Program / Course 22: Christian Ethics / Lesson 1.3
What you will learn
- Define virtue, vice and habit, and explain how virtues are acquired.
- Describe Aristotle’s account of virtue and happiness and how Aquinas adapted it.
- Distinguish the cardinal virtues from the theological virtues.
- Summarize the twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics and the main objections to it.
The big idea
Virtue ethics holds that the central question of morality is not first what rule to follow or what outcome to seek, but what kind of person to become. A virtue is a settled strength of character, formed by practice, that makes a person good and makes their actions good. Aristotle described the virtues as the shape of a flourishing life. Aquinas added the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which are given by grace. Virtue ethics has revived in modern philosophy, and Christians in every tradition have drawn on it.
Key terms
- Virtue
- A stable disposition of character, built by repeated good action and by grace, that inclines a person to act well.
- Vice
- A stable disposition toward bad action, such as cowardice, greed or cruelty.
- Eudaimonia
- Aristotle’s word for the human good, often translated happiness or flourishing. It means living well over a whole life, not a passing feeling.
- Mean (the doctrine of the)
- Aristotle’s idea that a moral virtue lies between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. Courage lies between cowardice and recklessness.
- Prudence (practical wisdom)
- The virtue of judging well what to do in a particular situation. In Aquinas it guides the other moral virtues.
- Cardinal virtues
- Prudence, justice, courage (fortitude) and temperance. The word comes from the Latin for hinge: other virtues hang on them.
- Theological virtues
- Faith, hope and love (charity), so called because they have God as their object and are given by grace (1 Corinthians 13:13).
- Habit (habitus)
- In the tradition, a stable quality acquired by repeated action that makes later action easier and more reliable.
Background
Virtue ethics begins in ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle asked how a person can live well, and answered in terms of excellences of character. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics argues that the human good is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life. Moral virtues such as courage and temperance are acquired by practice, in the way a person becomes a builder by building. A person becomes just by doing just acts, and the habit then shapes how he sees and feels.
Christian writers took up this language early. Ambrose and Augustine discussed the cardinal virtues. Augustine insisted that without love of God, apparent virtues of pagans lack their true end, a claim that later writers debated. Aquinas, in the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae, built a large treatise on habits and virtues. He held that Aristotle’s moral virtues are real goods but incomplete, and that grace adds infused virtues and the three theological virtues.
After the Enlightenment, moral philosophy in the West focused on duties and consequences. In 1958 the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe argued that modern moral language had lost the framework that gave it sense, and urged a return to ideas of human flourishing and virtue. Later Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, and others developed this into a movement. Many Christian ethicists joined it, including Stanley Hauerwas, who stressed that virtues are formed in communities and stories.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: Virtue as formed character
A virtue is not a mood or a single act. A person who once told the truth is not thereby honest. Honesty is a settled disposition: the person tends to tell the truth, sees what honesty requires, and takes some pleasure in it. For Aristotle, this settled condition is built by practice, and he adds that the right feelings must go with right action. A person who does a just act while longing to cheat is not yet just.
Christian writers add that virtue is also a gift. Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (Galatians 5:22-23). Catholic and Orthodox teaching speak of grace healing and elevating the person, while many Protestants stress that growth in holiness is the work of the Spirit, not of human habit alone. Most traditions agree that practice and grace are both involved, and differ on how.
Step 2: The cardinal virtues
Prudence is the ability to see what a situation really calls for and to choose the right means. Justice is the settled will to give each person what is due. Courage is the strength to do good in the face of danger or difficulty. Temperance is the right ordering of bodily desires, such as for food, drink and sex. The Book of Wisdom, which Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include, names these four (Wisdom 8:7).
Each virtue lies between two vices. Courage stands between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity stands between stinginess and wastefulness. Aristotle’s mean is not a bland average. It is the right response, which may sometimes be extreme in a given situation.
Step 3: The theological virtues and the final end
Aquinas holds that human beings are made for a happiness that exceeds natural powers: seeing God. The theological virtues direct a person to that end. Faith is the assent to what God has revealed. Hope is trust that God will give what he has promised. Love is the friendship with God and neighbor that Paul says is greatest (1 Corinthians 13:13). In Aquinas, love gives form to all the other virtues.
Orthodox writers speak of the same reality with different emphasis. The monastic tradition, in Evagrius, John Cassian and others, describes the struggle against the passions, such as gluttony, anger and pride, and the growth of the virtues culminating in love. Cassian’s lists of vices became the basis of the later Western list of seven deadly sins.
Step 4: Strengths and objections
Supporters say virtue ethics fits ordinary moral experience. People admire courage and mercy and despise cruelty, and moral life involves lifelong formation, not just single decisions. It also joins ethics to worship, community and the lives of saints.
Critics raise several objections. One says virtue ethics is not action-guiding: telling someone to do what a virtuous person would do gives little help in a hard case. Defenders reply that rules too need judgment and that virtue includes knowledge of particulars. A second says cultures disagree about which traits are virtues, so the theory lacks a common standard. Defenders appeal to a shared human nature or, in the Christian case, to God. A third, from Protestant critics, worries that stress on habit and progress can imply that people earn righteousness. Those who use virtue language in a Protestant frame answer that virtues are fruits of grace, not causes of justification.
- What trait of character is being praised or blamed, and is it a settled habit or a single act?
- What are the two vices on either side of this virtue?
- How is the virtue acquired, by practice, by grace or by both?
- What end or good is the virtue directed toward?
