Catholic Virtues,
American Virtues
This conference was one of a series being sponsored by the Faith & Reason Institute as part of its program on "Catholics and the American Public Square," which is supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia.
Presenter: Thomas S. Hibbs
Virtue Ethics: A Brief Introduction and a Partial Appraisal
Over the last
thirty years, one of the most striking alterations in the
landscape of anglo-american philosophy has occurred in the field
of ethics, where the ethics of virtue is now taken as seriously
as kantian and utilitarian ethics. Yet, it is difficult to
say exactly what virtue ethics is. There are Aristotelian
virtue ethicists MacIntyre, Hursthouse); Thomistic virtue
ethicists (Foot); Humean virtue ethicists (Baier); feminist
virtue ethicists (Baier); and recently even Kantian (O’Neill
and perhaps Shermann) and utilitarian virtue ethicists (Kupperman
and perhaps Scheffler). To further complicate matters, some
of those who are responsible for the increased attention to
character and virtue are called anti-theorists (Baier and
Williams), while others are ambitious theorists (Slote and in a
quite different way MacIntyre). Anti-theorists tend to deflate
the pretensions of ethical theory and academic philosophy; they
are suspicious of the modern attempt to render ethics and
politics scientific. They sometimes turn to literature and
history as more appropriate vehicles for the investigation and
expression of ethical claims.
The problem is
not that there are a variety of positions now located under the
generic title virtue ethics, but that many of those who work on
the topic of virtue gloss over the question what precisely
distinguishes virtue ethics from its rivals. In one of the
rare attempts to define virtue ethics, David Solomon suggests
that there are three ways in which virtue surfaces in
contemporary ethics [“Internal Objections to Virtue
Ethics” in Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue,
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13, pp. 428-441 (ND Press, 1988)].
[Other attempts at definition include, Slote, From Morality to
Virtue (Oxford University Press, 1992); G.V.Trianosky,
“What is Virtue Ethics All About?” American
Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1990), pp. 335-344; and Daniel
Statman, “Introduction to Virtue Ethics,” in Virtue
Ethics (Edinburgh University press, 1997), pp. 2-41.] First,
moral philosophers have shifted some of their attention from
abstract concepts like “right,” “good,” and
“ought,” to more concrete and descriptive terms, such
as “courageous,” “temperate,” and
“sensitive.” Second, it is now generally agreed
that any comprehensive ethical or political theory must include
some account of virtue. But neither of these ways of
discussing virtue poses much of a threat to the dominant 20th
century theories of ethics, namely, kantian and utilitarian
theories. According to Solomon, virtue ethics becomes
interesting only when it is construed as an independent and
normative account of ethics. By contrast with its chief
competitors, a normative virtue theory would treat the assessment
of character and the virtues and vices constitutive of character
as more fundamental than either the assessment of action (which
is basic in kantian deontology) or the assessment of the value of
the consequences of action (which is basic in utilitarianism and
consequentialism). Thus understood, virtue ethics would
have three tasks: to develop and defend a) some conception
of the ideal person, b) some list of the virtues necessary to
become a person of that type, and c) some view of how persons can
come to possess the relevant virtues.
To be sure,
Solomon’s description of a normative virtue theory is not an
attempt to try to find something common to all contemporary
virtue theories. That would be impossible. In fact,
much of what now passes for virtue ethics falls into the sort of
piecemeal, supplementary work Solomon deems unworthy of a
normative virtue thoery. Solomon worries that without an
articulation and defense of its distinctive features, virtue
ethics will end up succumbing to its rivals. Thus, he is
concerned to expose what he calls the “subordinating
strategies” of Kantians and utilitarians who wish to embrace
some of the insights of virtue ethics but subsume these within
their own, allegedly more comprehensive, theories. Each of
these attempts, Solomon holds, fails to give virtue its due.
But how we are
to give virtue its due is a matter of tremendous debate, even
among those in the virtue camp. Especially contentious is
the question of the relative weight a virtue ethics ought to give
character traits vs. acts. Indeed, in a recent book length
articulation and defense of virtue ethics, Rosalind Hursthouse
argues that, while it is certainly true that virtue ethics
emphasizes character and agency, it is not the case that virtue
ethics is “agent centred rather than act centred.”
Virtue ethics has an “answer to the question, ‘How
shall I decide what to do?’” [On Virtue Ethics
(Oxford, 1999), p. 29.] One way to put the contrast between
the Solomon and Hursthouse approaches is that Solomon wants to
change the topic of ethics from questions about acts to questions
about character, while Hursthouse wants to provide very different
answers to the sorts of questions about acts that Kantians and
utilitarians have been posing for some time.
Still,
Solomon’s focus on the differences among kantian,
utilitarian, and virtue ethics suggests an avenue of entry into
contemporary virtue ethics, an avenue that reflects the
historical origins of the turn to virtue in anglo-american
philosophy, a turn precipitated by widespread dissatisfaction
with the two dominant ethical theories of the 20th
century. At the risk of oversimplification, I would say
that what virtue ethics principally objects to in 20th
century ethics is the forgetfulness of prudence, its necessity,
its nature and scope, and its relationship to a host of other
virtues. One of the early and enduring accomplishments of
virtue ethics is to have rescued prudence from the clutches of
Kantians and utilitarians who see prudence merely as a clever,
calculative skill for securing self-interest. It is not
surprising that a rehabilitation of Aristotle has accompanied the
revival of prudence. At the heart of Aristotle’s
ethics is the claim that the good man, the man possessed of
practical wisdom or prudence, is the measure of virtuous action.
It falls to prudence to judge and command what ought to be done
in concrete circumstances.
Although we will
concentrate on contemporary anglo-american debates, the revival
of prudence is not limited to the context. Indeed, renewed
attention to prudence comes to anglo-american philosophy long
after it resurfaced in continental and catholic philosophy.
To see that this is so, one need only mention the names of
Newman, Arendt, Pieper, and Gadamer, all of whom resuscitate the
classical virtue of phronesis as central parts of their
projects. Newman turns to phronesis at a crucial
juncture in the Grammar of Assent as a way of capturing
the rationality of various kinds of complex, practical assent,
pertaining especially but not exclusively to religious belief,
that elude description in the terms endemic demonstrative
science. Borrowing from both Aristotle and Kant’s
third critique, Arendt developed an account of phronetic judgment
as essential to the politics of the modern age, while Gadamer
makes Aristotle’s account of phronesis central to his
hermeneutic philosophy in Truth and Method. [For
discussions of Newman, Arendt, and Gadamer on phronesis, see
Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground). Although in
terms of influence, he pales by comparison with the three
philosophers just mentioned, Josef Pieper provides the most
thorough and prescient account of the virtues. In the
1940's, well before and in complete independence from the debates
in anglo-american ethics, Pieper began a series of investigations
in the cardinal and theological virtues. His writings on
the virtues, found in a variety of his works but especially in
his collections entitled, The Cardinal Virtues and Faith,
Hope, Love, pre-date the Anglo-american rehabilitation of
virtue and anticipate many of its central tenets. He, too,
focuses on the need to rehabilitate prudence as a corrective.
