Andres' 2nd Comment

I understand we have settled on the topic of the Virtues of Idleness from here on in. Whilst the material of my 1st Comment was aimed at the issue of Pregnant Addicts, I believe its central ideas are directly applicable to this subject also, as I now hope to demonstrate below.

The feeling that idleness is a vice runs deep in our culture. Most of us would seem to agree that the notion of idleness is bound-up with not only a sense of lack of productivity, but also with self-centredness, selfishness. At first glance its apparent immorality would seem perfectly explicable in terms of universalist theories (of which I made mention in my 1st Comment): surely only the most peculiar and contrived (and therefore essentially artificial) examples could be offered in which the execution of an idle way of life could actually be seen to contribute, for example, to the maximization of human happiness or, to result in the treatment of others as ends in themselves, and avoid their treatment as mere means. But, a most serious problem would seem to afflict the Kantian and Consequentialist, and similar theories that appeal to the concept of moral objectivity: they remain, despite innumerable attempts to develop their sophistication, gnawingly incapable of reflecting some of our most profound moral intuitions. Let us take an example: you are confronted with a madman who informs you that he is either going to murder a group of three innocent people or a different group of twenty innocent people. He states that YOU must decide which group he kills and, if you fail to choose, he will kill all the people in both groups. Now Jeremy Bentham would declare that the morally correct action to take is quite clear: you ought to choose to let the madman kill the group of three. And perhaps for some this would sit well with their moral sensibilities but, there is undoubtedly a large number of people for whom it certainly would not: for many of us, Bentham's suggestion would not represent a case of reasonably choosing the 'lesser of two evils;' for many of us, to sanction the murder of three people is morally indistinguishable from sanctioning the murder of twenty, or a million; for many of us, the madman's attempt to implicate us in all possible outcomes does not succeed; for many of us, to refuse to engage with the madman does not soil our hands with the blood of twenty-three people, but declines his invitation to step into his perverse moral world.

And so, despite the ubiquity of the sentiment that idleness is a deplorable characteristic, many of us are filled with nagging doubts over this supposed truism; and this is precisely what Helen, in her posting on Nov 14th, and Oliver, in his latest posting, are driving at with some of their reflections. If we are unable to rid ourselves of these doubts, just as we are unable to rid ourselves of the other incongruities between objective moral theories and our lived moral experience then, perhaps the sense that idleness is a vice (and also perhaps the attendant notion of the badness of being self-centred) has an alternative origin. If the arguments for its logical necessity indeed cannot be sustained then, perhaps its emergence in our culture has been contingent upon features therein. And this brings me back to some of the key ideas of my 1st Comment.

So, whence came this notion of the vice of idleness?

Interestingly, Oliver, in his latest posting, points towards the capitalist social structure as partly being responsible for the rejection of idleness as a virtue. Perhaps the most famous and compelling thesis to have addressed this subject is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber (2001, Routledge: London). In this exceptionally influential work, which spans the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, theology and economics, Weber suggests that Puritanism, and in particular the sect of Calvinism, is the primary origin of the 'protestant work ethic'. In a nutshell, one of the central threads of his argument is that Puritanism's reaction against the unattainable elitism of Catholic monasticism (becoming a monk/nun is a realistic option for only the very few) resulted in the sanctification of ordinary plebeian life. Thus diligence in the role God had assigned you - your calling (compare the modern use of the word vocation) - was the primary method by which to glorify Him. Diligence went hand-in-hand with asceticism as, indulgence in luxuries was seen as a distraction from diligent application to one's calling. This also coupled -up with the Puritan doctrine of predestination - the notion that God has predetermined the fate of the soul of each person for either salvation or damnation. Hence the Puritan's successful display of extreme asceticism and diligence not only glorified God but, proved, as it were, both to himself and to on-lookers, that he indeed must be predestined for salvation (ibid., p.69), for only the electi are successful in their calling (cf. ibid.,p.105).

Thus evolved, Weber contends, a cardinal feature of the personality of the peoples of the countries in which Puritanism took root. And - which I find the most striking corroboration of his thesis - Weber illuminates the suggestion that the particular quality of these virtues of diligence and selflessness is far less apparent in the European countries that largely escaped the Puritan movement - broadly those to the south of the continent: indeed I am particularly drawn to his argument when I contrast English and Spanish personalities (the two cultural environments in which I have myself grown-up) in regard to attitudes towards idleness. It particularly strikes me in terms of concepts of masculinity: an English archetype of masculinity is the man who works a sixty-hour week to provide for his family; whilst this ethos is by no means absent in Spanish society, it does not at all have the same quality, and there is, in addition, an ethic that the man of the house should be made to feel comfortable: cooked good food, and afforded peace and quiet when he goes for a siesta.

So, if Weber's thesis is right, arguments against the possibility of idleness being considered a virtue would face a very serious challenge. And furthermore, this ties directly in to the conclusions I drew in my 1st Comment: we in the northern European cultures find it a great deal more challenging than those to the south, perhaps, to fully embrace the virtue of idleness as those Puritan doctrines have played a very major role in the shaping of our moral traditions and vocabularies. We assume ourselves free to choose whichever ideals we like but, this is but an illusion - an illusion forged by the fact that our moral consciousness is fabricated by the environments in which we are immersed from the moment of our birth. We think ourselves able to see the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, because the process by which our faculty of sight is brought about is not immediately apparent to us.

And so it might be asked: 'How could we have come to begin to challenge the prevailing moral tradition, if that is what we ineluctably take to be the moral truth?' Well, the answer may lie in the suggestion that we live, now, more than in any previous era, in a society exposed to competing moral traditions - globalization and multi-culturalism have undoubtedly played a very major role in this. The possibility that idleness may have intrinsic value; that we may consider it a virtue, is an idea that can genuinely engage us. For the Sixteenth Century English peasant, it is an idea that could not even have been rendered coherent to him, for it lies so far beyond the boundaries of his moral vocabulary.