Kierkegaardian Virtues and the Problem of Self-Effacement

Abstract

One of the more well-known objections to Kierkegaard’s moral philosophy is that he presents a view of moral life that is self-absorbed almost to the point of solipsism, focused on the subject’s own moral status rather than acting from responsiveness to others. Kierkegaard commentators have gone to great lengths to debunk such readings, to demonstrate that Kierkegaard is indeed a far more other-oriented ethicist than such critiques would suggest. At the same time, many—though not all—commentators have come to read Kierkegaard as a Christian virtue ethicist. Yet virtue ethics itself has been objected to on the grounds that it is (1) self-effacing (it requires us to act for reasons or from motives other than those virtue ethics itself endorses), (2) egoistic (it serves the benefit of the agent themselves), and (3) self-absorbed (it causes the agent to focus on themselves rather than others). This paper considers whether and how these objections might apply to Kierkegaard, and argues that his moral psychology has specific resources for answering these objections in distinctive ways.

1. Introduction

One of the more striking—if heavily contested—objections to Kierkegaard’s moral philosophy is that he presents a view of moral life that is self-absorbed almost to the point of solipsism. Kierkegaard has a great deal to say about how a human being becomes a self (or more commonly fails to become a self, or loses their self) and how one pursues their infinite, passionate interest in eternal blessedness (salighed) above all other concerns.1 Yet this creates a worry that Kierkegaardian ethics is ultimately focused on the self (even if is focused on the self in its sinfulness, rather than in a self-aggrandizing way) rather than on helping other people. Figures such as Adorno and Løgstrup have claimed that in Kierkegaard we find an ethics that is worldlessly turned in on itself, preoccupied with the subject’s own moral status rather than acting from an outwardly directed responsiveness to others. Even a text like Works of Love, with its extended meditations on what is required by our infinite debt of love towards the other, has been read as effacing rather than attending to the concrete reality of the Other as a moral patient. Far from seeing Works of Love as a guide to loving the other, Løgstrup savages it as “a brilliantly thought out system of safeguards against being forced into a close relationship with other people” (Løgstrup 1997, p. 232). Caught up in its own acosmic concern for its own moral status and salvation, the self ultimately loses touch with other people: “Never before has the ethical closed itself up and shut out the entire world to the degree that this happens in Kierkegaard’s work” (Løgstrup 2023, p. 82).

Few commentators accept this highly critical picture of Kierkegaard today, however, thanks to the spirited refutations that have been made of it. Kierkegaard commentators such as Ferreira (2001) have gone to great lengths to debunk such a reading, drawing upon texts from Works of Love and the upbuilding discourses to show that Kierkegaard is indeed a far more other-oriented ethicist than these twentieth-century interpretations would suggest. Kierkegaard argues in Works of Love that we are to love God through loving the neighbour, with God as a ‘middle term’ between us and those we love. For critics, this shows that Kierkegaard’s ethics take us away from direct, unmediated contact with other human beings; for his defenders, Kierkegaard is showing how genuine, unselfish agapic love is possible at all.

At the same time, many commentators have increasingly come to read Kierkegaard as a Christian virtue ethicist, or at the very least, a philosopher who discusses and endorses a range of virtues. The upbuilding discourses, in particular, have been shown to contain valuable discussions of virtues such as courage, humility, and patience—even if, as Sylvia Walsh points out in her important critique of aretaic readings of Kierkegaard, he never actually refers to these qualities as virtues (Walsh 2018, p. 85). Those who read Kierkegaard as a virtue ethicist do concede that he is a virtue ethicist of a somewhat unusual stripe. Certainly, as Robert C. Roberts has argued, a specifically Christian virtue ethics can only ever be an incomplete virtue ethics, in the sense that perfection is impossible for beings such as us in this life. A Kierkegaardian virtue ethics would also need to be, as Davenport (2001) has argued, an existentialist virtue ethics, one that finds place for stable dispositions of character whilst also allowing for genuine liberty of action and disavowing the value of mere habit. Yet Kierkegaard definitely seems to endorse progress in these virtues as morally required of us, even if he is sceptical (on both theological and psychological grounds) of our capacity to ever fully instantiate them.

In the course of its contemporary resurgence, however, virtue ethics itself has been subject to a series of interrelated but distinct critiques. Firstly, it has been argued that virtue ethics is self-effacing: it requires us to act for reasons or from motives other than the reasons and motives that virtue ethics itself endorses. An honest person will act honestly, for instance, but were they to act because they want to be honest, their motivation would no longer be virtuous in the right sense. Virtue ethics can thus serve as a framework for evaluating and even prescribing actions, but insofar as it is self-effacing, it cannot tell us what to do in the moment without thereby making us fail to act virtuously. Secondly, it has been claimed that virtue ethics is egoistic. This is, as we will see, actually two separate if interrelated critiques. The first is that virtue ethics is ultimately self-serving, seeking not the instantiation of virtue for its own sake but ultimately to promote the flourishing of the agent. The second is that insofar as the imperatives of virtue ethics are to become a particular type of agent, virtue ethics are ultimately directed at the agent themselves, not at the other towards whom one acts virtuously. (Certain virtues, such as humility and selflessness, will be particularly vulnerable to these objections.) Though distinct, these two objections are closely linked insofar as some arguments for self-effacement, such as Hurka’s (2001), claim that virtue ethics is inherently egoistic. Just insofar as virtue ethics aims to ultimately achieve eudaimonia, and also draws the agent’s attention to their own moral status, virtue ethics has—or so it is claimed—something intrinsically selfish at its core.