Echoing Garrigou-Lagrange’s complaint that theologians had
exercised a “quasi-suppression of the treatise on
prudence,” Pieper proceeds to argue that a retrieval of
prudence is necessary for an authentically Catholic understanding
of the ethical life. The casuistical moral theology of the
day, with its onerous list of prohibitions, had become a
“science of sins instead of a doctrine of virtues, or of a
theory of the Christian idea of man” (CV, p. 30). The
corrective has especially to do with a reassertion of the primacy
of prudence: “The first of the cardinal virtues is not
only the quintessence of ethical maturity, but in so being is
also the quintessence of moral freedom” (CV, p. 31).
Pieper’s
revival of prudence anticipates the central development of
anglo-american virtue ethics in its reaction against kantian and
utilitarian theories. Most discussions of the history of
20th century moral philosophy trace the return of virtue to
Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay from the late 1950's,
“Modern Moral Philosophy.”[1]
A jeremiad against Kantian and utilitarian ethical theories,
Anscombe’s essay urged that, given the present state of
philosophical ethics--with its incoherent conceptions of
obligation, its lack both of terminological clarity and of an
adequate philosophical psychology--, we should “banish
ethics totally from our minds.” She hinted, but only
hinted, at the possibiity that an adequate moral philosophy might
be resurrected from Aristotle, a suggestion that was to be
enthusiastically embraced by later proponents of virtue, most
notably by Alasdair MacIntyre in his influential After Virtue
(ND Press, 1981).
In
anglo-american circles, the philosopher most associated with the
recovery of virtue and arguably the one most faithful to the
project announced by Anscombe is Alasdair MacIntyre. Yet in
many ways, MacIntyre’s views are atypical of contemporary
virtue ethics, since his advocacy of virtue is tied up with his
wholesale rejection of modernity, with the thesis that the
enlightenment generates an emotivism that makes all to convincing
Nietzsche’s interpretation of moral language as covert
expressions of the will to power. In the famous, pivotal
chapter in After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that only
something like Aristotle’s conception of the virtues can
withstand Nietzsche’s critique. But it is not only in
MacIntyre’s radical critique of modernity that one finds a
recovery of virtue prompted by dissatisfaction with the dominant
modern ethical theories.
For example, in
his book Character, (Oxford University Press, 1191), Joel
Kupperman states that “a great deal of ethical philosophy of
the last two hundred years looks both oversimple and
overintellectualized… philosophers have treated morality as
if each of us is a computer which needs a program for deciding
moral questions…. Ethics…in this view is at work only
at those discrete moments when an input is registered and the
moral decision-procedure is applied (pp. 71-72).” Kupperman
focuses on three problems with the decision-procedure model of
ethics.
First, the
“decision-procedure is parasitic upon and presupposes a
classification scheme of features of the world that we are
supposed to treat as salient.” Input is never neutral
or completely obvious; to know what is salient, relevant,
significant in our experience requires capacities of perception
and articulation that the decision procedure cannot itself
provide. Kupperman appeals to the ineliminable role of the
agent’s sensitivity to the concrete situation. The
ability to apply a decision procedure presupposes moral education
and experience. Kupperman here provides his own version of
Aristotle’s warning at the outset of the Ethics that
moral philosophy will profit only those who have already been
well brought up, who in some way already possess the starting
points of ethics.
Second,
even given such a classification scheme, the decision-procedure
is notoriously indeterminate in the results it yields. Consider,
for example, the interminable debates over whether Kantian
universalization does or does not rule out suicide, lying, or
theft. In the case of utilitarianism, critics are fond of
arguing that the maximization of happiness can be used to justify
patently heinous acts like the murder or torture of the innocent.
Of course, utilitarians offer clever rebuttals, arguing that the
calculus need not result in the justification of such acts.
The real problem is that the calculus seems to necessitate no
specific course of action whatsoever.
Third, the
decision-procedure is “oriented toward single decisions,
viewed as disconnected from other decisions, in a way which
ignores or slights the moral importance of continuity of
commitment.” (p. 74). The objection touches upon the
atomism of the decision procedure model; sometimes this atomism
is exhibited in a fascination with so-called moral dilemmas, as
if morality were peripheral to ordinary life, only coming into
play in unusual moments of conflict and confusion. Atomism
also presupposes that acts and agents are intelligible in
abstraction from contexts. Kupperman and others reject the modern
partitioning of the moral as a specific realm of human life and
recall the ancient conception of the ethical as coextensive with
the human.
In ways that a
decision procedure cannot, character accounts for the importance
of continuity of commitment, since it allows us to focus on
agents over time and in a variety of settings. Moreover, a
virtuous character is constituted by habits that amount, in
Kupperman’s language, to a set of commitments. Indeed,
virtues circumscribe the types of acts a virtuous agent is
willing to undertake or even consider. Yet utilitarianism,
as Bernard Williams has argued, requires that the only commitment
we are to have continuously is the commitment to maximization.
Commitments imposed upon us by certain virtues would always have
to be tentative and conditional, that is, we would always have to
be willing to act against a virtue if acting in accord with
virtue would bring about a less than optimum set of consequences.
And while Kant advocates purity of will in a habitual willingness
to do one’s duty, it is not clear that doing one’s duty
in kantian terms is compatible with actions flowing from virtue.
At least one influential essay ponders the contrast between
visiting a sick friend because of friendship or because of a
universal, impersonal duty. [See Stocker, “The
Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” Journal of
Philosophy 14 (1976), pp. 453-466. For a response to
Stocker and others who suppose Kant’s conception of agency
and moral motivation are antithetical to Aristotle’s, see
the chapter on Aristotle and Kant in Hursthouse’s On
Virtue Ethics.]
A
related problem with kantian and utilitarian ethical theories is
that even where they find an important role for virtue, say in
the utilitarian benevolence or Kantian self-control, they seem to
reduce the multiplicity of virtues operative in human life to one
overriding virtue. This calls to mind Anscombe’s
charge against impoverished vocabulary of “modern moral
philosophy.” Her modest proposal is that instead of
identifying a bad act as “against the moral law or morally
wrong,” we should at least “name a genus,” such as
untruthful or unchaste.
