Question:

The text-book story of habituation is familiar to us, and I here purposely presuppose no special or thoroughly developed account of habituation or virtue. My concern is that replacing an emotionally monovalent agent with an emotionally ambivalent agent creates difficulties that are not easily resolved by nuancing our account of habituation. Below, I will briefly present the problematic, and then look forward to your proposed (dis)solutions!

The faimiliar story of habitation would go something like this. Our not yet virtuous moral agent, call her Monovalent Mona, feels fear at t in circumstances C (leaving C undefined for the moment). Excess of fear at t would be an act of cowardice, and thus not what the virtuous person would do at t. Deficiency of fear at t would be a foolhardy act, and thus not what the virtuous person would do at t. The courageous act at t will be the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, and is the action that a virtuous person would perform at t. Thus, to perform an act of virtue, Monovalent Mona must perform the mean act at t. This is a very simple story and of course many nuances would be added to any complete account of habituation.

Equally familiar: Many of us are emotionally confused in our less glorious moments, we simultaneously (or very nearly so) feel a number of emotions and it is not clear how to do justice to them all at the same time. In some cases, perhaps through no infirmity of our own, we have directly opposing emotions about the same person or event, e.g., loving and hating your ex at the same time, or hating and loving your country at the same time.

A mundane, but familiar, example developed by Patricia Greenspan ("A Case Of Mixed Feelngs: Ambivalence And The Logic Of Emotion" in Explaining Emotions, E. Rorty ed.) She describes a friendly rivalry for a choice position where you lose out, and your dear friend gets the position. Ambivalent Amy will feel happy and unhappy about the same event, and may continue to experience both emotional valences about this event. Again, we will want to add to or modify this simple example, but I think this is enough to establish the problematic at hand. Amy is emotionally ambivalent, unlike the emotionally monovalent Mona that typically gets run through the process of habituation.

A and B above are both intended to be uncontroversial (if incomplete) accounts of habituation and our emotional life respectively. My question is whether the simple story of habituation can accommodate emotionally ambivalent agents without substantive modification. If important modifications are needed, will it turn out that emotionally ambivalent agents will need special intellectual virtues (or other cognitive resources) that emotionally monovalent agents do not need in order to succeed in being habituated to virtue?

One way to see the process of habituating Amy is as follows: Amy starts with two ambivalent emotions (say love and hate), we reconcile Amy's conflicting emotional states to a monovalent emotional state where the resulting state is a mean between her emotional extremes at t. We then we determine excess and deficiency for Amy's monovalent state in the same way we did for Monovalent Mona. The act of virtue for Amy would then be the mean between these extremes, and everything proceeds in the usual way from there.

However, this is form of explanation is not clearly available to us if we are Aristotelian about habituation. For Monovalent Mona, we determine a mean act by projecting from her current emotional state. But, for Ambivalent Amy, the output of our first iteration of 'meaning' (the process of determining the mean) is another emotion, not an action. This is not only a departure from how we explain habituation for Mona, but appears to conflict with Aristotle's claim that emotions are not moral states because they are not voluntary states. If a monovalent emotional state is the output of 'meaning' Amy's ambivalent emotions, then we appear to take emotions as voluntary in a way Aristotle would not agree to. In the monovalent case, determining the mean takes us from emotion to action, whereas in the ambivalent case determining the mean takes us from emotions to emotion. I take this as a significant departure from the standard case.

Another possibility is that, rather than meaning to a monovalent emotional state, we determine the mean act for each of Amy's ambivalent emotions, and then determine the mean act between these two mean acts. I am not sure how this would work in a real case, but we have not only an additional iteration of the meaning process, but we are working from two mean acts to a mean of means, so to speak. In this case, our input is different from the standard case, since we typically mean from an emotional state to an act, not from an act to another act.

I am interested to hear what others think of this. Perhaps there is a simple solution here, and I am just muddying the waters to make them appear deep!