity feels
a sense of responsibility, or a compulsion, to act. Action reflects not on a rationalistic
calculation of costs and benefits, but on ‘an extension of the essential self into the domain
factually accurate accounting of it. For purposes of revealing personality, the former is
adequate if not superior. However, this leaves open whether the self-understanding or the
facts would be the true seat of predictive power.
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of the possible,’ an extension that must occur if the person is ‘to remain true to himself or
herself.’”34
A practical necessity account of the Non-Optionality Claim in instances of moral
heroism is further strengthened by connecting the foregoing to another theoretical
perspective on moral personality, the social-cognitive view.35 Social-cognitive units are
conceptualized as conditional situation-behavior pairings: if I am confronted by a
situation that strains my competency, then I respond by being aggressive.36 This model
locates personality in patterns of behavior over time, with repeated, stable patterns or
schemas becoming core features of personality. Some schemas are so frequently
deployed that they become “chronically accessible” in the sense that an agent’s behavior,
including her perception and interpretation of situations, is pervasively affected by these
schemas. The traits identified by Walker and Frimer (2007, 2009) as being distinctively
emphasized by moral exemplars, we might suggest, can be understood as chronically
accessible schemas that color how those agents interpret events and make decisions about
how to act. The logical end state of chronic accessibility is automaticity.37 Here the idea is
that some schemas are such a part of an agent’s personality that they are automatic both
in the sense that they function in a way that is largely automated, out of the purview of
the contemporaneous will or conscious reasoning, and in the sense of being
automatically, reliably or consistently triggered and deployed. Lapsley and Narvaez
(2014) claim the fact that this notion of automaticity can give a good account of the NonOptionality Claim is a virtue of the social-cognitive view of personality (p. 143). I want
to suggest that practical necessity is the logical end state of automaticity. Core elements
Cervone and Tripathi (2009), p. 40, quoting from Blasi (1984).
See Lapsley and Narvaez (2014).
36 Lapsley and Hill (2009), p. 190. Some researchers understand traits in precisely the
same way, which supports the idea that there is no real opposition between dispositional
trait views of personality and social-cognitive views.
37 Lapsley and Narvaez (2014), Rees and Webber (2014), Lapsley and Hill (2009), p. 202.
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34
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of the agent’s moral personality dispose her to automatically function in certain ways,
and as these are incorporated into her moral identity, she experiences their force as
necessity, and indeed she is bound by the identity she has come to inhabit. It is not an
alien imposition, however, an assault on her free will. It is instead the constitution of her
identity that generates the necessity, and as such in being subject to practical necessity
she is nonetheless acting in her full agential powers. If there is anything we should wish
to add in order to enhance our ability to hold her responsible for her practically necessary
acts, I argue it is supplied in the next section.
2.2 Decision and Discovery: Practical Necessity, Deliberation, and Responsibility
Williams (1995) thought a distinguishing mark of practical necessity is that it is a
conclusion reached in deliberation. This relation with deliberation also separates practical
necessity or moral incapacity from physical and psychological incapacity. The fact that it
arises as the conclusion of deliberation makes practical necessity a decision and earns the
agent’s endorsement. This is crucial to the idea of practical necessity’s compatibility with
attributions of responsibility: Inasmuch as practical necessity arises as the endorsed
conclusion of deliberation, it is the sort of thing for which one may be held responsible.
Since many acts of moral heroism are spontaneous, and since furthermore part of the
view I have offered includes mechanisms like automaticity that precisely preclude
deliberation, this contention requires revisiting.
In addition to contending that practical necessity represents a decision, Williams
(1981) also maintains that if often constitutes a discovery (p. 130). The latter half of this
puzzling combination seems relatively straightforward on the account of practical
necessity I have elaborated: It may not have been antecedently clear to an agent just how
her character would bind her to act in a novel situation, and so she might discover
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something about herself in that situation.38 The difficulty is in retrieving a sense in which
practical necessity could plausibly be said to represent a decision, especially when it is
understood to have its roots in something as abstract and out of the reach of conscious
thought as one’s personality. I argue that if Williams is understood as offering a
deliberative model of practical necessity rather than requiring that actual deliberation be
productive of the practically necessary conclusion, that distinguishing relation to
deliberation can be sustained. So we would say of a hero moved spontaneously to act by
practical necessity that if, counterfactually, she had deliberated about what to do, she
would have found that the option to rescue was not one she could choose against, and this
result would receive her endorsement. In this sense, it bears the mark of agency. She does
not align her will against it, nor would she have. This manifests itself in interviews with
moral heroes who, years after their heroic acts, evince and endorse the Non-Optionality
Claim as associated with their heroic act.39 Contrast this with a case of psychological
incapacity: there the immediate effect in deliberation, actual or counterfactually modeled,
is the same, but the agent finds the volitional resources to disown it. She might try to do
what for her is psychologically impossible – she would not try to do what for her is
morally impossible.40 Practical necessity is a decision in that it is endorsed by the agent,
who embraces this aspect of her moral personality. If she changes her stance, practical
necessity is converted into lingering psychological necessity, and what was formerly
authorized to decisively determine her will is relegated to the status of an intrusion on her
agential power.