According to
virtue theorists, the basic flaw in an exclusively rule-based
system is that it is too far removed from the concrete
circumstance of action. It relies too heavily on a
deductive model of reason that begins and ends in universals.
The deductive model disregards the distinctive object and term of
practical reasoning: the concrete, singular action. Between
universal and singular, the perception and judgment of the agent
must intervene in decisive, non-rule-governed ways. The
agent must be able to discern what is salient in the circumstance
and this involves not only measuring this experience against
previous experiences (hence the crucial role of memory in
prudence) but also an awareness of what is novel and of how to
interpret that novelty. If rules are to be brought to bear
on the singular, the agent must judge which rules are relevant
and, if there are multiple rules, apparently in conflict, the
agent must decide which rules apply and how. If we are to
invoke further rules to cover the interpretation of ambiguous
cases or cases where relevant rules seem to conflict, we invite
an infinite regress of rules and moral paralysis. Moreover,
the casuistical model replaces the virtues of perception,
deliberation, and judgment (which can be possessed and exercised
only by an individual agent) with an abstract decision procedure.
All of this appears to make the agent superfluous and the
irreducibly singular action merely an instantiation of a
universal.[2]
Another way to
express the concern among virtue ethicists about the decision
procedure model is in terms of the contrast between ethical and
technical reasoning, in Aristotle’s terms between phronesis
and techne. There are at least three issues here.
First, for many, a legalistic ethic is too closely modeled upon techne
wherein an agent imposes an abstract form or plan upon raw
matter, whereas phronesis has more to do with discerning
what ought to be done in given circumstances. Second, a
further disparity between technical skills and ethical virtues
emerges in Aristotle and Aquinas’s claim that intentional
errors are culpable in the sphere of the ethical but not
necessarily in that of the technical or even the artistic sphere.
(It is important to recall that techne comprehends any
sort of making and thus includes both technical and artistic
skills.) If a reputed pianist decides on a whim to sit at
the piano and just make noise, this does not make him any less of
a musician. If, however, someone reputed for compassion
decides on a whim not to rescue a toddler who wanders into
traffic, we have serious reason to doubt his virtue. Ethical
virtues differ from technical skills by precluding the
possibility of a gap between possession and exercise. Third,
an important contrast between Aristotle and classical
utilitarianism emerges in the consideration of means to end
relationship. Both identify the end happiness but, in
addition to disagreeing about the meaning of happiness, they
construe the means to end relationship differently. Utilitarian
has a technical or productive understanding of the means to end
relationship, wherein, there need be no intrinsic link between
means and end. As MacIntyre points out,
Each
can be adequately characterized without reference to the other;
and a number of quite different means may be employed to achieve
one and the same end. But the exercise of the virtues is
not in this sense a means to the end of the good for man…
the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of
such a life, not a mere preparatory exercise to secure such a
life. We thus cannot characterize the good for man
adequately without already having made reference to the virtues
(AV, pp. 139-140).
Of course,
kantians and utilitarians are not without resources to respond to
the attacks from virtue ethicists. Both Onora O’Neill
[“Kant after Virtue”] and Nancy Shermann [Making a
Necessity of Virtue] have shown that there is much room in
Kant to develop a richer conception of agency and the role of
judgment. [The best assessment of how far Kant can be taken
in this direction is Robert Pippen’s “Hegel, Ethical
Reasons, Kantian Rejoinders,” in Idealism as Modernism (Cambridge
University Press, 1997), pp. 92-128, especially pp. 111-124].
And even consequentialists, such as Scheffler [see The
Rejection of Consequentialism], have argued that they can
carve out a space for agency and character. Furthermore, in
its flight from acts and consequences, virtue ethics is
vulnerable to kantian and utilitarians counter-charges that
virtue ethics itself is reductionistic. Later in the essay,
we shall consider a specific version of this argument.
For now, I want
to suggest that virtue ethics has failed to be sufficiently
ambitious, systematic, and comprehensive in its reflections on
ethics. It still lacks what Elizabeth Anscombe called for
in her famous essay, namely, an “adequate moral
psychology.” To revive anything like Aristotle’s
ethical program would require resuscitating an account of nature
and teleology. In spite of some impressive gestures in this
direction by MacIntyre (Dependent Rational Animals) and
Hursthouse (On Virtue Ethics), there remains a dearth of
material on these topics. For a variety of reasons, most
virtue ethicists see these sorts of questions as distractions
from what they take to be their more concrete and detailed
inquiries into the virtues. But even here the results often
leave much to be desired. In spite of its persistent
appeals to experience, community, history and narrative, the
treatments of specific virtues too often lack rich, empirical
detail. With the notable exception of MacIntyre, there is
still a tendency among virtue ethicists to adduce a generic list
of virtues, with quick descriptions of each. And thinking
about certain virtues, most notably justice, is almost
nonexistent (Hursthouse cites justice as the most obvious gap in
the current literature; see On Virtue Ethics, p. 5).
Concerning the virtue of justice, virtue ethicists have allowed
their opponents to set the terms of debate. Nowhere is this
more evident than in that segment of virtue ethics that overlaps
with communitarian and feminist thought.
Indeed, there
are striking similarities between the critique of what Kupperman
identifies as the decision-procedure model of moral reasoning and
the critique of the procedural political theory of John Rawls by
communitarians and feminists. One thinks immediately in
this context of Michael Sandel’s first book, Liberalism
and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: 1982), which exposes
the unencumbered self, the “person wholly without character,
without moral depth” that Rawls’ model of justice as
fairness both presupposes and fosters (p. 179). To this,
Sandel contrasts the “person with character” who is
always already implicated in history and community. But
concerning a rival theory of justice, Sandel has nothing positive
to say; he simply accepts the liberal conception and displays its
limits, the way it exacts costs and distorts our vision of self
and others. At the end of Liberalism and the Limits of
Justice Sandel suggest replacing rawlsian justice with the
classical conception of friendship in an attempt to rethink our
bonds and relationships with others. Later, in Democracy’s
Discontent, Sandel details how in 20th century America the
mechanisms of the procedural republic have supplanted the
formative project of civic republicanism. Excessive
reliance upon such procedures does serves to further fragment
society and dislocate individuals, thus fomenting conflict and
increasing our dependence on procedures. Although Democracy’s
Discontent suggests ways that we might recover a richer sense
of the role of virtue in our public life, it remains silent on
the issue of justice. Indeed, it has been typical of virtue
ethics and those loosely allied with its project to expend great
effort to uncover the limits of justice.