In what follows, I will first outline these three objections to virtue ethics, namely self-effacement, egoism, and what I will call self-absorption, and the sorts of replies that have been offered to them. Then, we will consider whether these objections apply to Kierkegaard’s version of virtue ethics, if such there be; and finally, we will consider whether Kierkegaard’s moral psychology has distinctive features that allow it to overcome these objections. My conclusion, somewhat tentatively, is that he does. That does not make Kierkegaard a virtue ethicist, necessarily; but it does mean that if he is one, that need not count against him.

2. The Self-Effacement Objection

The locus classicus for discussions of self-effacement in moral theory is an influential paper by Stocker (1976). Stocker asks us to imagine being in hospital, no doubt feeling quite miserable, and suddenly receiving a cheering visit from a friend. It seems, all else being equal, that visiting a sick friend to lift their spirits is a morally praiseworthy thing to do. Yet suppose it turns out that they are visiting purely out of a scrupulous attention to duty, or instead, that they are visiting because doing so will yield the greatest net balance of utility (whether taken in hedonic or preference–optimisation terms). Suddenly, the visitor’s action changes quality; it is no longer simply or principally an act of loving friendship. If my visitor is here out of a sense of duty or a concern to maximise overall utility, they are no longer here for my sake. In order to cheer me up—that is, to achieve the end that both deontology and consequentialism tell them to achieve in this circumstance—the visitor must be motivated not by the thought that visiting me is the right thing to do according to those theories, but by a simple friendly concern for me and my welfare. Deontology or consequentialism can tell an agent the right thing to do, but that agent cannot do the right thing unless they are not motivated to do so by deontological or consequentialist concerns. These theories, then, are self-effacing. As Joel A. Martinez puts it:

To say theory X is self-effacing is to say that by X’s own lights, if one believes the criterion of right action X offers, then one cannot perform the right action. The term ‘self-effacing’ is appropriate because, as a result of being convinced by X, one recognizes that one should act from some motivation other than the considerations that make an action right.

(Martinez 2011, pp. 278–79)

Hence, “Self-effacing theories pry apart motivation and the criterion of right action” (Martinez 2011, p. 279), though not all theories that separate motivation and moral criteria are therefore self-effacing. Some theories are merely indirect, without being self-effacing. Martinez compares hedonism, for example, as a motivational guide with deontology or consequentialism; the hedonist may need to think about something other than the pleasure they are experiencing from a given activity in order to enjoy it (e.g., thinking about chord shapes and picking technique rather than thinking about how much fun you are having playing guitar.) But, the charge goes, for deontology and consequentialism, motives and the theory of right action that govern the situation are actually in conflict. At best, there is a risk of psychological conflict, for to be a successfully motivated agent “one cannot be moved by the things one values and one cannot value the things by which one is moved” (Martinez 2011, p. 281). At worst, a self-effacing moral theory can provide no ongoing action guidance at all.

There are various reasons why such self-effacement might be seen to be a problem; Pettigrove (2011, pp. 192–93) identifies at least five. The main lines of criticism of self-effacement, however, arguably boil down to three main concerns:

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Self-effacement makes it much harder for a moral theory to guide action; at best, it means that agents cannot act immediately upon their theory-based moral deliberations, because we need time to forget why we are acting as we are. Stocker’s hospital visitor needs to lose himself in concern for his friend, so to speak, after he’s done the moral calculus in a cool moment. (See also Hurka 2001, p. 247).

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Self-effacement opens a troubling disconnect between our judgments of what is really important (e.g., acting from duty, utility maximisation) and our motives as well as our judgments of what is valuable in good action (loving concern for your friend).

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Reflecting on a self-effacing theory in more general terms cannot train an agent to act in the right way as situations arise, and in fact, might undermine their ability to respond morally to others in the right kind of way.

Stocker takes his argument to be a reason to favour virtue ethics over consequentialist and deontologist positions. If virtue ethics tells us we should embody virtues of compassion and loyalty, then these virtues can motivate us to visit our sick friend in a way that is not self-effacing. “I was worried you might be miserable so I’ve come to cheer you up, old friend!” is not self-defeating in the way “I’m here to cheer you up out of concern that my actions accord with the moral law/maximize the net balance of happiness over suffering, old friend!” would be.

Subsequently, however, philosophers such as Keller (2007) have argued that Stocker’s objection from self-effacement applies to virtue ethics as well. Keller asks us to imagine three friends on a hike, who are sharing a hut in the woods. Looking out the window, they notice a family struggling to put up a tent in the rain, their children crying because it is too wet to cook food. The three friends each immediately resolve to invite the family in to share their food and shelter. Yet the three have subtly different motives: the first is motivated by the thought that he wants to help the suffering family, the second is motivated by the thought that he wants to be generous (not merely appear generous, but actually be generous), and the third is motivated by the thought that she wants to act as a virtuous person would (again, not merely appear to act virtuously, but to actually emulate virtuous persons). All three act well, and all are arguably praiseworthy for doing so. But only the agent who does not act from the thought of wanting to have virtuous motives seems to fully instantiate the relevant virtues. Ironically, in not explicitly aiming at generosity or virtue, the first agent is “the most generous, and the one who most closely resembles the fully virtuous person” (Keller 2007, p. 226). Adopting virtue as a motivating reason has the perverse effect of taking us further away from instantiating virtue. In order to fully instantiate generosity, for instance, “we often need to be moved to action by thoughts that are not of our own generosity or our resemblance to the fully virtuous person” (Keller 2007, p. 227), and this thought applies to, at the very least, many other virtues as well, though not all.2 It is still better to invite a cold, wet, and hungry family into your hut out of a desire to be virtuous than to leave them out in the rain; nor need we agree with Kant that an act performed solely out of inclination is merely ‘pathological’ and devoid of moral value. But we can, nonetheless, acknowledge that sometimes acts are in fact more valuable the more thoughtless and without reflection or hesitation they are (Stokes 2010).

