In A Minimally Good Life, Nicole Hassoun develops a new virtue she calls creative resolve. Creative resolve is “the disposition to commit, imagine, and act to help people secure the things they need to live well enough insofar as necessary, possible, and otherwise morally permissible (and it can also help us secure other significant moral goods)” (Hassoun 2024). It is about being able to respond to apparent tragedy by cultivating creativity (looking for alternatives and creative solutions) and resolve (not giving up on a problem). While I am broadly sympathetic to the concept of creative resolve, I shall show that it currently has ambiguities that make it unclear how demanding it should be and it is unclear how the virtue of creative resolve fits more broadly within Hassoun's sufficientarian theory of the minimally good life. It is commonly accepted that normative theories should be appropriately demanding (Estlund 2011, 2020; Gheaus 2013; Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012). They should neither be too demanding nor insufficiently demanding for both practical and principled reasons. Practically, unduly demanding theories risk non-compliance, and insufficiently demanding theories may not secure ideals that could be secured if people were asked to do more. As a matter of principle, overly demanding theories may affect other moral goods and breach certain agent-relative prerogatives to pursue our own interests, and unduly lenient theories leave important moral pursuits unachieved. These are all issues Hassoun is aware of in A Minimally Good Life (hereinafter, MGL), as she mentions the importance of creative resolve not crowding out other morally important pursuits. However, I think further clarity could be offered on these matters. “Our creativity should take us to, but only succeeds within the bounds of, the possible” (Hassoun 2024, 131). “We should not persist in trying to help people in the face of impossibility … we should persist only insofar as necessary and where possible and permissible” (Hassoun 2024, 137, my emphasis). “Creative resolve assists us in finding good ways to overcome apparent tragedy when possible” (Hassoun 2024, 128, original emphasis). Creative resolve is also constrained by the “proviso that we must only try to fulfill the conditions for creative resolve insofar as necessary and where possible and otherwise morally permissible.” (Hassoun 2024, 127). On the most expansive reading, possibility is conceived simply in a metaphysical sense: something is possible iff it is metaphysically possible in this or some other world. The most demanding normative proposals—fully open borders, radical cosmopolitan egalitarianism, the abolition of private property, and perfect living standards for all—are possible in this sense. If mere metaphysical possibility is all that constrains creative resolve, it is not clear what assistance it provides for us working in practical normative theory. The other extreme is what we might call temporal possibility. Something is possible iff there is a high probability of it being achievable, here and now. This is far too restrictive and would not be consistent with the ambition of creative resolve. Between these two extremes, however, further guidance needs to be provided about the right account of possibility. This determines the shape and scope of creative resolve as a virtue that makes demands upon us as moral agents. Hassoun talks about hope being “limited by moral and empirical reality” (Hassoun 2024, 140), but I am unsure how we should conceptualize ‘moral reality’ in this sense. A lot of people thought (or still think) that justice should be limited to the internal borders of a state. This was somewhat dogmatic in theories of justice until relatively recently. Are we to take this nationalist limitation as something that is a ‘moral reality’? If so, this means that it is not clear how creative resolve should work. On the other hand, some kinds of limitations about human psychology may be important to factor in as part of the constraint of our moral reality (Miller 2013; Go 2023). Unlimited altruism and extreme self-sacrifice may not be appropriate to demand of people as they are in our world. Perhaps phronesis or some kind of practical wisdom is Hassoun's response to how we ought to navigate these complexities and ambiguities around what possibility entails. This is alluded to by Hassoun in Footnote 8 on page 128 of MGL. This may be right, but two things are worth noting. First, a more comprehensive account of virtue and practical wisdom would need to be provided. What kind of phronesis is needed for us to understand what possibility means in creative resolve? I'm doubtful that responding through the idea of phronesis alone solves the issue; it may just deflect the difficulties of creative resolve needing to specify what it considers within the bounds of possibility. Second, the comprehensiveness of any guidance about virtue may come into tension with Hassoun's intended ecumenicism and desire to make her account compatible with any theory of virtue (as she stipulated at the start of the chapter). If so, then creative resolve may need to rely on a more comprehensive account of virtue and not something that can be adopted ecumenically across any account of virtue theory. One way to emphasize the highly demanding nature of creative resolve is to reflect on its doxastic component. It is clear that creative resolve has an important doxastic component. We are asked to change our beliefs and mindset about possibility and feasibility, and “question limits to the possibility of helping people live minimally” (p. 123). To believe that we can, in fact, do it and then to create the motivational reasons for us to do it. The natural pessimist is asked to change her mind about what she believes is possible. Justice gives us obligations not only to do things, but also to believe certain things—about possibility and feasibility, and about who is and is not in our moral community. As it happens, I think further work could attempt to conceptualize creative resolve as a doxastic duty that entails demanding obligations on us to change our beliefs. The literature on doxastic virtues and doxastic wronging, currently in its relative infancy, has much to contribute here (Basu and Schroeder 2019; Basu 2023). We can be held responsible not only for our actions but also for what beliefs we hold. For