A similar sort of
strategy is operative in Annette Baier’s feminist critique
of the hegemony of the ethics of obligation in modernity, which
issues in an “abnormally coercive model” of human
relationships as fundamentally contractual. Baier objects
to this model as “symptomatic of the bad faith of liberal
modernity” (p. 270). Referring to Rawls’
assumption that in a liberal society we suppose that parents will
love their children and in time children will love their parents
(p. 267), she urges that liberalism presumes a cultural deposit
of character about which it is at best inarticulate. Its
focus on morality as a “game of mutual mutually corrective
threats” leaves out of consideration the “conditions
for the survival of the practices it endorses” (p. 272).
The liberal shift to a coercive model in cases of conflict among
equals tends to suppress the question why we should entrust
certain individuals and groups with the power to enforce
obligations. “The whole question of when moral
pressure of various sorts, formative, reformative, and punitive,
ought to be brought to bear by whom is subsumed under the
question of whom to trust when and with what, and for what good
reasons” (p. 274). So it is not just that coercive
liberal politics rests upon a deposit of character about which it
is silent and which its procedures may over time erode, but also
that its very foundations are morally precarious. In
another essay, entitled “The Need for More than
Justice,” Baier enlists the ethics of care as a challenge to
Western individualism, to the “fairly entrenched belief in
the possibility and desirability of each person pursuing his own
good in his own way, constrained only by a minimal formal common
good.”[3]
Liberal justice neglects not only concern for those at the
margins of society, but also “an education that will form
persons to be capable of conforming to an ethics of care and
responsibility.” Even were we to grant these
deficiencies in procedural conceptions of justice, it is unclear
how either an Aristotelian model of friendship, something akin to
which is operative in Sandel’s rival communitarian
conception of the self, or the notion of trust could replace
justice in the political order. Aristotle does indeed say
that where friendship is present, justice is superfluous, but he
has an awful lot to say about justice precisely because true
friendships are so rare. Baier may well be correct about
the limits and distortions of liberal justice, but it does not
follow that an ethics of care provides a viable, comprehensive
alternative. As Elenore Stump puts it, “If the value
of caring for others is the fundamental ethical value, then it
isn’t easy to explain why it is morally acceptable to
withhold care for others in the interests of pursuing one’s
own projects.” Without justice, the ethics of care
alone can be too easily exploited.[4]
The opposition of
care to justice is a contemporary one and the sweeping indictment
of Western conceptions of justice will not withstand historical
scrutiny. Both Aristotle and Aquinas supply a conception of
justice that avoids the defects of proceduralism and care. Aquinas’s
view of justice is invulnerable to the standard objections raised
by communitarians and feminists; Aquinas subsumes under justice
what philosophers like Baier see as absent in contractual
accounts of justice, protecting the powerless and educating youth
(See Stump, “Aquinas on Justice” PACPA). Yet
the individual is not swallowed up in concern for the common
good. Aquinas provides a robust account of the human good
and of the virtues constitutive of it. The virtue of
justice will require different things of different persons in
different circumstances. Commutative justice will also
dictate appropriate recompense for sacrifices made and services
rendered. Blind obeisance to the wants, even the needs, of
others can foster vice in both giver and recipient. Virtue
will often require resistance not passive submission.
The
call for an enriched conception of personal and political bonds
is a staple not just of communitarian and feminist political
theory, but also of virtue ethics. In his book From
Morality to Virtue, Michael Slote argues that we need to
replace the narrow conception of morality operative in modern
ethical theories with a notion of the admirable. Focusing
on what we admire might lead us to think about the goods we
pursue in common and about the rich variety of contributions to
our common life. It would certainly allow us to bring under
the purview of justice much more than what a procedural account
admits. Although he does not develop the political
implications of his theory, Slote concurs with the claims of
Larry Blum [Friendship. Altruism, and Morality (Routledge,
1980)] and Simmons [Moral Principles and Political Obligations
(Princeton: 1979)] that, so long as we limit ourselves to a
purely “deontic notion of obligation,... political theory
cannot offer a convincing general account of our political
bonds.” But Slote counters that this does not rule out
the option of “fundamentally aretaic, and clearly ethical,
notion of bonds and ties.”
The appeal to the
admirable could have the advantage of forcing us to be more
articulate about what we do admire, about the various sorts of
contributions to our common life. [Cf. Charles Taylor in
the opening chapter of Sources of the Self on the
“inarticulacy” about morality bred by modern ethical
theory and certain forms of liberalism.] It also raises the
question that was central to pre-modern political thought: the
question of merit. There are, nonetheless, problems with
appealing to the admirable, at least in the way Slote does.
To what extent can an appeal to the admirable provide unity to
the theory and practice of the virtues? What are the
sources of our list of admirable traits? How are we to
adjudicate between rival conceptions of the admirable? From
the perspective of Aristotle’s Ethics, the appeal to
the admirable would constitute but the first, dialectical moment
in ethical inquiry: the culling of various, received opinions on
what is noble and good. Given our pluralism, moreover, the
drive for consensus on the virtues, for a list of admirable
traits that we all hold in common, may well leave us with a
paltry and disappointingly short list of virtues.
It seems to me
that contemporary virtue ethicists who assume a consensus on the
virtues, that there exists a core set of virtues and shared
understanding of the virtues across historical and cultural
divides have yet to meet MacIntyre’s challenge on this
issue. MacIntyre has repeatedly made the argument that
there is not one doctrine of virtue but many doctrines of
virtues. In specific accounts of the virtues as taught and
lived, there is likely to be disagreements not only about the
list of virtues, what is included and what, excluded, but also
about the rank and relative importance attached to particular
virtues. Even where the same virtue is cited in two
contexts, there need not be agreement about the nature and
function of the virtue. [In one essay, MacIntyre singles
out an unlikely virtue for comparative analysis, sophrosyne
or temperance ("Sophrosune: How a Virtue Can Become
Socially Disruptive," In Midwest Stuides in Philosophy,
Volume XIII, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 1-11.).]
MacIntyre’s
commitment in After Virtue to an historicist defense of
the virtues has only confused matters; in fact, MacIntyre has
since repudiated his own repudiation of Aristotle’s
“metaphysical biology.” One need not be an
historicist to agree that accounts of the virtues differ. Of
course, no one aims to present an idiosyncratic picture of the
virtues. Classical philosophers strive to depict the
virtues proper to human nature, virtues constitutive of the human
good. But they do not reach an account of the virtues
proper to human beings by filtering out what is controversial to
arrive at a human condition accessible to anyone, anywhere,
regardless of education or training. The goal is not to
unveil the least common denominator in the human understanding of
the good. Whereas some modern authors repudiate the pursuit
of the ultimate end of human life as futile, classical
philosophers grounds each of the virtues in a teleological
conception. No virtue is intelligible apart from its
relation to the end or rational good to which it contributes and
which it partially constitutes. Precisely because there are
competing accounts of the virtues and because any generic account
is misleadingly shallow, we must begin with a critique of
misunderstandings of the virtue in question, misconceptions
operative either within the current culture or within a rival
philosophical school.
