The Importance of Moral Heroes

Anne Frank and two theories of ethics

Image: Anne Frank, nationalgeographic.com

If you had to pick your moral heroes, who would they be? Would they be people you know personally, or people you know of only through their deeds?

Just as importantly, what qualities would you pick them for?

I recently found a new moral hero when reading a book I’ve long meant to read but had previously only read excerpts from: Anne Frank's Diary.

As is well known, Frank’s diary is remarkable for many reasons. It’s a document of life in hiding under dictatorship, a record of one young woman’s adolescence, and, of course, it’s a tragic and poignant echo of a life cut brutally short.

A further remarkable quality of Frank’s diary is that she serves as an exemplar of courage – even though she’s living in hiding.

How could this be?

Theories of Ethics

To understand why Anne Frank is an exemplar of courage, and a moral hero, we have to look at what ethics or morality is (I’ll use the terms interchangeably).

If you stopped someone on the street and asked them what ‘ethics’ was, they might well struggle to provide an answer.

Admittedly, part of the reason would be that you’ve just accosted them randomly, while they’re probably thinking about what to make for dinner. Even accounting for that, however, it’s a tricky question to answer.

Given a moment to think, your interviewee might say that ‘ethics’ means doing the right thing. That’s a reasonable answer, if a little general. When pressed on what doing the right thing means explicitly, they might then say that it means helping people or perhaps that it means following rules of good behaviour, like not stealing.

These two more specific answers roughly correspond to two philosophical theories of ethics, called consequentialism and deontology, respectively.

Consequentialism is the idea that what’s ethically correct is acting in a way that produces beneficial outcomes. For instance, a consequentialist would say that giving £10 to a homelessness charity is better than going to the pub and spending the money on beer, because the former action would almost certainly have more positive consequences.

As indicated, the emphasis here is not about what you mean to happen, but very much on what does happen. If the consequences of your action aren’t beneficial, then it wouldn’t matter what you intended: you didn’t do the ethically right thing.

Deontology, by contrast, holds that what is ethically right is following the appropriate moral rules. The best-known example of such an approach to ethics isn’t actually philosophical, but rather religious: the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses. These commandments are essentially rules of conduct: thou shalt not steal, honour thy mother and father, and so on.

There are philosophical equivalents to the Decalogue, of course, and what they share is an emphasis on whether one willingly acts in line with the moral rules in question.

Virtue

Now, there are good arguments for and against both approaches, which I’ll not rehearse here. Instead, I’ll only point out that they are incomplete by themselves because both are primarily about what we do and not also about what we are. The theory of ethics that focuses on the latter is known as virtue ethics.

Virtue ethics is as old as Western philosophy itself, but for the first several decades of the 20^th century it was out of favour amongst academic philosophers. This may have been because virtue ethics doesn’t lend itself neatly to law and public policy, in the way that deontology and consequentialism do, or perhaps it was simply because of the Victorian overtones of ‘virtue’, which made it seem passé.

By the 1990s, however, plenty of philosophers accepted that something important was missing from strictly consequentialist or deontological theories of ethics. This was the notion of good character: being a good person, which can underpin doing the morally right thing.

If you think that telling the truth because you’re an honest person is something deeper than telling the truth because it tends to have better consequences, then you might share this assessment.

The Golden Mean

Image: Aristotle, thecollector.com

Of course, any theory of virtue ethics has to pin down what a virtue is. Aristotle – who is the principal inspiration for this school of thought – thought that a virtue is a character trait that, when it appropriately informs one’s behaviour, helps us to live well.

If we understand ‘character trait’ to mean things like generosity, honesty, or wisdom, then this makes some sense. But it invites the question: what does ‘appropriately informs one’s behaviour’ mean?

For critics of virtue ethics, this is where the theory becomes infuriatingly vague. By contrast, admirers of virtue ethics – like myself – think that any vagueness in the theory is instead an appropriate reflection of the subtleties of morality.

Either way, Aristotle’s answer is that being virtuous is a contextual affair: a course of action that might be virtuous in one set of circumstances might be ill-advised in another.

Like I said, this is a little imprecise. He does give us something to work with, however, in the notion of the golden mean. This is the idea that a virtue generally lies on a spectrum between two vices, which are an excess and a deficiency of the virtue in question.

Take the aforementioned virtue of honesty. On the one hand, someone who regularly fails to tell the truth is dishonest, which is very clearly a vice. On the other hand, however, Aristotle tells us that being honest isn’t actually about telling the truth at all times and in all circumstances. Sometimes it’s appropriate to lie to spare someone’s feelings, or to prevent a great harm being done. Someone who told the truth literally all the time would be insensitive to their social context, and thus excessively honest. Honesty, therefore, lies in a golden mean between the extremes.

Courage in Hiding

This may have helped clarify things a bit, but we can go further still. Aristotle says that role models can help us in two ways: firstly, by pinpointing what a virtue looks like in a particular context, and secondly, by motivating us to live up to their example.

One such example, for me, is Anne Frank, who exhibited the virtue of courage in the most difficult of circumstances.

Frank famously lived with her family in the secret annexe of a warehouse in Amsterdam. Her parents had fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands in 1934, but, as life in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam became too dangerous, they went into hiding in 1942.

For just over two years she lived in secret: often remaining still and silent for hours on end while people were in the warehouse; never opening the windows or curtains during the day, let alone going outside, even at the height of summer. They ate meagre and often terrible food, including mouldy vegetables, and they shared a single toilet that frequently blocked up amongst eight people. It was, clearly, a very tough existence for anybody, let alone a teenager longing for freedom.

And yet, despite all of the above, Frank’s spirit remained unbowed. She regularly complained, of course, as any sane person would – but she did not let her situation get the better of her. Frank’s diary entries reveal a well of resilience, joie de vivre, and remarkable strength of character. In other words, she is a model of moral courage, maintaining her integrity even in the most terrible of circumstances.

This serves, I think, to illuminate Aristotle’s point about the contextuality of virtues such as courage. In Frank’s situation, the courageous thing to do would not have been to try to fight or undermine her oppressors. That might have made sense for adults who could move reasonably freely – as was the case with members of the French Resistance, who undoubtedly were courageous. But for a person barely out of childhood, targeted by a genocidal regime for her ethnicity, it would have been reckless. Instead, hiding was entirely compatible with courage: and her great strength of character is proof of the latter.

This is why, for me, Anne Frank is a moral hero: she embodied the virtue of courage, which informed her actions in the right way in the circumstances given to her. Even though most of us will never know such circumstances, and be called upon to respond with exactly that manifestation of courage, her example is a reminder of the depths of the human spirit, and can serve as an inspiration to us all.