The power to promise and forgive: Stabilizers of action and the moral ecology

The spider and the ant

Before moving on, however, I will introduce a metaphor, and use it to paint a picture that might help express what I have in mind. I borrow it from the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2011) image of the spider. Ingold has developed this metaphor in a discussion with Actor–Network Theory (ANT), and he depicts a contrast between the life of the spider and the life of the ant (which is, needless to say, emblematic of ANT). Ingold is in many ways supportive of ANT, but also has some reservations, and this parallels my own relationship to the theory of moral ecology. He tells us that the ant, according to the vocabulary of ANT, acts as an act-ant (p. 90), that is, derives its agency from the entire network of associations in which it takes part. It is a central assumption for actor–network theorists that agency is distributed across networks of actants. Furthermore, ANT scholars (e.g., Latour, 2005) will argue that anything can belong to the network, ants (or humans) as well as nonants (and nonhumans), so we should in principle abstain from locating agency anywhere in particular in the network. It is the network as a whole that is doing the action.

Not so for the spider, Ingold explains through his parable that is framed as a dialogue between the spider and the ant. For, as the very articulate spider tells the reader, “The web, in short, is the very condition of my agency. But it is not, in itself, an agent” (Ingold, 2011, p. 93). The spider lives in a web—a lifeworld—that it itself has spun, and this enables the spider to catch its prey and move around in what would otherwise be free air. The web is thus a creation made by the spider, and this creation at the same time enables its movements and life processes—and constrains them. The web is a condition of the spider’s acts, but contrary to ANT, it would be misguided to say that the web is an actor or actant. It is still the spider that is doing the action, but always on the background of the web.

Ingold finds that this is a truer image of how not only spiders, but also human beings live and act: the power to act is located with the human being, but it is always conditioned by the results of these powers in nonrandom ways. According to Ingold, we should thus replace the acronym of the ANT with the SPIDER: Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness (Ingold, 2011, p. 94). This is what I will explore in the remainder of this article, focusing specifically on the moral skills and embodied responsiveness of human beings. A human life is only possible if one develops skills that enable participation in the social practices, which are constantly recreated and renewed through embodied responsiveness. The moral ecology is like a spider’s web for humans (what Ingold refers to as a meshwork), and just as the spider does not move about in a static and pregiven web, but constantly creates the web through its operations, so it is for human beings whose powers to stabilize action (“moral web-construction,” we could say) notably involve promising and forgiving in the web of the moral ecology. These significant moral acts can in a sense be seen as nonconventional and nonconstructed conditions for social constructions.

The moral ecology of social practices

The ecological approach to psychology was developed first and foremost by J. J. Gibson (1979). Gibson was concerned specifically with visual perception and developed an account of how humans perceive the world without a need for internal, mental representations. Gibson argued that information about the world is directly available in the light that meets the organism and is ready to be “picked up” by an active, embodied creature. Perception is in this way a function of action, as knowledge about distance and depth is revealed as the organism moves around in the environment. The idea that action knowledge (“I can” or “I know how”) is more fundamental than representational knowledge (“I know that”) unites Gibson with pragmatists such as Dewey (1896) and phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002), both of whom addressed muscle memory and “motor intentionality” as basic for an understanding of how human beings exist in and know the world. We know the world by moving through it and manipulating it, and not by copying it in a private, inner world of mental representations, which these scholars found to be illusory.

To explain how we can know what to do with objects, and what things are for, Gibson coined the term affordances—a concept that points at the same time to the abilities of the organism (to manipulate objects, to sit, to walk, etc.) and to the properties of objects. It is a relational concept involving subject and object at the same time. Affordance is also a normative concept about how something ought to be handled or done. Affordances, in other words, provide us with reasons for action, but they do not as such cause behaviors in a deterministic sense. Gibson (1979) argued that the “perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object . . . it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object. . . . Physics may be value-free, but ecology is not” (p. 140). Ecological psychology—even in its fundamental form as a theory of visual perception—is a science of value and meaning, locating these not in the minds of humans, but in an embodied creature’s relationship with the world—the ecology.

