The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics

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,

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, 2009

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.

2017

The traditional doctrine of the theological virtues holds that faith, hope and love are virtues of a special kind. Being divine gifts, and directed towards our supernatural telos, these virtues differ in kind from those on the classical lists, not least the ones Aquinas called ‘cardinal’. This doctrine gives rise prima facie to a dilemma. Either the theological virtues are capable of being exercised through human agency, in which case they do not in this respect differ in kind from those on the classical lists – or they are incapable of being exercised through human agency, in which case they are not really human virtues. In this paper, I chart possible responses to this dilemma and advance what I call a non-theological solution to the problem it articulates. Developing Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of ‘virtues of acknowledged dependence’, I argue that there is a cogent way of thinking of faith, hope and love as virtues of a kind, without recourse to Aquinas’ account of human teleology or to any special theory of divine agency. On the approach I develop, faith, hope and love are virtues of a kind because of the way in which they express the distinctive kind of agency that is involved in owning up to our human dependence and vulnerability. My overall aim is to show that ethicists still have much to learn from the idea of the theological virtues, even if they do not accept the Thomistic framework in which this idea is traditionally advanced.

Diane Chandler (ed.). The Holy Spirit and Christian Formation

In the West, virtue emerges as a prominent theme in the Classical Greek World, fi rst with Plato (Republic) and later with Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics). Both philosophers refl ect on the connection between the moral virtues (e.g., justice and prudence), character formation (becoming a morally mature person), and the proper end (telos) of a human being, which Aristotle specifi cally calls happiness (eudaimonia = well-being). Later Christian theologians draw on the insights of the Classical philosophers but also fi nd fault with them. For example, when thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas states, "[Humankind] is perfected by virtue," he is repeating a point made fi rst by Aristotle. But he goes beyond Aristotle when he says, "Now [humankind's] beatitude or happiness is of two kinds … One is proportioned to human nature, which [human beings] can arrive at by the principles of [their] nature. The other kind is a happiness surpassing [human] nature, which [human beings] can arrive at only by the power of God, by a kind of participation in divinity." 1 This chapter explores the dynamics of what Thomas Aquinas calls "participation in divinity." Specifi cally, it considers three related questions:

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.

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2010

In this paper, I examine two different ways of understanding Aquinas's account of the infused and acquired virtues. I argue that one of these ways, at least as it is commonly described, is unable to accommodate one of Aquinas's most central claims about the difference between the infused and acquired virtues.

The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, 2013

This essay examines the different answers that British moralists gave to the question ‘what does virtue consist in?’ Rather than as a royal road to present-day views in ethics, their answers are best understood when considered against the background of early modern natural law theories and their projected metaphysics of morals. The emerging ‘science of morality’ dealt with the metaphysical problem of determining what sort of thing virtue is. Considered from this vantage point, the British moralists struggled with the problem of deciding whether moral concepts signify laws of nature, rational drives in human beings, irrational drives in human beings, volitions of a legislator, or social institutions. British moral philosophies in the eighteenth century can be divided up according to whether they defended the thesis that moral qualities are artificial, the thesis that they are part of nature, or the thesis that they are the product of historical experience.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1987

Philosophia, 1990

The thesis of this paper is that a theory of the virtues is an irreducibly important part of moral theory, but that it cannot be the only part. The paper has two sections. In the first, I follow the thinking of a particular writer on the virtues, Philippa Foot, at points where she is dealing with the foundations and limits of virtues ethics. In the second part, I make a more systematic comparison between deontologieal and aretaic (i.e., virtues-based) theories of ethics, indicating what I take to be the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. An ethics of the virtues typically answers the most basic questions of ethics by reference to a generic human need for certain traits of character, rather than by appeal to moral law (a la Kant) or to the maximization of benefits (a la Mill). Thus definitions of what a virtue is can usually be cast in the form "A virtue is a quality of character which humans need in order to .... " Versions of virtues ethics can be distinguished from one another by seeing how they would answer the question, why do human beings need the virtues? Along with a definition of a virtue there frequently goes a nondeontological account of moral obligation. "People should be courageous" is read as an analogue of "Cacti should be watered infrequently;" in both cses the "should" is not unpacked in terms of commandments but of generic needs. There is a life characteristic of normal cacti. A cactus flourishes if it is a good or well-realized example of this life; and infrequent watering is one of the conditions a cactus requires in order to flourish. Likewise, human beings should (i.e., need to) be courageous, since this is one of the conditions for human flourishing. The "compelling force" of morality, according to the virtues account, comes ultimately from this need that humans as humans have for the virtues3 Elizabeth Anscombe, in her 1958 essay"Modern Moral Philosophy," defended the adequacy of this non-deontologieal account of obligation. She claimed that without belief in a divine law-giver, "the moral ought"