- What would this view say a person should do in a hard case, and is that enough guidance?
- Who in your own life or in history shows this virtue well, and what do they actually do?
Examples
Courage and its neighbors
A nurse reports a medication error that she made, knowing it may cost her a promotion. A second nurse hides one, and a third boasts about taking risks no one asked for. The first is courageous, the second cowardly, the third reckless. (A constructed example.)
Practice before feeling
A man who finds it hard to be generous sets a rule to give a fixed part of his income each month. At first he gives reluctantly. After some years he notices that he enjoys giving and sees needs he used to miss. Aristotle and Aquinas would call this the formation of a habit. (A constructed example.)
A rule and a virtue
A rule says never to lie. A person with the virtue of honesty also knows when silence, gentle phrasing or a question is the right response to a grieving friend. The virtue is more than the rule, but it does not contradict it. (A constructed example.)
Different perspectives
Catholic
Catholic moral theology, following Aquinas, treats the virtues as central, and the Catechism gives a section to them. Human virtues are acquired by effort and strengthened by grace. The theological virtues are infused by God. Many Catholic moral theologians since the Second Vatican Council have called for a return to virtue as the heart of moral theology, in place of manuals centered on sins and cases.
Orthodox
Orthodox writers place the virtues within the ascetic life. Cassian, the Philokalia and the desert tradition describe vices as passions to be healed and virtues as qualities of a soul being united to God. Virtue is not a human achievement but a participation in divine life, which makes the whole subject close to theosis.
Protestant
Protestants have been of two minds. Luther feared that Aristotle’s ethics flattered human ability and said so sharply. At the same time Reformed and Wesleyan traditions speak much about sanctification, the growth of holiness, and Jonathan Edwards wrote at length on the affections and true virtue. Hauerwas and others, working from the Anabaptist and Methodist background, argue that virtues are formed within the church and its story.
Secular philosophy
Secular virtue ethicists, such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse and, in a different way, MacIntyre, argue that virtue is the best account of ethics without reference to God, grounded in human flourishing. Critics from the duty and outcome traditions say it cannot settle hard cases or guard against abuses without further rules.
Why it matters
Virtue ethics changes how a student reads moral life. It shifts attention from isolated crises to the long task of forming habits, friendships and loves. It also explains why Christian traditions give so much place to prayer, fasting, worship and example. These are the training grounds of the virtues, and a person who ignores them may know the rules and still fail.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Virtue ethics has no rules.
Correction: Most virtue ethicists keep moral rules, especially prohibitions of grave wrongs. They hold that rules are best understood within an account of character and that judgment is needed to apply them.
Misunderstanding: Virtues are earned, so virtue ethics contradicts salvation by grace.
Correction: Christian virtue ethicists in every tradition say that grace precedes and enables virtue. Aquinas insists that the theological virtues are infused by God. Protestants who use the language treat virtues as fruits of the Spirit, not grounds of acceptance by God.
Misunderstanding: Aristotle’s mean means being moderate in all things.
Correction: The mean is the right response to the situation. A person facing a grave injustice should not respond moderately, if the right response is strong.
Misunderstanding: The Bible has no concept of virtue.
Correction: The Bible uses the language of fruit, wisdom and character, and Peter urges believers to add to faith virtue, knowledge, temperance and patience (2 Peter 1:5-7). The Greek word used there, arete, is the same word used for virtue in Greek ethics.
Knowledge check
What is a virtue, and how is it different from a single good act?
A virtue is a settled disposition of character, formed by repeated action and, in Christian teaching, by grace, which inclines a person to act well and to feel rightly about it. A single good act can be done by someone who lacks the virtue. The virtue is the stable readiness behind many such acts.
Name the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.
The cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, courage and temperance. The theological virtues are faith, hope and love. The first four can be described by reason and are shared with Greek ethics. The last three have God as their object and are given by grace.
How did Aquinas adapt Aristotle?
He accepted Aristotle’s account of moral virtues and practical wisdom as real goods but said they are incomplete because human beings are made for union with God. He added infused virtues and the three theological virtues, and made love the form of all the virtues.
State one objection to virtue ethics and one reply.
One objection is that telling a person to act as a virtuous person would gives little guidance in a hard case. A reply is that every moral theory needs judgment, and virtue includes the practical wisdom to see what a situation requires, usually learned by watching and imitating good people.
Think it through
- Which virtue do you most admire in another person, and what do they do that shows it?
- Which vice in yourself is hardest to see? Who could help you see it?
- Is it fair to say that grace and practice both shape a person’s character? How does your tradition speak of this?
- Does stress on character make ethics more demanding or less demanding than stress on rules?
Independent assignment
Tracing one virtue
In your notebook, write 400 to 600 words. Choose one virtue from the lists in this lesson. Describe the two vices on either side of it, give an example of each from ordinary life, and name one practice that could strengthen the virtue in you. Then say how Aristotle, Aquinas and one Protestant writer of your choice would each describe where the virtue comes from. Do not send this to anyone or post it anywhere.
Further study
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Virtue Ethics Read for the main versions and objections.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Read the treatises on habits and virtues in the First Part of the Second Part, and selected questions on the theological virtues.
- John Cassian, The Conferences Read selectively for the monastic account of the passions and virtues.
- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church Read the section on the virtues in Part Three.
- Galatians 5:22 The fruit of the Spirit.
- 1 Corinthians 13:13 Faith, hope and love.
- 2 Peter 1:5 Adding virtue to faith.