Still and Good (1998) later extended the Gibsonian framework to encompass moral issues. They argued that Gibson’s view of direct perception can favorably be coupled with the moral phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas. They contended that ecological information specifies ethical demands, just as it specifies morally neutral affordances like a chair’s sit-down-ability. In human encounters we can, if we have been provided with adequate moral habits in our upbringing, directly perceive the ethical responsibilities we have towards others, and such perception is in their view unmediated by representational knowledge, rules, and theories. Also, Hodges and Baron (1992) developed Gibson’s ideas further by focusing on values as embedded in the “environmental arrays” and activities of perceivers. They understand perception as an “achievement term” in that it is value-realizing.

When we think about moral properties of the world that are not simply physical (such as the climb-ability of stairs or the sit-down-ability of chairs), we need to understand that these exist within social practices. In Brinkmann (2004), I argued that we therefore need to couple the ecological perspective with a theory of social practices if we want to understand the moral world in which we live as persons. This led to the idea that there is a moral ecology of social practices. The affordances that give us reasons for actions as moral creatures exist within historically developed social practices; at least according to contemporary practice theorists that subscribe to the so-called “practice turn” (Schatzki et al., 2001).

An important source of inspiration for theorizing morality in terms of social practices came from Alasdair MacIntyre (1981/1985) and his influential After Virtue that reintroduced virtue ethics into the philosophical discussion after years of debates between the exclusive choices of deontology and consequentialism. This was a breath of fresh air, which also succeeded in coupling moral theory with the social sciences that were slowly beginning their practice turn. MacIntyre defined a practice as follows:

Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity. (p. 187)

Practices are thus configurations of activity, which have certain standards of excellence. ¹ These standards show newcomers what they ought to do in order to excel in the practice, and this provides them with reasons for action. There are simply better and worse ways of participating in any given practice. This is what constitutes it as a practice, and persons who strive for adequate participation in social practices are at the same time trying to take part in the human goods that are internal to those practices. Football, agriculture, architecture, and politics are examples of practices. One must possess certain character traits or virtues, as MacIntyre (1981/1985) calls them in accordance with Aristotelian virtue ethics, if one is to be able to participate adequately in a practice. One should perhaps be persistent, careful, and patient in order to achieve those standards of excellence that define the practice of agriculture. Patience is thus not a value-neutral, purely descriptive concept, for it embodies a unity of fact and value. Of course, the concept has descriptive elements; the observable behavior of waiting to harvest until the time is right, for example, but it is also an evaluative concept of praise when employed in the practice of agriculture.

Following philosophers such as Bernard Williams (1985), who developed the notion of “thick ethical concepts,” I have argued that practices express a union of fact and value (Brinkmann, 2004). We have to share an evaluative point of view in order to understand what holds all instances of a concept such as patience together. Williams argued that although thick ethical concepts are intrinsically evaluative, they are also guided by properties in the world in their application and are therefore descriptive. It is not up to me to subjectively decide when someone can rightly be called patient. There are right ways and wrong ways of using this concept, which means that thick ethical concepts pick out real features of the world of practices—moral properties and affordances—and we thereby have a way to overcome the fact–value split in psychology and other human sciences (Brinkmann, 2009). Some aspects of our world—particularly those existing in our moral ecology—are only what they are (in a descriptive sense) because there is an implicit understanding of their normative worth (in an evaluative sense). As Gibson said, physics may be value-free, but ecology is not—and certainly not when we address the moral ecology.

A key aspect of thick ethical concepts is that they—like Gibsonian affordances—are guided by worldly practices (and can be applied more or less correctly) and they are also action guiding within social practices. But situations may arise where someone’s participation in one kind of practice (e.g., the practice of artistry) is incompatible with their participation in another (e.g., the practice of agriculture or, say, family life). That was indeed the case for the painter Paul Gauguin, who was split between his art and his family. The practice–internal values and goods involved in one practice will thus be incompatible with the values involved in another. Then how should one decide what to do? In his moral theory of practices, MacIntyre (1981/1985) was aware of this problem, and he thus posited the need to appreciate that some goods transcend all social practices. Referring to the ecological framework, we can say that human beings, unlike spiders for example, are creatures that exist in and across a number of quite different ecologies that confront us with very different reasons for action. An account of practice–internal goods is therefore only partial:

Without an overriding conception of the telos of a whole human life, conceived as a unity, our conception of certain individual virtues has to remain partial and incomplete. . . . Unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. (MacIntyre, 1981/1985, pp. 202–203)

We must thus posit a “teleion agathon,” a single complete good, which is the good of a whole human life that determines the place and proportions of other more partial practice–internal goods. In Aristotle’s theory of the virtues, it is important that the various values and goods are ordered properly in their right proportions in the course of a human life. That a human being can move between ecological contexts in the right way, one could say. This is what constitutes eudaimonia or happiness in the sense of human flourishing. This is about the shape of our lives, and awareness of such a good helps us confront and choose between incompatible moral reasons for action.