In fact, in the
sequel to After Virtue, entitled Whose Justice? Which
Rationality?, MacIntyre argued that there were fundamentally
different conceptions of justice. To see how the recovery
of the virtue of justice might provide a corrective to certain
tendencies in contemporary virtue ethics, it will be useful to
consider an important objection to virtue ethics.
In his essay
“On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics” (Virtue Ethics,
ed. by Crisp and Slote), Robert Louden argues that all
contemporary schools of normative ethics are
“mononomic” (p. 204); each is incomplete, providing
only a part of what is needed. This is a version of the
reducitonist objection to which I referred earlier. Since
this is precisely the sort of charge that virtue ethicists are
fond of aiming at Kantian and utilitarian theories, they may be
surprised to find Louden turning the objection against them.
Nonetheless, he urges that the “strong agent
orientation” of virtue ethics leads to an exclusive focus on
agents over acts. Louden contends that the question
fundamental to virtue ethics, “What sort of person ought I
to be?” cannot be separated from the question “What
ought I to do?” Without some answer to the latter, we
shall not know how to become virtuous and be left with vague,
hypothetical descriptions of exemplary characters. The
problem here is not just the threat of moral skepticism. Perhaps
the strongest objection concerns what Louden calls
“intolerable acts... certain types of action which produce
harms of such magnitude that they destroy the bonds of the
community and render (at least temporarily) the achievement of
moral goods impossible” (p. 207). Attentive readers
will hear in this passage echoes of (the pre-Thomistic)
MacIntyre’s insistence that a list of virtues needs to be
paired with a list of actions never admitting of a mean (After
Virtue).[5]
But Louden fails to articulate the complementarity of virtues and
rules in MacIntyre’s Aristotelian language; instead, Louden
appeals to Frankena’s thesis that “The Greeks held that
being virtuous entails not just having good motives or intentions
but also doing the right thing.” Since the Greeks
don’t have a lot to say about motives or intentions, at
least not in the modern senses of these terms, Frankena’s
claim needs to be reformulated in less historically objectionable
language. Indeed, what is most problematic is his
imputation of a good/right split to Greek ethics. We might
more accurately say that for Aristotle an act is good only if it
is good in every respect. More broadly for Aristotle, being
virtuous is a matter of having a certain kind of character,
spelled out in terms of possessing a set of virtues. A
virtue is a habit standing midway between potency and act, or
more precisely a potency that is oriented in a determinate way.
But such a habit exists in order that it may be actualized.
This accords with Aristotle’s doctrine of energeia,
wherein capacities are ordered to activities (cf. Metaphysics,
VII).
Even if Aristotle
does not neglect specific acts,[6]
the accusation of reductionism can be reformulated: even if acts
are given their due, they are valuable only in so far as they are
signs or manifestations of virtue, of the excellence of the
agent. Aquinas does not completely collapse the goodness of
acts, at least the acts of justice, into that of the goodness of
the agent. Some acts are intolerable because of the harm
they do to others and because they thwart the fundamental goods
of political life. In fact, justice is distinguished from
the other virtues in the nature of the mean. In contrast to
the other moral virtues, where the mean is directly relative to
the character of the agent, the “due” or mean of
justice does not reside in the subjective disposition of the
agent; it consists rather in the external act, in the harm or
good done to the other. It is important to note that the
resources in Aquinas for responding to the objections of Louden
do not require a turn from virtue to an alien account of moral
rules. Instead, the response arises precisely from a more
adequate account of the virtues and of their distinctive and
proper subject matters. In both Aristotle and Aquinas, but
especially in Aquinas, we find a rich consideration of rules,
laws, and procedures, falling under the analysis of the virtue of
justice. Indeed, it is instructive to note that Aquinas
does not offer an examination of the relationship of precepts to
specific cases in his initial discussion of the natural law but
rather in his later discussion of the virtue of justice.
Just how
comprehensive is the virtue of justice is clear from
Aristotle’s claim that justice is “complete virtue in
relation to another.” Aquinas goes so far as to
identify justice with the human good (iustitita est humanum
bonum). Of the four cardinal virtues (fortitude,
temperance, prudence and justice), only the virtue of justice is
essentially related to others; both Aristotle and Aquinas call it
the good of the other (bonum alterius). Given that
the recovery of the inherently social and communal character of
human action has accompanied the revival of virtue, the neglect
of the virtue of justice is surprising. Of course, this
conception of justice as securing what is due to others cannot be
codified in terms of abstract and ahistorical procedures. Instead,
it involves attention to the range and hierarchy of the goods
operative in the community and, in light of those goods, a
prudential assessment of who merits what. Hence any
conception of procedural justice must on this view be woefully
deficient.
If virtue
ethicists were to devote greater attention to the virtue of
justice, they would be in a better position to respond to other
objections. It is sometimes argued, for example, that
virtue theory is insufficiently social and other-oriented and
that virtue theory is trapped in an idealized vision of
self-sufficiency. Jerome Schneewind’s assertion that
modern legal theories, in contrast to virtue theories, remind us
of the “basic needs we share, and the difficulties, inherent
in our nature, to overcoming them” (p. 200). We have
already seen that, according to the basic precepts of justice,
certain kinds of harm to others must always be avoided. To
the most fundamental prohibitions on murder, theft, and adultery,
Aquinas adds prohibitions on lying, since truthfulness is
necessary for the preservation of society and is thus a precept
of justice. To arrive at an adequate account of justice, we
would also have to include a set of virtues, including gratitude,
liberality, affability, and mercy, virtues that in some cases
specify and in others supplement justice. Affability, for
example, is the virtue of “behaving toward all,” even
strangers, “in a fitting way” (II-II, 114, 2, ad 3).
Affability fulfills neither a legal debt nor a debt from a favor
received, the latter of which is fulfilled by the virtue of
gratitude. Moreover, affability falls short of perfect
friendship; hence it does not exhibit the intimacy appropriate to
perfect friendship. Still, because of our common humanity
we are “every man’s friend,” even strangers
(II-II, 114, 1, ad 2).