There are various strategies available to the virtue ethicist to get around this problem. One is to find some way in which one can argue the virtuous agent is acting virtuously without consciously acting from virtue as a motive. Another is simply to bite the bullet, as Woodcock (2022) does, and accept that some moral theories can indeed be self-effacing, but conclude that self-effacement might just be a routine and fairly benign feature of our psychological repertoires anyway. It may be that, for beings such as us, sometimes acting well requires us to forget—at least in the moment of action—the reasons why we should act as we do. Yet we may still ask, with Hurka, “Is it not odd for a theory to so directly condemn its own practical influence?” (Hurka 2001, p. 247). Indeed, as Jonathan Webber puts it in his outline of the self-effacement objection, virtue ethics so understood seems to undermine any reason we might have to aim at cultivating virtue or bringing our actions into line with a virtue-based theory of ethics: if we want to aim at better behaviour, “virtue cultivation would be a misdirection of ethical attention” (Webber 2013, p. 248).

3. The Egoism Objection

The claim that virtue ethics is egoistic is at least as old as Kant’s Groundwork, where he insists that making someone prudent is not the same thing as making them virtuous (see Toner 2006, p. 595). The objection is that if, per Aristotle, I am virtuous because virtue promotes the flourishing of the agent, then my virtuous behaviour is ultimately directed towards my own self-interest. This is the case even if the exercise of a virtue in a given situation is detrimental to one’s proximate self-interest—the courageous act of self-sacrifice, the honesty that costs one dearly, etc. In such cases, the agent is still exemplifying a mode of behaviour that, in general, will tend to their overall good, even if the individual instance will harm them. (As an analogy, a person who has been warned by their doctor to avoid strenuous exercise but goes for a long run anyway could still be said to be doing the sort of thing that tends towards health, even if they are in fact risking their own.)3.

In this model, in bringing the wet and cold family into my hut, I am making my own environment more cramped and my own share of the available supplies smaller. But I am also exemplifying a set of character traits that tend to make human lives, and a fortiori my own life, go better. Even if we stipulate that only other-directed character traits can count as virtues, we’re still left with the problem that cultivating these other-regarding virtues is nonetheless in one’s own interest. Just to the extent that virtue ethics is a form of eudaimonism, it appears to be egoistic. If, on the other hand, we insist that we should be motivated to act virtuously not because the virtues are to our benefit but simply because it is right to act virtuously, it is not clear that we are still talking about virtue ethics at all but instead have slipped back into a form of deontology.

There are, again, various ways of getting around this objection. One is to insist that the sort of wellbeing we obtain from the virtues is intrinsically altruistic, and so “It is not self-centred to seek one’s own flourishing because such flourishing is essentially relational” (Toner 2006, p. 613). Lorraine Besser-Jones takes this route, arguing that the self that is figured in eudaimonistic forms of virtue ethics is not an egoistic self, but rather “a self whose true interests can be described only through reference to the interests of others” (Besser-Jones 2015, p. 67). Because our flourishing is ultimately dependent on and indeed continuous with the welfare of others—or even that flourishing just is standing in the right relationship to other people and things—our goal in acting virtuously is ultimately not directed towards ourselves, or at least not in an ethically problematic way.4

Another response is to insist that the virtuous agent acts out of a concern for virtue and not for reward, even if virtue ultimately is in their interest. In other words, by acting as a virtuous person would, I act in a way that is prudentially beneficial for me, but that is not why I act that way. To a large extent, this overlaps with the transparency response to the self-absorption objection, which will be discussed below.

4. The Self-Absorption Objection

This brings us to the third objection, and the one closest to the Løgstrupian objection we alluded to in the introduction: the charge that the virtuous agent is self-absorbed in a way that is inimical to genuinely moral agency.

As with Keller’s hut example, the self-absorption objection’s worry is that the agent’s attention is not directed at the moral patient, or at least is so only indirectly or in a mediated way. Instead of being focused on a particular virtue, the agent is focused on themselves qua (would-be) virtuous agent. It is possible, as Webber notes, to develop virtuous dispositions simply by focusing on the situation in front of me: invite freezing families into your cabin often enough and you will have built up a disposition towards generosity. But in reflectively trying to cultivate virtue, I shift my gaze from the moral world around me to myself, such that “the direction of one’s ethical attention looks questionable” (Webber 2013, p. 243). While my actions may still help the freezing family, and are also in accordance with virtues of kindness, generosity, etc., I am not thinking about either the family or the virtues but simply of myself and my own moral status. As Hurka puts it, virtue ethics “directs the attention of a person who wants to act rightly self-indulgently inward, at her own motives rather than at states of the world”. And that is a problem: “Surely conscientiousness, even when only part of a person’s motivation, need not be so unattractively self-absorbed” (Hurka 2001, p. 221).

