Philosophy-Discussion Forum 2
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Holmes-Chapter14.docxCHAPTER 14
Virtue Ethics
There is more to morality than doing what is right. If I drive within the speed limit only because a police car is following me, I may be doing what is right but I do it for prudential rather than moral reasons. I may perhaps drive within the speed limit merely to annoy my companion and make him late for an important engagement. Then I would be doing what is right from a morally wrong motive. Again, I might keep the speed limit just because my car won’t go any faster. Then I would be doing what is right unintentionally. Motives and intentions as well as actions are morally significant. Even more than my actions, they reflect the kind of person I am, my inner disposition and character. To be peaceably disposed, a kind and patient person, is virtuous. But animosity, self-centeredness and greed are vices.
The Bible, especially the New Testament, places greater importance on moral virtue and character than it does on rules of conduct. Both the Beatitudes in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the fruit of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5 are about virtues.And, as we noted in the last chapter, until modern times moral philosophy gave far more attention to virtues than to moral decision making. Indeed Plato focused on four cardinal virtues (self control, courage, wisdom and justice), to which Aquinas later added three theological virtues (faith, hope and love). But it was Plato’s student, Aristotle, who laid the groundwork by opening up an underlying moral psychology. [1] While these biblical and Greek sources remain the key to this area, recent decades have produced a widespread resurgence of work on the subject, [2] much of it drawing on Aristotle’s question about the highest good. That was a “quality of life” question, you recall, and his response about living one’s whole life in accordance with reason led him directly to the virtues, intellectual virtues like wisdom and prudence as well as moral virtues. They are inner habits of heart and mind, stable dispositions that move us to think and act in particular ways, in contrast to passing inclinations that lack deep roots and are too easily lost. Virtues are what constitute the good life: excellence of character.
Virtues and Moral Rules
If a virtue is a habit of mind as Aristotle maintained, then how is it acquired? MacIntyre likens it to the skills of an outstanding musician or athlete or surgeon. [3] Standards of excellence like theirs require years of training and experience, with practices that have to be carefully followed if one is to become and remain a professional. Excellence requires discipline of mind and body, for consistency is essential to being really good. So too with moral virtues. Children need rules and external control, like craftsmen learning their trade, and the continuous discipline develops good habits. But this applies also to adults: a woman who at cost to herself repeatedly chooses to help those in need and makes such beneficence her general rule, begins to experience benevolent dispositions. Practices like these—thoughtful, intentional, habitual, even rule directed—shape virtue.
But virtues also affect moral decision making. They influence moral reasoning, the considerations we take into account, the options we consider, the care with which we seek information and advice, and even the rules we follow. They explain what we do and how we do it, readily or grudgingly, thoroughly or scantily, selflessly or seeking recognition. They manage our bad inclinations and motivate good behaviors, making the kinds of things we do more predictable and, as we say, “in character.” They shape the conscience, such that there are some things a person of good character simply would not do.
Some virtues seem more basic than others. Plato’s four “cardinal” ones, for example, have key roles in his psychology: temperance or self control for the soul’s appetitive part, courage for the spirited part, and wisdom for the rational part which guides them to the justice of a well-ordered life. As Aristotle put it,
No one would call a man happy who had no particle of fortitude, temperance, justice, or wisdom; who feared the flies buzzing around his head, who abstained from none of the extremest forms of extravagance whenever he felt hungry or thirsty, who would ruin his dearest friends for the sake of a farthing, whose mind was senseless and as much astray as that of a child or a madman. [4]
Aristotle himself blamed vices on a weakness of the will, and Kant insisted that nothing can be good without qualification except a good will, the strength to will and to do what we know is right. Moreover intentions and dispositions are themselves in measure voluntary, as Philippa Foot points out. [5] Consider also the choices we fail to make and the rules we fail to follow. The moral life is a life of decisions, with temptations to resist and good practices to be chosen. Even wisdom is under the will’s direction in the ends it adopts, the assumptions it makes, the considerations it pursues. In this sense I do choose the kind of person I want to become. As Aristotle concluded,
Happiness belongs more to those who have cultivated their character and mind to the uttermost, than to those who have managed to acquire more external goods than they could possibly use, and are lacking in the goods of the soul.
Yet that choice too is ruled not by what we know but, as Augustine put it, by what we most love. Love too is voluntary, this central Christian virtue, and it is love that gives rise to justice and the other virtues of a well-ordered life. [6]
Virtues and the Good
Augustine found much to appreciate in Plato, particularily his vision of a transcendent Good, the archetype of goodness that finite beings desire and want to be like, and so he developed that conception in ways that influence Christian thinking to this day. [7] If God is the highest good, then desiring the Good means desiring God and wanting to be like him. If God is the epitome of every kind of goodness, then desiring truth and beauty as well as moral character is tacitly a desire for God. And loving God entails that we love what God loves, being good and doing good. So for Augustine, loving God meant desiring to be like him, the exemplar of goodness, and the desire for virtue both nourished and was nourished by the desire for God.