Yet, precisely
because of its accentuation of friendship Aquinas’s entire
conception of justice comes under fire for allegedly failing to
appreciate the otherness or separateness of persons. This
of course takes us back to tensions in Aristotle’s
conception of friendship, where, on the one hand, the friend is
described as another self and friendship is based on self-love,
and where, on the other hand, the mark of true friendhsip is said
to be the love of the friend for his or her own sake, not as an
instrument of one’s pleasure or utility.
The best way to
clarify the role of friendship in Aquinas’s account of
justice and its allied virtues is to make use of that most
Thomistic of doctrines: analogy. In friendship the
self-other relationship is neither univocal nor equivocal, but
analagous. If it were univocal, involving a redundant
sameness, Aquinas would indeed be open to the charge of obscuring
from view the distinction and separateness of persons. If
it were equivocal, that is, if the other were regarded as
radically other, then it is hard to see how an other could be at
all intelligible to us, what would count as an appropriate
response to the other, or even why an encounter with the other
should be construed as significant.
Consider in this
context the virtue of liberality, a virtue for which there is
little place in either right-wing libertarianism or left-wing
social engineering. Liberality, a mean between prodigality
and covetousness, has to do with the proper stewardship of excess
riches (II-II, 117, 1). Prodigality is not just
wastefulness but spending money on the flesh that leads one to
take no pleasure in virtue. In the treatment of
covetousness, the inordinate love of possessing, Aquinas refers
to its daughters or offspring, which are treachery, fraud,
falsehood, perjury, violence, restlessness, and insensibility to
mercy. Nearly all the vices bred by covetousness assault
justice. One of the daughters, insensibility to mercy,
erodes our ability to see and respond appropriately to others in
need. The root of this vice is a hardening of the heart
such that we are not moved to assist the needy. Aquinas’s
explication of mercy takes direct aim at a certain conception of
self-sufficiency. While conceding that a passion cannot be
a virtue (II-II, 30, 3), Aquinas insists that feeling of sorrow
which is part of mercy is not a vice or defect. He cites
Aristotle: “amicibilia condolere amico” (II-II, 30, 2).
He contends further that “to repute oneself happy” and
invulnerable to suffering is a result of the vice of pride, whose
false sense of justice is actually a form of scorn (II-II, 30, 2,
ad 3). By contrast, the wise who have fallen into misery
are more merciful. The proudly self-sufficient disown any
connection between themselves and those who suffer; yet this is
an illusion, a failure to see themselves as at least always
potentially in the very position of the needy and suffering
other.
The nesting of
justice within a host of other virtues evinces the precise scope
and limits of justice. If Aquinas fails to reduce our needs
to a short list, he does underscore our neediness in other, more
pronounced ways. Moreover, the modern account described by
Schneewind embodies its own conception of self-sufficiency, since
it tends to view individuals as isolated from one another,
lacking any common vision of their good, and primarily needing
others in an instrumental fashion. The contractual model of
justice presupposes a clean slate, where debits and credits
emerge only after we have entered into the contract. On
Aquinas's view, by contrast, many of our debts are incurred prior
to and without an individual’s conscious consent and some
can never be fully repaid. Such is the case, for example,
with the debts we owe to God, country, parents, and those who
exercise offices of dignity in the community. At the heart
of the Thomistic account of justice, by contrast, is the paradox
of debt that cannot be fully repaid, the virtuous response to
which is gratitude, liberality, and hospitality. Pieper
writes, “The just man, who...realizes that his very being is
a gift, and that he is heavily indebted before God and man, is
also the man willing to give where there is no strict obligation.
He will be willing to give another man something no one can
compel him to give” (p. 111).
How different the
Thomistic conception of justice is from its modern rivals is
clear from its inclusion of the virtues of religion and piety,
whose scope extends beyond debts to God to those owed to country
and family, under its purview. This is an affront not only
to our sense of the separation of religion from politics, but
also to the common supposition that an obligation is something
that can be fully repaid. What is due, however, to God,
country, or family often cannot be repaid. Rather than neat
procedures and a clear reckoning of debits and credits, at the
heart of justice is the paradox of debts that cannot be repaid.
Justice thus underscores its own limits. The Thomistic
conception of justice points to the necessity of a host of allied
virtues like gratitude, liberality, and hospitality and thus does
it eclipse contemporary divisions, divisions between
proceduralism and communitarianism, universalism and
particularism.
Aquinas’
ethical thought transcends not only these divisions but also
contemporary divisions between law and virtue. Indeed, in
the current philosophical climate, to call Aquinas a virtue
ethicist is likely to be as misleading as calling him a theorist
of law. Of course, the more thorough and less piecemeal is
our study of Aquinas, the more we risk losing adherents in
contemporary ethical and political debates. But then we
might gain something much more important: a new appreciation of
the goals and methods of classical ethical and political theory,
whose inquiries into the best life and best regime allow us to
see possibilities of human excellence not present in, and perhaps
positively excluded by, contemporary politics and mores. Whether
virtue ethics, which has already learned much from classical and
medieval authors, can take the measure of their complex and lofty
teachings, remains to be seen.
Notes
[1] The essay first appeared in 1958 (Ethics 33);
its most recent reprint is in Virtue Ethics, edited by Crisp and
Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 26-44.
[2] Once again, Pieper anticipates later developments.
He traces the attraction of casuistry to the understandable, but
misplaced desire for “certainty and security.” Pieper
holds that to overvalue casuistry is to “confound model and
reality” and to misunderstand the “meaning and rank of
the virtue of prudence” (CV, pp. 26-27).
[3] In Justice and care: Essential Readings in
Feminist Ethics, ed. Virginia Held (Boulder, CO.: Westview
Press, 1995), pp. 48, 52, and 55. The passages from Baier
are quoted in Elenore Stump, ”Aquinas on Justice,” in
PACPA 71 (1997), pp. 61-78.
[4] Perhaps Baier is not open to this charge, since she is
careful to state that the notion of trust, for example, must be
balanced by a notion of appropriate distrust (see “What Do
Women Want in a Moral Theory?”).
[5] Virtue ethicists, who wish to meet Louden’s
challenge, must be careful, lest they deprive themselves of one
of their strengths: indeterminacy. As Amelie Rorty
observes, “The more practical an ethical theory, the more it
reflects the sorts of difficulties that virtuous agents have, and
the more clearly it locates and explains our failures. Ethical
theories designed to be practical and action-guiding cannot be
expected to provide salvation where none is to be had”
(“Virtues and their Vicissitudes,” p. 147).