Since his ground-breaking magnum opus, After Virtue, MacIntyre (1981/1985) argued that the two virtues of integrity and constancy are necessary in order for us to exercise the other moral virtues that are internal to social practices (MacIntyre, 1999). One must strive to be the same person across contexts and practices (integrity) and pursue the same goods through extended periods of time (constancy) if one is to be a competent and trustworthy moral agent. Integrity, or the good of human life as a unity, is thus a fundamental human value within his framework, which is necessary in order to exercise trustworthy moral judgment. It is this aspect of MacIntyre’s thinking, which he has not himself pursued further to a great extent, which I believe we need to articulate and build upon if we want to understand how our moral ecology stems from human powers of promising and forgiving, both of which are deeply related to integrity and constancy.

In summary, with the updated Aristotelian idea of social practices and practice–internal goods, we become able to understand the character of the moral ecology, the way the human world presents us with moral reasons and demands. There is no clear fact–value distinction in a moral ecology. We cannot understand the affordances and reasons for action if we separate the descriptive from the normative. Nor can we understand the human capacities needed to live adequately in a moral ecology if we separate fact from value. This is partly because such an ecology can only be satisfactorily described with a vocabulary of thick ethical concepts, and partly because it is comprised of practices that always already denote something functional and normative (Brinkmann, 2004). It has even been argued that this blocks the objection that one would otherwise expect, namely, that this represents a case of the naturalistic fallacy (the attempt to derive prescriptive sentences from descriptive ones). MacIntyre argues that this is not a problem regarding functional concepts. Say, from “this is a watch” we can infer that “it ought to tell time accurately,” because if it fails to do so, it fails to be what it is in a certain sense (Brinkmann, 2009). A watch is simply defined as something that ought to tell time, so if it does not, it is defective as a matter of fact. From “they are a farmer” we can validly conclude that “they ought to do whatever a farmer ought to do.” A watch and a farmer are functional concepts that refer to the proper function of something within a range of social practices, and here there is no fact–value split.

Personal moral powers and stabilizers of action

Until now, I have reiterated the theory of the moral ecology as social practices. The human world is comprised of collective activities in which we participate as individuals. Social practices present us with affordances to act in accordance with standards of excellence inherent to the given practices, and these are usually called reasons for action in the terminology of moral philosophy. A psychology of human action is in my view unthinkable if one does not take into account that we live our lives within these contexts of value, where everything that we do can in principle be assessed in a normative way, which is what makes our activities actions (if by “action” we mean something that can be justified with reference to reasons). Something can count as “playing the piano” only because there is a difference between better and worse ways of playing the piano. Something is “teaching mathematics” only because there is a difference between better and worse ways of teaching mathematics. Something is a human action only relative to the practices that constitute actions as such, and these practices are defined by the values and goods that one may realize by excelling in the practice and by the virtues needed to perform the relevant actions.

Social practices thus represent the moral spider webs in which we operate, and into which we strive to socialize the young. And, to stay with the spider metaphor, MacIntyre (1999) has tried to address the qualities of the spiders (moral agents) that are not specific to any particular place in the web but concern the capabilities of spiders to spin their webs in the first place. He called them integrity and constancy, but I believe that these have so far been undertheorized in a social practice/ecological perspective on human (moral) life, so in this section, I will introduce a perspective from Hannah Arendt’s philosophy on “stabilizers of action” to analyze how the personal moral powers enable human beings to affect their moral ecologies.