The problem, in fact, is twofold. Firstly, the agent is directing their attention at the wrong thing, and as such fails to properly embody other-related virtues (as in the application of Stocker’s hospital example to virtue ethics). But self-absorption is arguably also itself a vice. If I am walking around meditating constantly on my own virtue, I can easily slide into a state of narcissism or excessive pride. Even if I am instead constantly preoccupied with my lack of virtue, my self-absorption may well be morally reproach-worthy. An agent who is walking around either patting themselves on the back or beating themselves up is still focused on themselves in a way that, we may well think, is inimical to the other-directed character of moral life. If you are visiting me in hospital, I do not want you to spend your visit remonstrating with yourself for not coming sooner, any more than I want you silently congratulating yourself for your compassion.5

One way around the problem of self-absorption is to claim that overt thoughts of one’s own virtue (or, if the concern is egoism, of how virtue serves one’s own flourishing) will be intermittent, and largely confined to the learner. As with the acquisition of any skill, we will need to do a great deal of explicit cogitation about what virtue requires and how to act virtuously in given situations at first, but as virtue becomes second nature to us, we will be able to live virtuous lives without needing to think about it very much. Julia Annas takes this route:

The virtuous person, then, will have thoughts about flourishing. These will be like the explicit thoughts about virtue and virtuous action; they will be explicit in the beginner, who needs to be taught the point of being brave, generous, or whatever. As he becomes more virtuous, he will no longer need reminders about the point of being virtuous; these thoughts will gradually, as they are no longer needed, become effaced from his deliberations, and he will simply act, think, and feel virtuously without explicitly thinking about the point of it. Still, this progressive effacement from his explicit thoughts does not mean that thoughts about flourishing evaporate and leave a blank. For, as with virtue itself, the thoughts can be recovered, when they need to be conveyed to a learner, and so they remain transparent to the agent. But, as with virtue itself, the progression is like that in a skill from a learner to an expert: explicit thoughts gradually become effaced from explicit deliberations, but can be reactivated if required without creating any split in the self, or problem for unified deliberation.

(Annas 2007, p. 213)

Yet this appeal to intermittency, like the claim that self-effacement is offset by only thinking about virtue in a ‘cool hour’ and not when we’re acting virtuously, can only ever be partially effective. It could only apply fully “if we presume as our representative agent someone who is the perfect instantiation of the phronomoi”, someone whose moral vision and dispositions are so completely trained that “she never needs to step back and reflect on the foundational values that justify her ethical obligations” (Woodcock 2022, p. 457). To the extent that none of us are like that, none of us can avoid the problem that virtue ethics seems to require us, at least from time to time, to focus on ourselves as virtuous agents and not on the moral patient who needs us to act virtuously. So, we are still left with the claim that even the most virtuous among us is going to spend some of their time wrapped up in thoughts about themselves instead of simply acting to meet the needs of others. The model of a moral saint who acts with spontaneous goodness towards all moral patients becomes impossible to emulate for creatures like us. For Kierkegaard, who as we will see would agree we could never fully instantiate perfect virtue, that may not be a problem. It is, however, more of a problem for philosophers who want to see virtue ethics as an answer to the sort of objections Stocker raises to its major competitors. If we want moral agents who are focused on the needs of others instead of themselves, virtue ethics looks like it will still leave us short of that goal.

5. Kierkegaard on Self-Effacement and Egoism

How, then, might Kierkegaard reply to these objections? Trying to construct a Kierkegaardian defence against objections to virtue ethics is of course complicated by the fact that the jury is still out on whether Kierkegaard should even be regarded as a virtue ethicist at all. Walsh (2018, p. 82) notes that Kierkegaard actually says little about the concept of virtue directly, and that largely in his magister’s thesis The Concept of Irony. Here, he notes that despite Hegel’s claim that Socrates is a paragon of virtue, Socrates’ discussion of the putative unity of the virtues uses a rather sophistic irony to turn virtue into something “so abstract, so egotistically closed up in itself that it only becomes the rock upon which the individual virtues, like well-freighted sailing vessels, run aground and are smashed to pieces” (Kierkegaard 1992b, p. 58; 1997a, p. 119). Much of the ensuing discussion on this topic has thus focused on whether the Kierkegaardian excellences of character, such as patience, courage, faith, etc., are to be understood as virtues in the virtue-ethical sense, or something else. (Walsh herself settles on the position that Kierkegaard is a character ethicist but not a virtue ethicist (Walsh 2018, p. 107)). If scholars cannot even agree on whether virtue plays a central role in Kierkegaard’s ethics, we might expect the prospects for finding answers to objections to virtue ethics in his work to be faint indeed.