[6] Obviously a host of difficulties need to be addressed
here. The same act can at least superficially be performed
by a virtuous and a non-virtuous agent. A virtuous person
can retain a noble character even when she is impeded from
realizes virtuous actions. I suspect, although I cannot
demonstrate it, that one of the reasons virtue ethicists resist
an act-oriented approach to virtue is that this seems to give to
much ground to rival contemporary theories. It might also
appear that we are shifting the accent from being to doing in the
sense of producing effects in the external world. But this
fails to distinguish between doing as acting and doing as making,
the former of which is an immanent perfection or actuality while
the perfection of the latter is transitive, passing into the
thing made.
Thomas Hibbs is a professor of Philosophy at Boston College in Massachusetts.
Respondent: Dr. Russell Hittinger
In the time
afforded to me, I want to briefly develop two points of his
paper. In the first place, Tom Hibbs’s survey
indicates that virtue is not a free-standing subject in moral
philosophy. Indeed, every effort over the past quarter
century to make it so have not proved very convincing nor very
effective in changing the discipline of moral philosophy. Some
of the reasons can be found in the work to which Hibbs referred,
namely Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal essay “Modern Moral
Philosophy” which appeared in 1958. In the second
place, I believe Hibbs certainly is on the right track in
emphasizing the problem of justice; for this is where we will
most likely discover that we do not need to choose between an
ethics of virtue and an ethics of precept.
At the outset of
her essay, Anscombe proposes that:
the concepts of obligation, and duty – moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say – and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.[1]
This proposal was
deliberately mischievous. It was meant to expose a chronic
and unexamined prejudice in modern moral philosophy: namely, that
moral predicates are equivalent to legal ones. The essay however
was widely received as saying something revolutionary: that the
concepts of virtue and character could and should be substituted
wholesale for the concepts of duty and obligation. Hence,
the quest for a free-standing virtue ethics.
What Miss
Anscombe actually said was something like this. For
Aristotle, the subject-matter of morality always involves
description and judgment about human dispositions, passions, and
actions. The terms “should,” “ought,”
or “needs” relate to good and bad, e.g. the machinery
needs oil, or should or ought to be oiled, in that running
without oil is bad for it, or it runs badly without oil. In
describing moral actions, passions, and dispositions the
pre-modern philosophers would always name a genus, e.g.
untruthful, unchaste, or unjust. The word “ought”
was used in an ordinary, or what Anscombe called a
“non-emphatic” fashion. Having understood that an
action was of a certain kind, there was no apparent need to go in
search of a special moral predicate over and above the good or
bad already indicated in the genus or species of the act so
described as good or bad.
Modern
philosophers, however, are not satisfied with the ordinary use of
the words “ought” or “should” – they
also want to know whether the doing of such and such an act is morally
wrong. Thus, descriptions of actions immediately pass to a
quite different notion: “should” or “ought” in
the moral sense of these terms; and the special moral
sense is regarded as equivalent with “is obliged” or
“is bound” or “is required to.” Accordingly,
moral descriptions and evaluations are typically displayed in a
legal-like verdict upon, or within, the person. On this
view, moral concepts are very much like, if not identical to,
legal concepts of being bound, permitted, or excused. It is
not enough to have good reason to think that fornication and
lying are bad; the specifically moral issue is whether one has
reason to think that one is bound, permitted, or excused with
respect to such acts.
Interestingly,
Anscombe defends the idea that legal conceptions are, or can be,
aboriginal in moral evaluation. Indeed, Jews, Stoics, and
Christians have reason to think that “being obliged to”
is fundamental to moral evaluation.
Thomas Aquinas,
for example, held that all human judgment is set within an
already existing legal order. We find in I-II, 94.2 the
proposition that the habit of synderesis holds the
“first precept of law” (primum praeceptum legis):
“the good is to be done and pursued and evil resisted.”
Notice that Thomas does not say the first principle of
practical reason, as some contemporary thomists have
paraphrased the passage; rather he says first precept of law.
Thomas means exactly what he says. By the impression of
created light God induces the creature to share in the rules and
measures of the eternal law.[2]The radical
implications of Thomas’s teaching should be evident. Every
created intelligence not only has a competence to make judgments,
but to make judgments according to a real law — indeed, a
law that is the form and pattern of all other laws. Thus,
the legal order of things does not begin an acquired virtue,
possessed by a few; nor does it begin with the offices and
statutes of human positive law; nor does it begin with the law
revealed at Sinai. The first virtue or habit is the ability
to hold and to share in a precept. God speaks the law, at
least in its rudiments, to every intelligent creature. “The
right ends of human life are fixed,” Thomas explains, and
therefore there is a “naturally right judgment about such
ends.”[3] Thomas
groups these under the triad of to be, to live, and
to know — effects of God which are desirable and
lovable to all.[4] Human
prudence is a participation in divine providence.
Supposing that
one has solid reasons for believing in a divine law conception of
ethics, two sorts of problems that haunt modern moral philosophy
can be defused. First, the axiological predicates (good and
bad) do not have to go in search of a law – that is, in
search of an “ought” that gives moral reasons for
choosing what is good and rejecting what is bad. Second,
the emphatic “ought” (designating obligation) does not
have to go in search of axiological predicates (good and bad).
This is the dilemma of modern moral philosophy: either it
describe goods bereft of moral norms, or it brings into view a
moral law that is ontologically empty with regard to human goods.
To return to
Anscombe, her main point is that modern moral philosophy
inherited a language of moral precept and obligation that becomes
empty once the theological presuppositions are discarded. We
are left with agents who in some mysterious way utter laws to
themselves despite the fact that there is no good way to place
such precepts in the genus of a real law. For all his
sophistry, David Hume was right when he said that the word
“ought” is a sentiment, a prejudice that adds nothing
to the description that such and such an act is unjust.
So, Anscombe
proposes that the legal language of obligation be put on the
Index. Unless and until the theological presuppositions are
recovered, we should investigate the much simpler model of
finding moral predicates in our description of characteristic
types of acts and states of character. The agent needs
courage; living without this virtue is not good for the agent,
etc.
It should be
reiterated that Anscombe’s essay was polemical, dialectical,
and tentative. First, as she herself admits, the emphatic
ought has been embedded in our moral discourse for two millennia.
Second, the simpler model of description quickly runs into the
same problems as the legal model. Having rid itself of the
idea of participation in the precepts of a divine lawgiver,
modern moral philosophy is hardly apt to accept the notions of
nature, characteristic function, and final causality which come
the fore when we start giving descriptions of acts as unchaste,
unjust, etc. While the two models of participating in divine
precept and sharing common natures are distinct, for all
practical purposes the flight from one is the flight from the
other. In fact, from an historical standpoint, this view of
nature and human nature was jettisoned before western
intellectuals gave up on the divine command ethic.
