The Resurgence of Virtue In Recent Moral Theology

2001

Journal of Analytic Theology

One of the more important areas of retrieval in contemporary work in ethics and moral theology is the discussion of virtues and vices in the tradition. Our contemporary discussion has not limited itself to generic retrieval-simply taking ancient wisdom and applying it wholesale today-but is a creative reworking of ideas and traditions in conversation with ancient thinkers. Thomas Aquinas is perhaps the most important representative invoked in this discussion, with a specific focus on his retrieval and development of Aristotle. In this particular volume, readers are given an excellent introduction into this conversation, and are exposed to the kind of constructive work being done. The essays, by and large, do a fine job of historical discussion balanced with contemporary issues/retrieval, that is interwoven into the author's own constructive agenda. In this sense, this volume would be a perfect way to start one's research on the virtues and vices, but it would also serve as a helpful outline of contemporary thought on the topic. To further add to the usability of the volume, it is helpfully broken down into five major sections: I. The Cardinal Virtues; II. The Capital Vices and Corrective Virtues; III. Intellectual Virtues; IV. The Theological Virtues; and, V. Virtue Across the Disciplines. These sections seek to address central aspects of the traditional discussion of the virtues and vices that, nonetheless, create room for our own contemporary retrieval and development. Importantly, the chapters do not seek to assert a single, uniform interpretation of the virtues and their vices, as if this volume were a constructive argument for an overarching view on the topic. Rather, one sees tensions and rifts within the authors, but these points of conflict prove to be informative and clarifying rather than muddying the issues and creating confusion. The above provides recommendation enough, and the volume deserves it. It fills a major lacuna in the field, and will be a helpful resource for students and researches alike. It would be impossible to go through all of the chapters, or even the sections, in a short review; and like all edited volumes there is a wide range of quality and focus. Therefore, in light of the focus of this journal, and the strand of virtue tradition developed in this volume, it proves helpful to focus on the theological issues at hand. The editors' self-description is philosophical, and they have included a chapter in the final section on theology and the virtues, written by Stephen Pope. This distinction, between philosophy and theology, creates a rather odd tension in the volume, especially when working so much with a figure like Aquinas who would not have separated these out so cleanly.

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2023

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, 2009

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 1997

In his "primer" on virtue ethics Steven Duncan attempts an interesting synthesis. He states that "there has been no full scale attempt to reconstruct morality . . . on the basis of an ethics of the virtues" [1]. He shoulders this heavy undertaking, hoping "to present a credible alternative to the other great traditions in ethics" [1]. For his new synthesis he draws on the natural law theory of Grisez and Finnis as well as the AristotelianThomistic theory of the virtues. This "modern" theory he hopes will withstand the scrutiny of contemporary criticism.

Ethics, 2004

These are boom years for the study of the virtues. Several new books have recently appeared that bring to the literature new ways of understanding virtue and new ways of developing virtue theoretical approaches to morality. This new work presents a richly interesting cluster of views, some of which take virtue to be the central or basic normative ethical notion, but some of which merely amend familiar consequentialist or deontological approaches by incorporating into them an articulated conception of the moral significance of virtue. We will focus on the more distinctive and ambitious recent theories of the former kind, theories that purport to exhibit virtue as the central or basic moral notion. This essay therefore focuses on Michael Slote's Morals from Motives,

Virtue’s Reasons, 2017

I. BACKGROUND TO THE VOLUME Over the past thirty years or so, virtues and reasons have emerged as two of the most fruitful and important concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Virtue theory and moral psychology, for instance, are currently two burgeoning areas of philosophical investigation that involve different, but clearly related, focuses on individual agents' responsiveness to reasons. The virtues themselves are major components of current ethical theories whose approaches to substantive or normative issues remain remarkably divergent in other respects. The virtues are also increasingly important in a variety of new approaches to epistemology. Many writers have commented on the close connections between virtues and reasons: for instance between the ethical virtues-justice, courage, temperance, honesty, and so on-and the different ranges of morally relevant reasons that seem to be intimately, or even conceptually, tied to them. 1 Even so, the relationship is complicated, and it seems safe to say that no one has yet done justice to the complexity of the interconnections between virtues and reasons. To compound matters, the more recent growth of virtue epistemology, with its focus on the intellectual virtues, only makes the interconnections between virtues and reasons that much more challenging for anyone attempting to understand their relationship.

Korean Journal of Ethics, 2016

Since Anscombe’s seminal essay “Modern Moral Philosophy (1958),” which asks us to restore the concept of virtues in moral discussions, virtue ethicists have strived either to reform the ancient Greek tradition of virtue cultivation for achieving happiness or to construct new virtue ethical systems based on modern philosophical literature, such as Hume’s and Nietzsche’s thoughts on virtues. Broadly examining the current spectrum of Aristotelian, Humean, and Nietzschean virtue ethical theories, this article argues that in order to develop virtue theories tailored to our contemporary times, virtue ethicists equally opt to dispense with the proper principles of defining virtue, which have been emphasized by the original philosophers. Given that such principles reflect the essences of their thoughts regarding the virtues of their periods, lacking the principles for defining virtue attests to the reduced practical applicability of virtue ethics to the moral problems in modern-day contemporary societies.

Catholic professors in non-sectarian universities, who are tasked to offer courses in corporate governance and organizational ethics as a demand arising from these ‘ethical crises’, have the challenge of effectively teaching these financial governance and ethics courses without having recourse to the direct teaching of the Bible and religion. Happily, one is able to draw richly from natural moral philosophy material, a chief reference for which is Aristotelian Ethics. Concretely, a discussion of his Virtue Ethics, as expounded by St Thomas Aquinas, is helpful and meaningful, apart from acceptable in a secular institution. A consequent challenge, however, is to make Virtue Ethics ‘concrete’ or ‘non-vague’ in one’s ethics teaching. How does one convince students, for instance, that managers or management students need or need to know about specific virtues? A first step in this process is to show, via extant empirical research, that scholars are studying and developing virtues inventories or scales to survey potential respondents on several aspects of virtues, for example, which virtues respondents believe to be important, or which virtues they observe their superiors to possess. In this proposal, the proponent wishes to share preliminary results of an exploratory attempt at generating a virtue ethics scale for Philippine managers, using the initial listing of Shanahan and Hyman (2003) and Chun (2005). The survey questionnaire consisting of 34 virtues was administered to a convenience sample of 141 postgraduate business and finance students who are managers in Philippine companies. The questionnaire sought to elicit from the respondents which of the virtues listed they felt their superiors possessed.