Nonetheless, we can start by noting where these objections intersect with other topics on which Kierkegaard has more to say. For instance, in dealing with the places in which Kierkegaard makes seemingly critical remarks about virtue, Roberts discusses something in the Postscript that looks intriguingly like a version of the self-effacement objection:

if it is a sorry error literally to want to be like God through virtue and holiness instead of becoming more and more humble, then it is all the more ludicrous to want to be that in consideration of one’s being an unusually brilliant mind, because virtue and purity are indeed essentially related to the nature of God, but the second stipulation makes God himself ridiculous as the tertium comparationis [third element in a comparison, a standard]

(Kierkegaard 1992a, p. 565; 2002, p. 514)

Roberts is at pains to point out that Climacus is not attacking virtue and holiness as such, but the effort to be like God through virtue and holiness; after all, humility, which Climacus here commends, is a Christian virtue (Roberts 2019, p. 328). But Climacus’ suggestion seems to be that we can only aim at virtue and holiness in an indirect way, focusing on humility while becoming virtuous behind our backs, so to speak. In classic Kierkegaardian dialectical style, we can only be built up virtuously by focusing on how unvirtuous we really are. This is echoed in other discussions of humility in Kierkegaard, where humility is presented as an attitude that actually diverts our attention from our own virtue and towards just how much, relative to the prototype of Christ, we fall short. In Judge for Yourself!, Kierkegaard declares that “Imitation must be affirmed to press toward humility. This, quite simply, is how it is done. Everyone must be measured by the prototype, by the ideal” (Kierkegaard 1990, p. 198; 2012, p. 244). Humans are elevated not through self-consciously acquiring virtue, but quite the opposite: “when, humbled and ashamed, I turn from my best deed as from something base and find rest in grace […] from this humiliation comes the lifting up that blessedly reaches heaven”. Kierkegaard warns that “You cannot worship God with good deeds”; rather, one strives to accumulate good deeds but then “deeply humbled before God sees them transformed into something miserable and base—this is what it is to worship God—and this is a lifting up” (Kierkegaard 1990, p. 154; 2012, p. 203).

So Kierkegaard does, I think, have something very much like the self-effacement objection to contend with, and we are right to look for ways in which he addresses this issue in his own work. Recall that self-effacement is a problem because it disconnects psychological motivation from action-guiding principles. A self-effacing theory entails that we should act in accordance with that theory but not be motivated by that theory. In Kierkegaard’s ethics, what we are presented with is not a theory to be enacted but a prototype or exemplar (forbillede) to be imitated, yet the problem remains the same: we are to become virtuous while thinking about something else, namely our sinfulness. We are to imitate while thinking all the while of our infinite distance from the object of our imitation.

We can come at the egoism objection from a slightly different direction, by noting that it is in some respects an objection to the eudaimonism that sits at the heart of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The Aristotelian agent adopts a virtuous set of dispositions because these are the dispositions that promote human flourishing, and in Aristotle’s case at least it is clear that the agent’s own flourishing is an integral part of that aim. Whether Kierkegaard’s ethics are eudaimonistic and in what way is itself a matter of some controversy; John J. Davenport has gone to great lengths to articulate a form of eudaimonism at work in Kierkegaard’s ethics (Davenport 2001), while Walsh points out that Luther, whose work sets the orthodox parameters of Kierkegaard’s theology, “opposes eudaimonism as well as the notion of an autonomous human agency, both of which are essential elements of Aristotelian and most contemporary views of virtue” (Walsh 2018, p. 78).

Roberts, one of the most vocal proponents of the idea that Kierkegaard is a Christian virtue ethicist, admits in passing that even Christian virtues are prudentially valuable: “Christian virtues, while benefiting their possessor, are not solely for the benefit of their possessor” (Roberts 2019, p. 326, my emphasis). Walsh, in arguing that Kierkegaard is not a virtue ethicist, notes the connection in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses between the term ‘virtue’ and the quality of prudential cleverness or sagacity (klogskab), a term which Kierkegaard frequently uses pejoratively. Roberts replies by appealing to what we might think of as a ‘higher prudence’ in Christian virtue ethics: “If we take sagacity to be the capacity to discern the way to one’s best interest, then true sagacity—we might call it wisdom—for Kierkegaard will be something like the ability to discern the way to one’s eternal happiness” (Roberts 2019, p. 330, original emphasis). What is ultimately in our best interest, as the Christian knows but even the most virtuous pagan did not, is ‘eternal blessedness’ (salighed)—which is also our highest interest, according to some of the many formulae in which salighed appears in the Postscript. The Christian virtues are thus a feature of the sort of life that makes salighed a live possibility, if only by grace. It may, as John Lippitt claims, seem almost like a reductio ad absurdum to say that a concern for salighed itself would somehow be selfish (Lippitt 2013, p. 114). If a concern for salvation is selfish then it seems no concern for oneself at all could ever be legitimate. Yet it does also seem that such a concern preserves something eudaimonistic, even if it is a sort of deferred eudaimonism where ultimate happiness will not be ours until after death.

This ‘deferred eudaimonism’ does not quite get the virtue ethicist out of the egoism objection. However, it points us in a useful direction. We can find replies to both the self-effacement and egoism objections in An Occasional Discourse, almost universally referred to as Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing—precisely the work in which the temporal character of eternal blessedness is most explicitly thematized. In this discourse, Kierkegaard takes aim at ‘double-mindedness’, understood as a will that is improperly directed at both the good and the reward for doing what is good. Or to come at the same thought from the other direction, to will the good for the sake of reward, or because one wants to be the person through whom the good is realized, is aiming improperly at two things at once: the good itself, and the reward.

The question for a religious writer like Kierkegaard, then, is how an agent can be properly motivated when doing good is linked to salighed as a person’s highest interest (though given the Lutheran doctrine of justificatio sola fide, not linked in a straightforward way such that doing good deeds earns one salvation). To avoid double-mindedness, the believer needs to will the good, but “without regard for reward; in truth to will one thing is to will the good but not to want the reward for it in the world” (Kierkegaard 2004a, p. 151; 2009, p. 39). Even to want the good to be victorious is ultimately a form of double-mindedness, albeit one that “is first recognizable at the boundary where time and eternity touch each other” (Kierkegaard 2004a, p. 171; 2009, p. 63). The believer must simply will the good qua good.