example, I may wrong a black woman in a boardroom if I generalize and assume that she is a secretary when she is in fact a senior executive (Fabre 2022). Hassoun's idea of creative resolve could link well with this burgeoning literature. We have moral obligations to hold certain beliefs about feasibility and possibility and may be required to not foreclose our minds about solving a problem. The doxastic dimensions of creative resolve may take its demandingness the other way. Insofar as it compels us to alter our beliefs, it might come across as overly demanding. This question around demandingness, then, goes the other way: insofar as creative resolve contains a doxastic requirement for us to change our beliefs, is it too demanding? In Hassoun's defense, however, the doxastic dimension of creative resolve is not as radical as it may initially appear. My view is that Hassoun's account already has the tools to deal with it. Beliefs are often (even if not always) a matter of disposition. We can often alter our beliefs by repetitively acting in certain ways or forcing ourselves to engage with evidence to the contrary. In doing so, ways of thinking become more natural to us (akin to a disposition). Consider the practice of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), frequently seen as the gold-standard psychological therapy for anxiety. Individuals with anxiety are able to change their beliefs about danger by repeatedly doing certain things—going to parties in spite of one's social anxiety, to see that there is no danger from doing so or progressively exposing oneself to a spider to overcome one's arachnophobia and beliefs about spiders. Our habits and actions influence our dispositions and beliefs. The dispositional aspect of creative resolve highlights the fact that changing our beliefs is not as demanding (nor as difficult) as it may initially appear. The final question around the demandingness of creative resolve—and in some ways the most important—is whether the virtue of creative resolve is consistent with the normative theory of sufficiency defended by Hassoun in MGL or if something more demanding is in fact needed. Creative resolve is ostensibly treated as a virtue that mandates fairly demanding duties. However, there may be an important tension between the virtue of creative resolve and the relatively less demanding theory of the minimally good life that Hassoun develops in the rest of the book. This raises concerns around the internal consistency of different parts of MGL. The virtue of creative resolve may require something more creative and demanding than sufficientarianism and more than what Hassoun has defended in other policy areas such as in the area of access to essential medicines and pharmaceutical reform (Hassoun 2020). Many may feel that in a highly unequal world, the pursuit of sufficientarianism does not show enough resolve or creativity. Creative resolve may mandate something much more outside the box, and it is a fair question to ask whether Hassoun's theory in MGL provides such an account. Part of the concern around internal consistency is that there is a sense in which creative virtue is simply tacked on to Hassoun's theory, instead of occupying a more central role within it from the outset. If creative resolve holds the power and importance that Hassoun attributes to it in Chapter 6, then the virtue could have a stronger role to play in the methodological foundations of Hassoun's eventual theory of the minimally good life. For example, should impartial spectators in the quasi-contractualist method for generating the demands of the minimally good life possess the virtue of creative resolve? And if so, would they not demand that everyone has more than a minimally good life (even if not a maximally good life)? Should there not be stronger attention to the complex structural and institutional factors that regulate whether others are able to achieve a minimally good life or not, or whether some have a minimally good life while others have maximal abundance? Of course, the sufficientarian theory defended by Hassoun in MGL may not be driven by the motivation to avoid making justice overly demanding. There might be other motivations to limit justice to sufficiency. But even if that were the case, agents possessing the virtue of creative resolve would likely come up with a more expansive and demanding theory than the one presented in the first part of MGL. Hassoun does not provide explicit guidance in earlier parts of her book about how creative resolve should feature in our reasoning about what constitutes a minimally good life. Perhaps creative resolve is meant to govern how we enact the idea of the minimally good life in our real world, rather than providing a meta-level principle that governs how we arrive at what the minimally good life is in the first place. This may be the case, but it would be to dilute the power of creative resolve. The virtue of creative resolve, it seems to me, has a lot of potential in making Hasson's MGL account of sufficiency and method of contractualism/quasi-contractualism stand out from other accounts in the distributive justice literature. Hassoun's theory of creative resolve has components that can be cashed out in highly demanding terms, such as her view that we need to question the limits of belief and possibility. At the same time, there are some ambiguities about how demanding it should be and what the constraints of ‘possibility’ and ‘moral reality’ really mean. There are also important questions remaining around how the virtue of creative resolve is meant to fit into Hassoun's account of the minimally good life more generally. I already alluded to the view that a person standing in another person's shoes, possessing and exercising the virtue of creative resolve, may in fact demand something much more radical than a minimally flourishing life. None of this should be taken to mean that I think creative resolve is an idea that should be jettisoned. On the contrary, I think the need to think about feasibility in diachronic (rather than synchronic) terms, to expand our moral imaginations, and not to give up in cases of apparent tragedy are vital for achieving justice. Hassoun is right to try and capture all these ideals in the virtue of creative resolve. The author has nothing to report. The author declares no conflicts of interest.
Johann Go (Sun,) studied this question.