Perhaps the best way of understanding the relevance of Arendt (1958/1998) for the matters discussed in this article is to quote from one of her most famous books, The Human Condition. The quote is from a context where she discusses Descartes and his method of systematic doubt. Arendt here proclaims that “even if there is no truth, [humans] can be truthful, and even if there is no reliable certainty, [humans] can be reliable” (p. 279). This could at once be an existential credo and the basis of a theory of how social life depends on human moral powers of truthfulness and reliability—or what MacIntyre (1999) referred to as integrity and constancy. The quote also reflects the major political upheavals of the 20th century, which presented humans with an historical situation where it was necessary, as Arendt (2018) liked to put it, to think without a banister. This is imperative when the conditions for life and for thought are constantly undergoing change—when we live in what Bauman (2000) called liquid modernity, where stable forms and structures seemingly liquify and shift. How can we live together under such conditions, and how can we find an existential standpoint? Can there still be a human nature—or at least a human condition—worth caring about? It is here that Arendt’s ideas become particularly relevant, since they concern how to live in a moral ecology under liquid modern conditions without stable grounds and banisters to hold on to, but where truthfulness and human reliability nonetheless retain their importance. Although she responded in her philosophy to the emerging liquid modern times, Arendt was no postmodern relativist, but deeply inspired by Aristotle’s view of humans as capable of intelligent thought, ethical life, and public action. In that sense, she was a realist in a way compatible with Gibson’s ecological approach and the nonmediational realism spelled out by Dreyfus and Taylor (2015; along with not only Aristotle, but also Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein).

The context of the quote is Arendt’s analysis of the historical transformation from the Middle Ages to an era of enlightenment and scientific methodology and reason. In this new world, truth and reliability were no longer existing in the world as such, as the world was seen as subject to blind forces of nature. It therefore had to be a human task to bring these phenomena into the world through our truthfulness and reliability. ² But why? Why should we strive to tell the truth and act reliably? Since stability is not a given in the world, it is up to humans to create it; to stabilize a contingent and fluid world by striving to speak truthfully and act reliably. We cannot understand these existential phenomena if we reduce them to their instrumental value. There is something intrinsically valuable to telling the truth and being reliable, Arendt thought. They are in some ways morally primitive. They are the kinds of phenomena we point to when we try to explain what the concept of morality means.

In a book on Arendt, the Danish historian of ideas Schanz (2007) has argued that there is in her philosophy an emphasis on “stabilizers of action,” as he calls them. It is these that I believe are powers that enable us to develop and live in a moral ecology, akin to the spider’s ability to make its web. The stabilizers of action are meant to explain how the human world of action can be relatively patterned and ordered, even for a thinker like Arendt, who otherwise stressed plurality and natality. Natality, for Arendt, referred to the fact that we, as humans, are born and give birth, which is where she saw the potential for hope and belief in the creative power of human action—something of a contrast to the dominant Marxist theories of the day that saw humans as determined by external economic circumstances. Those social theories that begin with stable structures (e.g., functionalism, structuralism, etc.) have a hard time explaining creativity and newness, but since Arendt begins from the exact opposite standpoint by stressing novelty and creative action, she needs somehow to explain stability and order. Therefore, she needs the “stabilizers of action” in her framework as fundamental moral values that function for us as normative vectors. Schanz (2007) argues that there are two basic kinds of stabilizers in Arendt’s philosophy: promises and forgiveness. Both of these are addressed by Arendt (1958/1998) in The Human Condition.

Promising is forward-looking and commits the person to do something and be held accountable in the future if the promise is not fulfilled (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 245). Promising, Arendt tells us, is the opposite of domination, where one uses force to control others in the future. Complete control and domination would in principle destroy the possibility of action, since acting is done freely and creatively, for its own sake and not because of fear of punishment. Domination is instrumental and reduces the other to a tool to be used for external purposes. There is thus a sense in which relations of dominance threaten the fundamental features of moral ecology. Arendt approached promising from a broad phenomenological perspective, but her view compares nicely with how the philosopher of language John Austin approached it around the same time from the perspective of language. Austin (1962) argued for a very fundamental notion of promising in claiming that all factual statements involve promising; even something as simple as making an observation about the world is, in a functional sense, the same as making a promise (see Lovibond, 2002). Even when we say completely innocuous things like “the sun is shining today” we commit ourselves to believing it (until we learn otherwise) and acting upon it (e.g., not finding it necessary to bring an umbrella). To make a promise involves declaring oneself willing to be held accountable for it. The very fact that we make statements about the world means that we are in principle declaring ourselves willing to be held accountable for them. When we say, “the sun is shining,” or anything else, the statement always implies “I promise you!”