Can such a pure-hearted motivational setup be a virtue–ethical one? At face value, we might think not. If I am to do the good because it is good, and not because I hope to benefit, then it looks very much like we are back in deontological territory. Kierkegaard may well laud a set of Christian virtues like faith and courage, but either these virtues must be motivationally self-effacing, or they are not virtues in anything like the aretaic sense (excellences of character that promote flourishing) but are simply shorthand for a set of deontological imperatives (e.g., ‘be honest’ just means ‘it is wrong to lie’). Either the Christian virtue ethicist practices a sort of crypto-eudaimonism where they must act virtuously while putting out of their mind why they should act virtuously, or these virtues have no non-derivative normative force themselves but are simply names for how one behaves when one acts in accordance with moral commands.

However, Kierkegaard, as a religious ethicist, has another move available to him here that the non-religious ethicist may not. On three occasions in ‘Purity of Heart’, Kierkegaard uses the metaphor of a crossroads to illustrate the predicament of the double-minded person. In each case, the double-minded person stands caught between two motivating principles: the good and reward; the good and fear of punishment; and the good and hope for the victory of the good. As with a physical crossroads, the options are irreconcilable, for one cannot successfully walk both paths at once. But in each case, Kierkegaard appeals to a third dimension, so to speak:

The double-minded person stands at the crossroads; two prospects appear there: the good and the reward. It is not in his power to reconcile them, because they are heterogeneous; only the reward that God internally and eternally adds to the good, only that reward is truly homogeneous with the good.

(Kierkegaard 2004a, p. 153; 2009, p. 41)

The double-minded person stands at the crossroads; then two visions appear, the good and the good in its victory or even in its victory through him. The latter is presumptuousness, but even the two first visions are not exactly the same. In eternity they are, but not in time.

(Kierkegaard 2004a, p. 172; 2009, p. 63)

The eudaimonist serves an end that would lead to his own reward and welfare, except that “with his sensate eyes he is not permitted to see the good in its victory; only with the eyes of faith can he aspire to its eternal victory” (Kierkegaard 2004a, p. 172; 2009, p. 64). The good is victorious in a non-temporal sense, and as such, we cannot look for the good’s victory (and a concomitant reward) in time. What defeats the apparent selfishness of eudaimonism, therefore, is that the inherently temporal structure of reward—sacrifice followed by compensation—is disrupted by the non-temporal character of what is aimed at. Our natural, human, worldly way of conceiving of reward is that we make some sacrifice or effort now in return for receiving some good later. Compensation is inherently diachronic. But if the victory of the good is eternal, then ultimately, it is outside of time and thus outside of this diachronic economy. Eternity may look futural to us humans, which is why we end up using terms like ‘the world to come’. But strictly speaking, eternal blessedness lies outside time, and so actions undertaken for its sake cannot be understood as earning some sort of future payoff.

It is important to note here that ‘Purity of Heart’ explicitly rejects any understanding of eternity as if it is simply the next stage in temporality, “a new world, so that the person who had lived in time according to the ways of time and busyness, when happy and well he had arrived in eternity, now could try his hand at adopting the customs and practices of eternity” (Kierkegaard 2004a, p. 174; 2009, p. 66). Eternity is judgment, and it is always imminent; we live perpetually at the ‘eleventh hour’ where time and eternity intersect.6 There is a saying sometimes used for those who have undertaken thankless work: ‘Their reward is in heaven’. Kierkegaard’s point here is that we are not in heaven and that thinking of heaven (the eternal) as a place we go next would be a category error. The double-minded person, even the one who aims both at the good and at the good’s (worldly) victory, fails to understand this and so is aimed improperly and unstably at two things at once.

How might we apply this thought to the egoism objection to virtue ethics? Here is one possible way we could do so. In aiming to act virtuously, it is the case that I am acting in a way that tends to secure human flourishing, including my own flourishing. Yet I need not think of that flourishing as a concrete state that is directly and immanently linked to the specifics of my actions. Indeed, many virtuous acts may not aim at any actual flourishing, in my own life at least; we need not share Kierkegaard’s own assessment of how shabbily the world treats those who serve the good in order to agree that being virtuous need not, and very often does not, lead to success. Thus, while virtue tends to promote flourishing, I need not be focused on that flourishing as something that will be actualized for me. One can act virtuously without acting for the sake of reward, not because the reward is separable from the normativity of the act (as would be the case in deontology) but because that reward lies outside of the causal nexus in which virtue is practised. In inviting a cold and hungry family into my hut, I need not expect that they will one day reward my kindness in like fashion, nor imagine that my own life would go better if everyone behaved in the generous way I have. I do not even have to imagine that I will be happier if I am always this generous; in fact, I may make myself miserable. Yet I can imagine that in acting in this virtuous way, I serve a good whose ultimate victory lies outside of time and thus outside the effort–reward relationship. Thus, the virtuous person can pursue virtue qua the good without thereby seeking their own good. (It is worth pointing out in this regard that Anthony Rudd has argued at length (e.g., Rudd 2012) that while we should read Kierkegaard as a virtue ethicist, his ethics are at least as indebted to Plato as to Aristotle).