Augustine’s Confessions is accordingly a story about his desires: sexual appetites he struggled to control, self-centered professional ambitions and a frustratingly disordered life. His restless desire for wisdom led him for a while to Manichaean dualism, then, disillusioned, to skepticism, then to Cicero, then Plato, until as a professional orator and teacher he finally “put on” Jesus Christ (Rom 13:14) as his all-encompassing good. Persisting in the practice of the Christian faith, his life began to change. He gave himself to serving others, concerned from the outset that his students too develop well-ordered lives, and then the North African church sought his help. His wisdom, his example of unstinting service and his prolific writings shaped Christian practice and teaching for centuries, and still influence Christian thought.
This is the kind of narrative that Alasdair MacIntyre has in mind when he says that habitual “practices” are part of a person’s whole life story. [8] The narrative taken as a whole tells what Augustine’s life was all about by revealing its teleological context. He himself summed it up in the prayer that begins the Confessions: “You made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.” That peace of heart and mind is but one of the virtues that flowed from his highest good, and self-giving love is plainly another. The point is that the moral life finds inspiration and direction in a vision of the Good that makes a person’s virtues and his whole life story part of a particular moral tradition.
Virtues and Moral Traditions
Is virtue then relative to different traditions as well as places and times? Is there no common moral ground? Would Aristotle’s aristocratic virtue of “magnificence” be as laudable in an egalitarian society; or Benjamin Franklin’s conception of “thrift,” in a market driven economy; or Nietzsche’s rejection of Judeo-Christian virtues, in a commitedly Christian community? Dispositions commended in one culture or at one juncture in history fall out of favor at another. Consider too the traits desirable to inner-city gangs in comparison with the values of affluent suburban families. Yet in the ethics of virtue as in our previous discussions, diversity does not prove that all moral ideals either are or should be completely relative. Indeed religious and secular moral traditions may in some ways have similar ideals, but for very different underlying reasons.
Some of the diversity is like the differences MacIntyre examines between heroic virtues that Homer portrays and those of political life later on in Athens: two different social orders. [9] Their underlying concepts of virtue differed from Aristotle’s, being tied more to social functions than to being human. But the more basic question is about being human—the ideal human life and the psychological dispositions that entails. A good disposition is simply a fact about a certain kind of human life, and moral evil is a kind of human defect. Aristotle himself faced other views of virtue and the good, but argued throughout that his was rationally grounded in human nature and experience. A virtue ethic based on our common humanity is therefore about objective facts that lie beneath all local traditions. This kind of moral realism finds support in paradigmatic individuals who are transculturally recognized: as in the high regard ordinary people have for a Socrates or Gandhi, in contrast to a Nero or Hitler. [10]
Aristotle also observed that virtues often lie between two extremes, the excess and deficiency of some human characteristic. In the face of danger, for example, courage lies between the excess of foolhardiness and the deficiencies of cowardice. In the use of our resources, generosity falls between extravagence and stinginess. In handling our appetites, self-control finds a mean between self-indulgence and complete disinterest. In relation to others, friendliness lies between being obsequious and being grouchy. Basically such virtues are about acting in a morally responsible way, the vices in an irresponsible manner.
While our common human nature in a world we share naturally leads us to prize similar virtues, various traditions bring their own conception of the good life and the virtues it entails. So while Aquinas drew heavily from Aristotle’s work, he recognized that Augustine’s desire for God would only be fully satisfied in the life to come, and emphasized accordingly the “theological virtues” of faith, hope and love. Similarily the apostle Paul listed joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, in contrast to vices like selfishness, jealousy, self-indulgence and a militant spirit (Gal 5:19-23). As I reflect on these virtues, I realize that they manifest the kind of faith, hope and love of which Aquinas wrote, basic Christian virtues that make life good here and now as well as in the life to come.
The Bible thus is more direct and more explicit than the moral ideals human nature alone implies. The life story of Jesus is of one fully human as well as divine, the flawless paradigm case of a good human life and the model of human virtue. More appealing too, for Jesus is also the divine “word,” the “rhetoric” of God that evokes assent. His goodness appeals to those in other moral traditions because of our common humanity, but even more to those who have experienced his love. They now want to be like him, good in ways that Jesus was good in his life on earth. For as God incarnate he reveals what a good human life can be.