I suspect that agential endorsement is often too strong a characterization of what
the counterfactual model can provide, however. Really what we have is more like non38
Cf. Altshuler (2013), pp. 42-43.
This is roughly as common as the Non-Optionality Claim itself: the Claim is usually offered
at some point after the fact, typically with endorsement rather than, say, regret.
40 Williams (1995), p. 49.
17
39
repudiation. While non-repudiation may seem a thinner ground than endorsement for
attributions of responsibility, I want to suggest that just as we can hold you responsible
for the practical necessities you endorse, we can also hold you responsible for the
practical necessities you don’t repudiate. Being in possession of a moral identity isn’t just
an accident, a purely passive process to which willful exercises of agency are wholly
irrelevant. As Williams (1981) rightly says, “if one acknowledges responsibility for
anything, one must acknowledge responsibility for decisions and actions which are
expressions of character – to be an expression of character is perhaps the most substantial
way in which an action can be one’s own” (p. 130). Your moral identity speaks for what
you are in a powerful way such that, in the absence of active repudiation and distancing,
your character’s necessitating influence on the will is as much like a decision as we need
it to be in order to hold you responsible for it.
2.3 Real Necessity
There are a number of avenues to doubt whether practical necessity really
deserves its modal name. Tom van den Beld (1997), for example, doubts whether any
supposed instance of practical necessity cannot be explained away as a (relatively strong)
moral commitment – ‘musts’ are actually just especially vigorous ‘oughts’, as we might
characterize the worry.41 General observations about the changeability and weak mettle of
human character will likewise lead to skepticism with respect to the possibility of
practical necessity.
There are several points to make in response to this skepticism, and making them
will further clarify the nature of practical necessity. First, it’s worth noting again that
although I am focused on practical necessity as it appears in moral heroes, practical
necessity is posited as a relatively wide-ranging phenomenon among agents. Heroic
41
See also Williams (1995), p. 48.
18
personality profiles help understand why some agents find some morally heroic actions
practically necessary. Other types will have other schemas chronically accessible to them
in such a way that fosters automaticity with respect to other behaviors, opening up the
possibility of other moments of practical necessity. There isn’t anything necessarily or
automatically valorized about it, so we can dispense with the concern that the morally
flimsy material of human character couldn’t possibly be whittled into something so
noble.
Second, recall that schemas, traits, etc., are envisioned as interactive with
situations. That some act is practically necessary for some agent in some particular
circumstance does not imply that it will be necessary for that same agent in a different
circumstance, just as it does not imply that it will also be necessary for another agent in
the same circumstance.42 The necessity being defended is narrowly attached to particular
agents in particular situations.
Third, given what we have said about the roots of practical necessity in a slowly
evolving and relatively stable sense of moral identity and personality, we should expect
some diachronic stability in what a given agent finds to be practically necessary
(although of course situations at different times might be in other important respects
different). Nonetheless, it is important to note that what is presently practically necessary
for a given agent needn’t always remain so.43 The necessity in question attaches to a
decision at a particular time. Since people change over time, we should also expect that to
some degree what their moral personality makes practically necessary for them at any
given time may not be quite the same at a different time. Harry Frankfurt (1999) reaches
a similar conclusion with respect to the possibility of changes over time to which courses
42
43
Cf. Watson (2004), p. 99, fn. 16.
Cf. Furrow (1998, p. 224).
19
of action exhibit volitional necessity.44 For both Williams and Frankfurt, the primary
concern is the way in which features of someone’s identity could make it the case that
some courses of action become necessary or impossible or cease to be. The idea in both
cases is that a tie between an agent and a given course of action can be of the strongest,
necessitating kind. But since the various aspects of our identities that give rise to the
necessity are subject to change, what’s necessary for a given agent now may not be later.
A qualification Frankfurt imposes on this concession is that the way the relevant changes
take place is unlikely to have been strongly orchestrated by the exercise of the agent’s
own will, since it is, of course, that very will that is under the necessitating influence. The
changes in character that produce shifts in genuine volitional necessity, therefore, might
take place naturally (or perhaps, from the agent’s perspective, passively) or indirectly as
the result of successful efforts the agent makes to become a different kind of person. So
the fact of change in human character over time is not incompatible with a necessitating
power with respect to discrete actions rooted in that character.
Finding the roots of the relevant practical necessity in patterns of specific
character traits helps make sense of the possibility of changes in character that facilitate
changes in what is practically necessary for a given agent. It is probably not possible to
instantaneously will away or will into being a character trait like a disposition to view
past suffering in a redemptive light.45 But it is also probably not irrelevant to the
persistence of that trait that the agent aligns her will against it. One promising aspect of
personological analyses of moral heroism is that they advance our understanding of how
character can be sufficiently stable to ground real necessity, yet changeable in a way that
agents can sometimes influence.
44
45
See p. 112 and p. 136. Cf. Williams (1995), p. 53.
See Walker et al. (2010).