6. Self-Absorption and the Moral Mirror

We have, then, the rudiments of a Kierkegaardian response to the egoism objection. But the objections of self-effacement and self-absorption still stand—and, as noted above, self-absorption is a charge that has been made directly against Kierkegaard himself, most notably in Løgstrup’s work. For Løgstrup, Kierkegaard is guilty of a monomaniacal focus on eternity’s demands of the individual that leads us to view the other only through that lens. The other is no longer a concrete, individual person whose specific needs are within my power to meet, but simply an abstracted neighbour who I am to help love God. More broadly, we can say that the Kierkegaardian agent as encountered across both the pseudonymous and signed works is beset with moral demands that seem to require a continual self-focus.7 To use the most striking example of this first, Climacus claims I should “think death into every moment of my life” rather than only for an hour on Sundays (Kierkegaard 1992a, p. 167; 2002, p. 154). As Merold Westphal has pointed out, Kierkegaard cannot mean that we’re morally enjoined to be consciously ruminating about our death at all times, because that would be both unworkable and, indeed, “no doubt immoral” (Westphal 1996, pp. 109–10). Why immoral? Because, I take it, an agent so preoccupied with themselves would be incapable of seeing and responding to the needs of other people. Every interaction they have with another will be filtered through the lens of their concern for their own mortality.

This point is not limited to thinking about death, either. A recurrent feature of Kierkegaard’s thought is the requirement that we see the situations around us, even fictional ones, as making moral demands of us. Stages on Life’s Way imagines a reformed gambler seeing a fellow gambling addict’s body dragged out of the Seine. This gambler is one “who has understood the old saying de te narrator fabula [the tale is told of you]” (Kierkegaard 1988b, p. 478; 1999, p. 440). He understands that this piteous scene has implications not just for the victim, but for himself; in his drowned friend lies a demand for him to win the battle with his own addiction. In the same vein, For Self-Examination’s discussion of the ‘mirror of the Word’—the way in which I am to see myself as morally commanded personally when reading Scripture—uses the example of the prophet Nathan telling King David a parable about a rich man slaughtering and serving a poor man’s only (and much-loved) sheep instead of taking one from his own flock. When David rails that the selfish rich man should be put to death for this outrage, Nathan retorts “thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7). David has not purloined any sheep—but he has engineered the death of Uriah so that he can marry Bethsheba. Not only is David meant to see his own, quite different, guilt in the story of the selfish rich man, but it is clear that his failure to do so immediately constitutes a further failing. David should not need Nathan to clarify who the story is truly about.

David’s circumstances are obviously quite unusual, but Kierkegaard’s point is a more general one, both in the discussion of the ‘mirror of the Word’ and across Kierkegaard’s work more broadly. Again and again Kierkegaard discusses ethical life as characterized by a self-awareness that, read literally or naively, would entail a sort of self-preoccupation. In the second part of Either/Or, Judge William tells us that “Not until a person in his choice has taken himself upon himself, has put on himself, has totally interpenetrated himself so that every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsibility for himself—not until then has a person chosen himself ethically” (Kierkegaard 1988a, p. 248; 1997b, p. 237). Works of Love also endorses a model of awareness that is inherently self-awareness:

It is one thing to think in such a way that one’s attention is continually only outward, in the direction of the object that is something external; it is something else to be so turned in thought that continually, every moment, one is conscious, conscious of one’s own state during the thinking or of what is happening in oneself during the thinking. But only the latter is essential thinking—it is, namely, transparency; the former is unclear thinking, which suffers from the contradiction that that which, thinking, clarifies something else is itself basically unclear. Such a thinker explains something else by his thinking and, behold, he does not understand himself.

(Kierkegaard 1998, p. 361; 2004b, p. 355)

In such passages, Kierkegaard seems at first blush to be endorsing something like a higher-order theory of consciousness: to be conscious, a moment of awareness must simultaneously be aware that it is aware. But while Kierkegaard arguably should indeed be viewed as a theorist of consciousness, his account here is fundamentally ethical rather than being a purely descriptive contribution to philosophy of mind. The ethical person is not simply focused on the external world, but simultaneously focused on themselves.

To return to our cabin example, what Judge William considers a condition of ethical choice in Works of Love and is described as ‘transparency’ means that simply seeing the suffering of the family outside the cabin as compelling is not enough. They do not simply embody a general demand that such people be helped, but a demand that I help this family. I may well be struck by the sadness of their plight, but I must then say to myself: thou art the man, and the tale is told of you. This suffering is now up to me to fix. Achieving ethical consciousness requires that my focus shifts, at least in part, from the family outside in the cold to my own accountability for whether I serve their welfare or not.

Yet if this is Kierkegaard’s view of how ethical cognition operates, it is a somewhat unattractive one, in the same way that some of the figures described by Keller would be unattractive. If Kierkegaard wants us to shift attention from moral patients to our own status in relation to them, it seems we are acting no more ethically than the hospital visitor or cabin sharer whose heads are full of thoughts of virtue or duty instead of reflexive concern for the sufferer. A Kierkegaardian virtue ethicist starts to look decidedly self-absorbed in a way that seems incompatible with genuine ethical action. Does Kierkegaard have the resources to meet this objection?

