{"id":3186,"date":"2017-07-13T07:00:24","date_gmt":"2017-07-13T06:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=3186"},"modified":"2018-08-19T12:44:42","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T11:44:42","slug":"is-hope-a-virtue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2017\/07\/13\/is-hope-a-virtue\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Hope a Virtue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Iain Brassington<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s perfectly understandable that hope should have featured so prominently in the coverage of the Charlie Gard case<\/a><\/span>; each proposal is presented as offering fresh hope, each reversal presented as dashing hopes.\u00a0 In either case, hope is something presented as desirable.\u00a0 A bit more deeply, hope is one of the Theological Virtues, and so anyone who has grown up in the West, irrespective of their doctrinal commitments, will come from a culture in which there’s an overwhelming sense of hope being something good.\u00a0 For some, it may even be an unalloyed good – I’ll return to that in a moment.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a culture in which hope is not<\/em> fairly straightforwardly desirable: in which, that is, hope’s desirability is the exception rather than the rule.<\/p>\n

Hard, but not impossible.<\/p>\n

Here’s Hesiod, telling the story of Pandora in Works and Days<\/em> (from Dorothea Wender’s translation for Penguin):<\/p>\n

Before this time men lived upon the earth
\nApart from sorrow and painful work,
\nFree from disease, which lets the Death-gods in.
\nBut now the woman opened up the cask,
\nAnd scattered pains and evils among men.
\nInside the cask’s hard walls remained one thing,
\nHope, only, which did not fly through the door.
\nThe lid stopped her, but all the others flew,
\nThousands of troubles, wandering the earth.
\nThe earth is full of evils, and the sea.
\nDiseases come to visit men by day
\nAnd, uninvited, come again at night
\nBringing their pains in silence, for they were
\nDeprived of speech by Zeus the Wise.\u00a0 And so
\nThere is no way to flee the mind of Zeus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hesiod is ambiguous about hope here.\u00a0 Was it placed in the cask by Zeus as a sort of remedy for all the other evils?\u00a0 That’s the interpretation of the story to which I was exposed as a 10-year-old.\u00a0 It’s plausibly quite a Christianised reading, with Hope as the consolation for the cares of the world, and a shield against despair.\u00a0 That might have been how some contemporary Greeks took the story, too.\u00a0 But there’s nothing in the text to indicate that it’s the correct interpretation; it does seem to be something we’d have to infer based on an assumption that Hope is good, and Hesiod offers no grounds for that assumption.\u00a0 And there’d be puzzles left to solve for this interpretation to work.\u00a0 Why would Zeus, intent on making humanity suffer, provide an antidote to suffering?\u00a0 Well, maybe he had a change of heart.\u00a0 But that seems implausible, since hope was sent with all the evils of the world.\u00a0 A change of heart would be better expressed by not sending the evils – or not quite so many of them – in the first place.<\/p>\n

Might Hope itself have been one of the evils sent by Zeus, then?\u00a0 That’s be perplexing to a modern audience, but that counts for little; Hesiod was alive at roughly the same time as Homer, in the seventh or eighth century BC, so there’s plenty of time for all kinds of cultural contortions.\u00a0 Maybe Hesiod’s audience was one in which hope had undesirable connotations.<\/p>\n

But why should hope be seen as evil?\u00a0 Well, Nietzsche has an answer to that in \u00a771 of Human, all too Human<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Hope<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Pandora brought the jar with the evils and opened it.\u00a0 It was the gods’ gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the “lucky jar”.\u00a0 Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it.\u00a0 Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night.\u00a0 One single evil had not yet slipped out of the jar.\u00a0 As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside.\u00a0 So now man has the lucky jar in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure.\u00a0 It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it.\u00a0 For he does not know that the jar which Pandora brought was the jar of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good – it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew.\u00a0 To that end, he gives man hope.\u00a0 In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, it’s less the case that where there’s life there’s hope than it is the case that where there’s hope there’s life; and life is a necessary condition of Zeus making us miserable.\u00a0 Why the Greeks’d cook up that kind of mythos is unclear; but maybe that’s just how they rolled.\u00a0 (How Hope got into the world – for good or ill – given that Pandora closed the lid on it is a further question.)<\/p>\n

Love him though I do, Nietzsche is admittedly philosophy’s greatest contrarian and hyperbolist, so we probably oughtn’t to take his word for it.\u00a0 And he’s not always quite so dismissive of certain kinds of hope anyway, with a few lines scattered here and there throughout his work that express a limited and rather special kind of hope about what the future may hold for humanity.<\/p>\n

But the general idea, that hope is more ambiguous than we might like to admit, holds good.\u00a0 And that casts its own light on how we should regard its place in stories like Charlie Gard’s.\u00a0 Even if we think that hope is generally a virtue (giving us a reason to act to pursue the good for ourselves or others, for example), it doesn’t follow from that that it’s the overwhelming virtue, or that it’s always a virtue.\u00a0 One can be over-optimistic, and let hope override judgement; this can have undesirable outcomes.\u00a0 Sometimes the admirable thing to do is to abandon hope in favour of pragmatism: for example, a person who spends his entire paycheque for the month on lottery tickets in the hope that they’ll solve his money worries is not acting in an admirable way, however earnest he may be.<\/p>\n

Hope can be self-destructive; but it can also destroy others.\u00a0 It is possible to imagine situations in which one person’s interests end up being sacrificed for the sake of preserving another’s hope, or because that other person’s hope has outgrown its proper place.<\/p>\n

In short, there’re times when an all-else-being-equal virtue might turn vicious.\u00a0 The knack is knowing when hope is motivating desirable actions, and when it’s turned bad.\u00a0 Its mere presence is not enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Iain Brassington It’s perfectly understandable that hope should have featured so prominently in the coverage of the Charlie Gard case; each proposal is presented as offering fresh hope, each reversal presented as dashing hopes.\u00a0 In either case, hope is something presented as desirable.\u00a0 A bit more deeply, hope is one of the Theological Virtues, and […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[963,511,591,328,576],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-curios","category-in-the-news","category-life-and-death","category-philosophy","category-the-art-of-medicine"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Hope a Virtue? - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2017\/07\/13\/is-hope-a-virtue\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Hope a Virtue? - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By\u00a0Iain Brassington It’s perfectly understandable that hope should have featured so prominently in the coverage of the Charlie Gard case; each proposal is presented as offering fresh hope, each reversal presented as dashing hopes.\u00a0 In either case, hope is something presented as desirable.\u00a0 A bit more deeply, hope is one of the Theological Virtues, and [...]Read More...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2017\/07\/13\/is-hope-a-virtue\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-07-13T06:00:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-08-19T11:44:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"BMJ\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"BMJ\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2017\\\/07\\\/13\\\/is-hope-a-virtue\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2017\\\/07\\\/13\\\/is-hope-a-virtue\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"BMJ\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/ba3da426ed20e8f1d933ca367d8216fe\"},\"headline\":\"Is Hope a Virtue?\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-07-13T06:00:24+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-08-19T11:44:42+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2017\\\/07\\\/13\\\/is-hope-a-virtue\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1134,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/#organization\"},\"articleSection\":[\"Curios\",\"In the News\",\"Life and Death\",\"Philosophy\",\"The Art of Medicine\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2017\\\/07\\\/13\\\/is-hope-a-virtue\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2017\\\/07\\\/13\\\/is-hope-a-virtue\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-ethics\\\/2017\\\/07\\\/13\\\/is-hope-a-virtue\\\/\",\"name\":\"Is Hope a Virtue? 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