20
Perhaps the worry can be revived. Williams is keen to keep the modal force of
practical necessity on the same footing as literal, physical impossibility. In this vein, he
aphoristically notes the absence of vocabulary to speak of the relevant kind of noncompliance: “Nothing stands to the practical must as ought to have stands to ought”
(1981, p. 128). We can look back at errors in morality and rationality and rue that what
we did was not what we ought to have done. But for Williams, there is no counterfactual
perspective we can occupy with respect to what is for us practically necessary. If there
were, that would just show that the proposed behavior was not in fact necessary at all.
But just as it is fair to point out that we change over time, so it seems also only fair to
insist that we might change at a time – so if the necessity stems from character, and if
character can change, then practical necessity seems to be necessity only metaphorically.
The objection here focuses our attention on moments in which an agent’s identity
is overthrown even as she confronts what had until then been practically necessary for
her.46 I therefore suspect we should allow that it may be possible for one to fail to do what
was for her practically necessary even at a given moment, but only with serious violence
to one’s moral identity.47 So in Williams’s aphorism, I propose that as ‘ought to have’
stands to ‘ought’, the closest thing for ‘must’ would be ‘how could I?’, or perhaps better,
‘who am I?’.
Just as arriving at a practical necessity is a way of discovering something about
oneself, somehow flouting practical necessity is a way of destroying what had been
discovered, or indeed a way of becoming something else.48 For practical necessity to earn
its keep as a variety of necessity, these instances should be rare, but they seem
Watson (2004) entertains a case in which an agent is confronted with two conflicting
but practically necessary options (p. 122). If such a case is possible (I don’t see what could
rule it out), then breaking with practical necessity must also be possible.
47 See Badhwar (1993) for a related discussion on the aftermath of failing to do something
that one judges necessary.
48 Cf. Furrow (1998), p. 219.
21
46
undeniably possible. Whereas change over time was allowed as a source of changes in
necessity above, I am now suggesting that occasionally the same variety of change might
take place at a time. The violence to one’s sense of oneself that would accompany any
such occasion might manifest in a kind of alienation, or, if the changes aren’t durable or
subsequently endorsed, shame or bafflement.49
3. CONCLUSION: CULTIVATING HEROIC CHARACTER
I have claimed that bringing the notion of practical necessity into the context of
moral heroism in conjunction with recent work in moral psychology is a fruitful
enterprise. The payouts come in an improved and empirically grounded understanding of
practical necessity, on the one hand, and, through the combination of moral psychology
and practical necessity, a deepened understanding of moral heroism, on the other. Along
the way, I claimed that one virtue of invoking practical necessity in order to account for
the Non-Optionality Claim was that it provided a real sense in which the heroic acts were
not optional without calling the supererogatory status of the acts into question. Claiming
this as a virtue of the account involves the assumption that morally heroic acts are in fact
supererogatory, and of course, this assumption can be contested in any number of ways.
But even if it is not – that is, even if one accepts that morally heroic acts are
supererogatory – one might nonetheless think that we might face a moral duty to cultivate
See Frankfurt (1999), p. 170 for a discussion of the aftermath of breaking with volitional
necessity as distinct but similar to failing in moral obligations. By saying that failing in a
case of practical necessity one will have done violence to oneself, I don’t mean to beg the
question of whether this is always a bad thing. Indeed, I think it’s possible for regrettable
character to produce practical necessity that is morally really undesirable, and violence to
that character would be an instance of overcoming and triumph rather than a sudden
descent into depravity. This is a departure from the tone taken by both Williams and
Frankfurt, who systematically take up the issuances of practical and volitional necessity as
being supremely important to the good of the agent, almost as if authenticity were the
true rock bottom of value. It is also a departure from my focus on instances of practical
necessity in connection with moral heroism.
22
49
morally heroic characters, to become the sort of person for whom the morally heroic will
in some cases be practically necessary. Whereas the morally heroic act itself might
involve considerable sacrifice such that moral duties plausibly cannot demand it,
cultivating a morally heroic character might not entail such considerable sacrifice.50
If ought implies can, it may turn out that there are rather severe limits to what can
be asked on this front. Much of the relevant work in moral personality science cites early
life advantages that are beyond our power to choose or craft for ourselves.51 It may turn
out that some relevant features of our moral psychology need to be in place relatively
early in order to arrive at the kind of moral personality that would harbor heroic practical
necessity.52 In this respect as in others, that is, it may be that ‘the child is the parent of the
adult.’53 This is not to say that moral heroes are born rather than raised, but it is to suggest
that we may find that our abilities to craft morally heroic personalities for ourselves have
a disappointingly low ceiling.
See Carbonell (2012). See also Philip Zimbardo’s Heroic Imagination Project at
www.heroicimagination.org.
51 See, inter alia, Lapsley and Narvaez (2014), Lapsley and Hill (2009), Walker and
Frimer (2009), Jayawickreme and Di Stefano (2012).
52 Of course, this just pushes the question back: Should parents cultivate heroic character
in their children?
53 Lapsley and Hill (2009), p. 196.
23
50
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