I think there are two key elements within Kierkegaard’s work that can be used to mount such a defence. Firstly, as I have argued previously (Stokes 2010), Kierkegaard’s claims regarding making oneself and one’s moral status (ultimately, salvation or otherwise) the object of one’s thoughts make considerably more sense if we understand this self-awareness as non-thematized in character. Just as in a charitable reading of Kierkegaard, ‘thinking death into every moment’ cannot mean we are constantly thinking about death, so the sort of ‘transparency’ Kierkegaard endorses means our moral status must be present in our thoughts without being what our thought is about. The reformed gambler seeing his friend’s body hauled out of the Seine might explicitly think ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. But he also might not change the subject in this way, continuing to think about his friend but with the awareness of what his sad example means for the gambler’s own existence operative in the background, on a non-thematized level. When the Kierkegaardian agent goes to read the ‘mirror of the Word’, they need not pause every few seconds to think ‘this is me they are talking about!’ but may instead read with a sort of unspoken reflexivity built into their reading. And when they see a family struggling to pitch a tent in the cold and dark, they can act upon the thought that ‘I should do something about this!’ without stopping to think that thought explicitly. The intentional content of their consciousness remains the suffering family and their needs, while their own status as commanded to help nonetheless suffuses the experience in an implicit and unarticulated way. Virtue may operate without us having to think thoughts about virtue.

Yet for creatures like us, moral cognition all too often does not work this way, and Kierkegaard is painfully aware of the myriad ways in which we can evade such moral demands. We remain oblivious to what a situation asks of us (‘That poor family! Oh well.’), or we hesitate (‘Is anyone going to help those people?’) or try to talk our way out of helping (‘What if I invite them into my cabin and it turns out they are axe murderers?’). David needed to be reminded that he art the man, and we too very often fail to act with spontaneous love and instead need to be prompted, cajoled, and even coerced into doing what virtue would demand of us. Indeed, in Løgstrup’s telling, this is the level on which virtue always operates, as an ersatz motive to make us act in the right way after we’ve failed to do so spontaneously. So, in something of an analogy to Woodcock’s (2022) argument that self-effacement just is an unavoidable part of our psychology, the Kierkegaardian virtue ethicist can argue that failure to simply see our own involvement in moral situations, and our need for ‘thou art the man’ reminders, is just part of our fallen nature.

It seems, then, that the best we might hope for from a Kierkegaardian virtue ethics is something like what Annas promotes: a model of moral cognition in which at least some of the time we have to think about our own (lack of) virtue instead of about those who need our help. For Kierkegaard, pessimistic as he is about human motivation, that will be a great deal of the time.

However—and this is the second element of the defence—for Kierkegaard, this spontaneous, non-thetic character of ethical motivation is itself normative. In this, he differs from a contemporary virtue ethics defender like Woodcock, for whom self-effacement is not something we particularly need to worry about. Throughout Kierkegaard’s work, we find an emphasis on a need to respond to the world in a way that embodies our own responsibility but does not explicitly thematize ourselves. This is, for instance, a key feature of the subjective thinker described in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, who “acting, works through himself in his thinking about his own existence, consequently that he actually thinks what is thought by actualizing it, consequently that he does not think for a moment: Now, you must keep watch every moment—but that he keeps watch every moment” (Kierkegaard 1992a, p. 169). For Kierkegaard, thinking about ourselves explicitly is something we are ultimately enjoined to overcome, even if we are always doomed to fail. One thing that defenders of the idea that Kierkegaard is a virtue ethicist tend to agree on is that a Christian virtue ethics, and specifically a Lutheran one, cannot be realized successfully in the world in the same way the virtuous Aristotelian agent can (presumably) be realized. As Roberts puts it:

Are faith, love, gratitude, and humility unattainable? Perfect or absolutely flawless faith and love and gratitude are unattainable, in Kierkegaard’s view. To note this is just to note a general feature of Christian virtues: that only Christ perfectly exemplifies them. To assume they are not attainable to any extent at all would be to vitiate much of Kierkegaard’s missionary work in Christendom. A Christian virtue ethics must allow that perfection in the Christian virtues can be only approximated in this life.

(Roberts 2019, p. 329)

Rob Compaijen has likewise argued for a virtue–ethical reading of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the imitation of Christ, but that unlike in every other field of human praxis, where exemplary figures teach us what the excellences of that praxis are, Christ is an exemplar that we can never fully emulate (Compaijen 2011, pp. 349–51)8. A Kierkegaardian virtue ethics is, on some level, always an ethics of failure in the end. Yet the idea of spontaneous virtuous action, uncorrupted by thoughts of one’s own status or good, can stand as a regulative ideal that we are still enjoined to try to approximate. We are unlikely to ever become pure of heart, yet that does not excuse us from the work of purification.

7. Conclusions

The foregoing discussion is ultimately agnostic on the question of whether Kierkegaard is a virtue ethicist or not. Rather, I have sought to show that if he is a virtue ethicist, then he will need to address some recent challenges that virtue ethics of any stripe will need to address, and that, fortunately, his work does contain resources for dealing with these challenges. Such discussions always leave us open to a charge of anachronism, of trying to dragoon Kierkegaard into a metaethical debate so distant from his own concerns and intellectual horizons as to distort what he has to say. We do indeed need to tread carefully in treating Kierkegaard as an intellectual contemporary in this way. Yet if we are going to take Kierkegaard seriously as an ethical interlocutor—as I believe we should—then we are sometimes entitled to ask him our questions, as well as listen patiently to his own.