Character Development
Aristotle saw virtues as habits of mind that can be cultivated. They do not emerge naturally over the course of time, and they sometimes run counter to our seemingly natural tendencies. Nor are they due merely to formal instruction. Discipline and regulation may be conducive to good habits, yet habits of mind are neither unconscious nor altogether involuntary. They develop as a result of deliberation about the choices we constantly make and the ends we desire. We are responsible agents in our own character development. The weak-willed do not act out of ignorance either; they act rather out of emotional distractions that they have never brought themselves to control. But the virtuous act out of good habits of mind internalized by repeated reflection and decision. As Kant put it centuries later, virtues are “considered, firm and continuously purified principles.” [11]
I find Aristotle’s account of character development substantially correct but with qualifications, for it is challenged from several points of view. First, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment developed a far more rationalistic psychology in which a clear and distinct understanding has the power to overrule and subdue our passions and desires. Reason prevails over immediate self-interest so that we can organize a civil society and agree to live harmoniously under the rule of laws. This kind of psychology seems to underlie Kohlberg’s appeal to cognitive moral development as the key to moral formation. On the other hand David Hume had objected that human actions spring from the passions and will rather than from reason itself. [12] Reason alone is inert and impotent, and its civil laws derive their authority not from their rationality but from our self-interested feelings. We noted earlier that Augustine had taken a similar stand in response to Cicero’s Stoicism: we are not ruled by what we know but by what we most love. This, I suggest, is more akin to Aristotle’s repeated choices than to the Enlightenment’s prevailing reason. Aristotle, Hume and Augustine all insist that it is the will’s orientation, not reason alone, that is morally decisive.
Another objection arises, however, in regards to this emphasis on inclination and desire. Sigmund Freud, for example, claims that human behavior is controlled by inner drives and that “conscience” is merely the subconscious internalization of external controls. Character, then, is simply a set of inner sanctions for which we are in no way responsible. This is a determinist objection to freedom in character formation.
A major difficulty with the determinist view arises when it is applied to itself. Determinism is not a view we can hold “responsibly,” nor are we free to either accept or reject it. The determinist’s acceptance of it is itself determined, so that he cannot meaningfully say it is true independently of what he or we may think. We think what we are constrained to think, just as we have the inner traits we have, willy-nilly. But this self-referentiality is not the only problem: a further difficulty arises with the hasty generalization involved. Aristotle agreed that external regulation affects character formation, but plainly denied that it accounts entirely for the totality of a person’s character. We are self-critical moral agents who by repeated and deliberate choices break free from earlier conditioning.
This may be seen in the way we resist temptation. [13] I am urged and drawn by my own inner nature, even by elements of my present character, in some morally wrong direction. The path of least resistance, the most natural thing for me to do, in fact, would be to yield. But sometimes another desire is present that resists the temptation. It takes an effort of will to choose a right, and resolute strength of will to fight it through. But in doing so, I strengthen the tendency to do what is right and thereby contribute to shaping my character. Aristotle called this strength (as distinct from weakness) of will.
But given human depravity and its perversion of human nature, is habituation enough? Thomas Aquinas had followed Aristotle to this point, adding that obedience to the law’s commands could help habituate us to virtue; but he still recognized that habituation alone is not enough without “infusion.” The Holy Spirit infuses the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which go beyond any natural potential, but he also infuses habits that strengthen already existing habits. [14] In effect he frees us to be good. Grace does what human nature alone cannot, not grace instead of natural processes, however, but grace working in and through natural processes to the ends our Creator intended.
MacIntyre’s understanding of virtue in terms of the practices and life stories of a moral tradition is similarily applicable to Christian ethics. With no highest good, no overall telos, a person lacks any one moral identity and, in developmental terms, remains diffused, perhaps dualistic. But moral formation is naturally connected to faith development, and devotion to God as the Good gives purpose to one’s whole life. That is what the distinctive practices of the Christian tradition are essentially about: a love for God that pays close attention to the Scriptures and prayer and the sacraments of the church. Theologians refer to these practices as “means of grace. ” But Stanley Hauerwas goes further. [15] For years he has stressed the crucial role of Christian community in moral formation. It is there that I find my identity, the kind of people I most respect. For I hear their stories about people of character and vision who founded the place, a heritage that is typical of the Christian story, and then as I watch their lives and adopt their practices, I sense their ideals are becoming my own. I become part of a moral culture.
This kind of community reminds me of the medieval monastery schools that integrated character development with studies that nourished the desire for God. [16] They contemplated the goodness and wisdom of God in what they learned of his creation. They taught students to read the inner significance of a story, searching out the virtues and vices that might mirror what is in one’s own soul. A novice’s demeanor was discussed with his spiritual advisor in order to identify and shape his inner dispositions, and the most effective mentor was one who modeled an ideal in his own life and character. Bernard of Clairvaux was praised for teaching through his physical presence, so that students learned by reading his attitudes, habits and character. That kind of model and mentor is what we would hope to find in a Christian community today, one whose own exemplar is Christ himself.
A similar kind of community is possible among friends. Aristotle described a kind of friendship in which both parties want each other above all to be morally good, and so their common ideals lead them to feel responsible to each other for how they behave. Their lives become like open books, they admit to each other their failings and point out each other’s faults: “faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Prov 27:6). They talk about the kind of persons they want to become, and how each might help the other grow. Such friendship encourages self-examination, strengthens moral resolve, clarifies vision and builds good habits. A friend like this becomes my alter ego, a mirror that sees beyond outward appearances and shows who I really am. It may sound like marriage, for marriage too affects us morally—for better or for worse. So also do friends. But human friendship is not the highest good. It is selective, preferential, and a love that needs love in return, unlike agape, truly Christian love. Yet Augustine still claimed that friendship schools us in love, or as Aquinas put it “for friendship with God.” [17]