Since the
publication of Anscombe’s essay, virtue ethics has succeeded
when it functions as a corrective. In philosophy, as a
corrective to the puzzles and dilemmas of Kantianism and
utilitarianism; in Roman Catholic moral theology, as a corrective
to a certain strain of legalism which evolved in confessional and
canonical practices. But it has not managed to displace the
emphatic ought. Certainly not in philosophy or in political
philosophy.
In Catholic moral
theology, various and sundry attempts to give priority to virtue,
especially prudence, has been nothing short of a disaster, and
has fallen into most of the traps so well described by Anscombe.
Here, I have in mind the school of proportionalism which the Pope
took such pains to criticize in Veritatis splendor.
Bred in the Roman
and German schools of the 1950s by Bernard Haring and Josef Fuchs
and their disciples, proportionalism began, innocently enough, as
an effort to restore the importance of charity and prudence.
But prudence was assigned so much work that law ceased to have
any role in the formation of precepts. Natural law, for
instance, was characterized as nothing a native moral sensibility
that God instilled in each creature. Law, of course, is not
a power or a habit, but the norm directing the right use of
powers and habits. Having dissevered prudence from any
antecedent and peremptory norm, proportionalists did not revert
to Miss Anscombe’s notion of a non-emphatic ought yielded
from a description of natural kinds and functions. Rather,
they held that prudence must evaluate premoral goods and evils,
and then choose best proportion of these premoral goods and
evils. It is not enough to decide that lying is bad
according to its natural genus; one must go on to impose a norm
of proportions and consequences which ensue upon this or that
choice about premoral goods and evils. We are left with a
rather free-floating moral sense of the sort criticized by
Anscombe.
In summary,
virtue theorists have not shown us how the problems of modern
moral philosophy are redressed simply optic of virtue. And
in fact, the theories tend to reduplicate the very problems so
well described by Anscombe in her 1958 essay. So much for
my first point, which has left many important things unsaid.
As for my second
point, which I will have to make very quickly, I want to say that
Hibbs’s remarks about justice take us in the right
direction.
As have seen in
light of Anscombe’s essay, moral philosophers believe there
is a conceptual puzzle to be solved in how we get from “X is
bad” or “X is unjust” to “X-doing is morally
wrong.” Ordinary moral sensibility, however, is
remarkably resilient to such puzzles, especially when the
question concerns justice. To use one of Anscombe’s
own examples. Suppose I say to my grocer, Truth consists in
either relations of ideas, as that 4 quarters equal a dollar, or
matters of fact, as that I ordered potatoes, you supplied them,
and you sent me a bill. So it doesn’t apply to such a
proposition as that I owe you such-and-such a sum.”
Now, I might be able convince my grocer that there are
exceedingly slippery conceptual problems in locating the
veridical basis of my obligation to pay him such-and-such a sum,
but I am not likely to convince him that I don’t owe the
money, that refusing to do so isn’t bad and unjust, and that
a court should not order me (in the fashion of an emphatic ought)
to pay the sum.
One reason why
common sense is resilient to bad theories about justice is
that, as Hibbs points out in connection with Aristotle and
Thomas, the “due” of justice does not reside
principally in the subjective disposition of the agent, but in
the external act. The ready disposition of the will to give
to each what is his due, along with other moral and intellectual
virtues, are important. But unless and until X gives what
is due to Y, there is no justice. So, it is not only that
everyone wants justice, at least in their own case; everyone
wants justice in the concrete. This perhaps also helps to
explain why every effort to reduce the virtue of justice to techné,
or to instrumental rationality, is bound to fail. For it is
not sufficient merely to produce an external result – it has
to be the right, the just, result. Lawyers have not managed
to convince people that they should be satisfied with efficient
but unjust results. And this, in turn, brings to mind the
notion of a virtue called justice.
Another reason
why issues of justice tend to resist bad theories is that justice
cannot be dismissed by facile distinctions between private and
public. Liberalism is mesmerized by commutative justice
because it reflects the principle governing markets: viz. What is
owed to whom is settled by contracts and permission-giving.
Despite liberal ideologies which model justice on commutation and
contract, people do not behave as though this were true. It
is not enough, for example, to say that justice in health care
consists solely or even primarily in what patients give their
physicians permission to do. The distribution of resources
is an irrepressible issue of justice. And even if we should
decide that this is best handled by commutation in markets,
commutation does not settle or determine but only effectuates an
issue of justice that cannot be reduced to contracts or
permission giving.
When
issues of justice arise, it is not so easy to separate the good
and the right, actions and results. Many things go into a
seemingly simple event of X giving what is owed to Y. Most
people, most of the time, will not be guided by a theory that
forbids considering all of the different factors of justice.
Rawls, for example, does not separate the good and the right;
rather he uses the principle of right to limit, a priori, the
range of knowledge or belief about the good that can be deployed
in the public sphere. He himself admits that his scheme is
not modeled on what people actually think or do; it is modeled on
the constraints of a constitutional court. Common sense
dictates that we must first know something before the issue of
justice can arise, and it is at the very least odd to hold that a
principle of justice can limit in advance, and in any absolute
way, the things we might know and the claims we might be entitled
to make on the basis of what we know.
This
explains why, despite the moral flabbiness of our lives today,
the abortion issue will not go away. If it were simply a
matter of the vice of intemperance or cowardice the issue would
be more easily contained because the moral failing would have
reference mainly to weakness of the agent. And political
society does not ordinarily punish such vices except insofar as
they relate to acts which are unjust. People understand
that only on issues of justice can society bind its members to
perform an external act. And virtues or states of character
and disposition can be indirectly fostered by government only by
reason of their relation to external acts of justice. Thus,
the idea that government ought to promote respect for life
depends on already knowing that such respect comes under an issue
of justice. So, the issue will have to be resolved under
the rubric of justice. And because the current resolution
of the issue is based in large part on a rather artificial
constraint on what knowledge is admissible (note: not on what
precepts of morality are admissible or not) the issue will drag
on and on.
In conclusion,
and once again leaving many things unsaid, justice is a sturdy
plant.
Notes
[1] “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Ethics,
Religion and Politics, Vol. III of Collected Philosophical Papers
[original essay, Philosophy 33 (1958)]. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Pp 26-42.
[2] See Matthew Cuddeback, Light and Form in St. Thomas
Aquinas’s Metaphysics of the Knower, dissertation The
Catholic University of America (1998)
[3] S.t. I-II, 47.15
[4] The triadic structure of first precepts in I-II, 94.2
follow this pattern. See also I-II, 19.4.
Russell Hittinger is a Research Professor of Law and the Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
Right Reasons is an occasional publication of the Faith & Reason Institute. Please do not reproduce without permission.
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