In this sense, the promise is important as a stabilizer of action that orders human activities in forward-looking movements through the expression of trust and credibility. Our ability to enter into lasting relationships with others, and even communication in general, is based on an implicit assumption that we will stick to our promises. Reliability, one of MacIntyre’s (1999) virtues across specific practices, is based on the trust that we generally try to do as we have promised. This also requires constancy, or what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1992) called “self-constancy.” This is close to the notion of personal integrity and is what enables others to count on me. It can also be thought of as a precondition of the human practice of promising, for it only makes sense to make promises and commit to actions over time because we understand ourselves as being the same over time—because we have a more or less coherent identity (integrity or self-constancy). And we only have this because we are able to view our lives as a single narrative—as a story that stretches from birth to death. If I am not the same person next month, when I am expected to live up to a promise, as I am today when I am making the promise, then I might not feel bound by the promise. So, we have to strive to remain the same in this important ethical sense. This is not always easy, especially not in times of liquid modernity, to borrow Bauman’s (2000) term again, where demands for change, flexibility, and personal adaptability are everywhere.

However, we do not always live up to our promises, and not all actions are forward-looking in this normative way. Humans are often not moral saints, but fundamentally fallible creatures. This is why a moral ecology is unthinkable without forgiveness (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 236). Just as promising is forward-looking and is the opposite of domination, so forgiveness is backward-looking and is the opposite of revenge. Arendt (who was Jewish herself) credits Jesus of Nazareth with the discovery of the power of forgiveness, and she emphasizes that the religious language he used to express it is no reason not to take forgiveness seriously in a philosophical anthropology. It is simply foundational if we want to understand how humans exist together. After Arendt, Jacques Derrida developed a radicalized deconstructive view of forgiveness. Simply put, Derrida (2001) maintained that only the unforgivable can be forgiven—or, in his own words “forgiveness only forgives the unforgivable” (p. 32). The reason is quite simple: if something is forgivable, then there is no reason to forgive it. Only the unforgivable requires forgiveness. Forgiveness is therefore only possible by virtue of its impossibility. Or, conversely put, forgiveness is impossible—which is precisely what makes it possible.

Arendt would probably not go this far (Brinkmann, 2022). She stated about radically evil acts “that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance” (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 241). However, Derrida’s aporia of forgiveness is in line with Arendt’s concept of newness or natality: even in the context of radical evil, something new can always emerge in the wake of groundless forgiveness. Forgiveness is not determined from the outside, it cannot be understood within a utilitarian logic of cost–benefit, and so it exemplifies what Arendt wanted to point to with her notion of natality. It is expressed by a human power to forgive, however rare it may be, to forgive unconditionally. To preserve the possibility of doing so is important in a moral ecology.

With promising and forgiveness, we deal with concepts that seem to be irreducibly tied to the moral agent as a person. One cannot say that it is a whole practice or a network that forgives, promises, and is held accountable in the case that the promise is not fulfilled. These are thus concepts that are aligned more naturally with the spider metaphor than with the ant. Even more so if the web of moral ecologies can only be spun by actors/spiders in virtue of their powers of promising and forgiving. These are what stabilize the actions of human beings and therefore the moral ecology in which we live our lives.

In his long career as a philosophical psychologist, Harré (1983) always emphasized that human “moral orders” (close to my notion of moral ecology) are populated by persons who have powers to act, and these powers cannot be placed anywhere else than in the person, as this would eliminate personal responsibility. However, Harré did not go deeply into the exact nature of these powers (to promise and forgive), which is why I have found a need to go to the philosophical anthropology of Arendt in this context. We also need to understand how the personal powers can be developed in the course of a human life, which I will address in the concluding section of this paper.

The psychological development of personal powers

After having characterized the moral ecology as a web of practices and the person as a moral agent who contributes to the creation and maintenance of the ecology through their moral powers, it is time to return to Ingold’s (2011) approach to the SPIDER (Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness) and ask how the moral powers or skills develop. How does someone become capable of promising, forgiving, and the kind of integrity and self-constancy needed to spin the webs? Another way to frame the question is to ask how someone may come to see their life as a whole, since this is presupposed in acts of promising and forgiving. Promising makes sense, because one expects to be the same person in the future, when the promise is to be fulfilled (one needs to feel committed); and forgiving makes sense, because one understands that one was the same person in the past whose rights were somehow violated by a perpetrator.

In her book Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler (2005) described the development of the person (or “subject” as she prefers) as a creature who can account for their actions. Butler is especially interested in the moral dimension of the emergence of the subject, or “the force of morality in the production of the subject,” as she says (p. 10). Morality’s relation to the subject is in her view prior to the contrary relation that is most often discussed by philosophers and psychologists, namely, the relation a subject establishes to morality. As Butler argues, there can be no human subject before, outside, or free from morality. ³ Our moral education necessarily takes place within a moral ecology that is already in place beforehand. We do not begin from scratch, but, like spiders, we come from eggs that are themselves nested in the kinds of web that we are supposed to spin further along.

Butler (2005) refers to Nietzsche, who argued that we become accountable and self-reflexive beings in the course of development “through fear and terror” (p. 11). This dramatic way of putting it is meant to point to the idea that we only begin to give accounts of our actions because someone in power has told us to, within an established system of justice and punishment: “the accusation of guilt produces the possibility of a subject,” Butler tells us (p. 85). This can be understood in quite concrete developmental terms, as when a parent turns to a child and tries to locate their powers of action in a chain of events, for example, by asking: “Why did you spill that milk?” The child is thereby approached as a responsible subject, when asked to give an account, and this account will normally be in the form of a narrative and determine whether the person was the cause of the wrongdoing or not. In that sense, as Butler says, “narrative capacity constitutes a precondition for giving an account of oneself and assuming responsibility for one’s actions through that means” (p. 12).

Although Butler comes from quite a different philosophical background (informed by figures such as Foucault, Nietzsche, and Lévinas) than Gibson, MacIntyre, and Arendt, there is considerable convergence in their view of the subject/person as formed through participation in relations and practices, where developmentally embodied responsiveness emerges. According to Butler, the subject comes into existence as a moral agent when the individual is asked (or forced) to give a narrative account of themself in relation to some shared set of norms (that may have been violated). This account will involve reason-giving and will either explain through appropriate reasons why the subject was not responsible for what happened (thus offering an excuse) or will retain responsibility (and perhaps offer an apology; Brinkmann, 2010). In this sense, the subject is born in relation to a set of norms, “the very being of the self is dependent, not just on the existence of the other in its singularity (as Levinas would have it), but also on the social dimension of normativity that governs the scene of recognition” (Butler, 2005, p. 23). Butler addresses the paradox stemming from the idea that the subject is always also to some extent “dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence” (p. 8), and does not in that sense know itself fully, and yet, it must nevertheless produce accounts of what it does. Even if there are limits to narratability and accountability, since subjects cannot explain why they have developed as they have, they must still narrate and give accounts of their actions. The formation of habits, dispositions, desires, and tastes fade into the unnarratable parts of our past.

There is in Butler’s (2005) story of the emergence of a subject with moral powers a contradictory (and therefore dynamic) structure to the account-giving subject (Brinkmann, 2010). The subject is formed when it is forced to give an account of itself, often framed as a narrative, in relation to some moral norms. Here, the subject is originally born in Nietzschean “fear and terror,” for the one who is asked to give an account is not yet an account-giving subject, so they do not yet know what it means. It is analogous to the story of Genesis, where Adam and Eve are told by their maker that they must not eat the forbidden fruit, but they cannot know what “forbidden” means, since this knowledge only comes as a result of consuming it (with knowledge of good and evil). Adam and Eve are formed as moral subjects by the prohibition itself, because God expects more from them than they can actually live up to, which is necessary in order for them to eventually become what He expects. Likewise, as human beings we must expect more of our moral apprentices than they can perform in order for them to be able to perform as we expect.

Although Butler (2005) does not make the link, there are close similarities here to Vygotsky’s developmental theory, according to which the higher mental functions (thinking, willing, etc.) are formed when adults interpret, and act upon, the child’s innate behaviors (reflexes) in a zone of proximal development, thereby transforming biological dispositions into social acts. The famous example discussed by Vygotsky (1978) concerns what happens when a child is trying to reach something by performing a grasping movement. Adults subsequently bring that something to the child, who thereby learns to perform a pointing gesture. Learning to use social signs, such as intentionally pointing one’s finger, means developing a second nature and entering the moral ecology of social practices. Vygotsky did not discuss the moral ecology surrounding this development, but—to make the point simple—not everything that the child points at will be brought to the child, and there is definitely such a thing as inappropriate pointing (e.g., unsuitably pointing at someone), when the child is likely to be reprimanded rather than rewarded for pointing. Thus, an important aspect of learning to point involves learning when to point (and when not to), and at what. There is a moral normativity to pointing as to all other uses of signs in social situations and to all higher mental functions as such. Being a person means to be accountable in relation to this moral normativity. Or, as Ingold (2011) would say, it means being responsive to the moral reasons that are laid out in the moral ecology. As he said in the SPIDER formula: Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness. Skilled practice is developed relationally within the moral ecology as argued by Butler and Vygotsky.

In conclusion, we can return to the idea of self-constancy articulated by Ricoeur (1992). He argued that being able to give accounts of oneself presupposes some unity and self-constancy, which he presented as an essentially ethical notion: “Self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting [themselves] so that others can count on that person. Because someone is counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another” (p. 165). This means that self-constancy, as Ricoeur depicts it, is primarily for the other whereas other moral philosophers (e.g., MacIntyre, 1981/1985), have depicted it as something good for the agent themself. Perhaps we can conclude that it is an ethical capability that benefits both the agent themself and others. Lovibond (2002) has referred to this as an ethical quest for predictability. She claims that it is an ethical ideal to be able to speak as one person, being self-consistent over time, which demands a process of upbringing “that creates a unitary character out of the various motivational ‘fragments’ present in us from day one in the form of transient impulses” (p. 71). This is the “teleion agathon,” as MacIntyre (1981/1985) put it. Again, something of a challenge to achieve in a liquid modern world.

Conclusions

The purpose of this article has been to paint a credible picture of human beings as moral creatures in a value-laden world, or what I have referred to as the moral ecology. In previous work, I have drawn on the work of MacIntyre and focused on the moral ecology as a web of practices with inherent values and goods. MacIntyre argued that virtues such as integrity and constancy are needed, because moral agents move between and across social practices, and there must be something that ties their lives together if they are to be trustworthy and not simply merge with the norms of the local practices.

I then built on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of promising and forgiving to argue that that these are “stabilizers of action” that cut across various practices and constitute a moral life of self-constancy. Human beings are moral agents in virtue of these moral powers, and they must be cultivated within our social practices. I introduced Butler’s (2005) framework to briefly analyze how humans develop these powers by being held accountable, even before they can be said to possess these powers. This is in line with Vygotsky’s (1978) developmental theory of the zone of proximal development, according to which we become what we are, because others believe that we can do a bit more than we actually can.

I believe my analysis corresponds quite well to Ingold’s (2011) depiction of the spider: a creature that acts within a web that it continually recreates, but where action is located in the powers of the creature and not in the web as such. Similarly, human beings can be accountable moral creatures if their powers have been properly cultivated, but they cannot acquire their powers outside the “web” (the moral ecology). Future research can hopefully apply this conceptual framework in empirical studies that may surpass the traditional actor–structure dichotomies. It may also enable us to transcend the perennial discussion about the social construction of morality—is morality socially constructed or not? Yes, the moral ecology is in a sense constructed by the moral agents that inhabit it in virtue of their powers (e.g., to promise and forgive rather than dominate and seek revenge), but these powers concern objective moral values that are not conventional, but rather presupposed in conventions and social constructions. In a more overarching manner, approaching psychological phenomena through the lenses articulated in the present article would need to involve giving up the illusion of developing a value-neutral science of the human mind and life. If a human life is necessarily led within a moral ecology, and if this ecology is structured by the values of social practices and the normative acts performed by human beings, then a value-neutral science of psychology will be wholly inadequate to understand its subject matter.