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.
Recent Theological Developments
Dr. John Berkman
Wherein Does Virtue Consist?
This morning I
am going to provide a background on the renaissance of discussion
of virtue and the virtues amongst theologians. The paper
will be divided into two sections. In the first section, I
will provide a brief narrative history of this renaissance of
interest in the virtues by Protestant and Catholic theologians.
As we shall see, the touchstone and primary resource for almost
all of the work in this recovery of virtue is that of Thomas
Aquinas, and more generally the Aristotelian-Thomist or
"eudaimonist" approach to the moral life.
The second
section of the paper will provide some background for thinking
about "American virtue." In the midst of the
recovery of virtue amongst contemporary theological ethicists,
there has been what is to my mind a glaring omission, namely, the
problem of what I will call the "social location" for
the virtues. As MacIntyre has taught us in After Virtue,
"it is always within some particular community with its own
specific institutional forms that we learn or fail to learn to
exercise the virtues."[1]
One element of MacIntyre's point is the simple Aristotelian one
that one cannot learn and exercise the virtues with friends.
Another element of it is that the kinds of virtues we can hope to
inculcate and the degree to which we can inculcate them will
depend to some extent on the kind of communities in which we
live.[2] Some theologians, as we
shall have seen in the first part of the paper, have looked
primarily to the Christian church as the most promising
"social location" in which the virtues are to be
inculcated.
But that is not
MacIntyre's solution. MacIntyre's understanding of a
"social location" for the virtues involves a whole
society. MacIntyre's problem is, of course, that he is a
citizen of a nation-state which he does not acknowledge to be a
possible "social location" for the inculcation of the
virtues. MacIntyre's disdain for what he considers to be
liberal political orders is lifelong and legendary. One
simply has to recall MacIntyre's indictment of the economics and
politics of the liberal nation-state at the conclusion of the
penultimate chapter of After Virtue:
…
the tradition of the virtues is at variance with central features
of the modern economic order and more especially its
individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the
values of the market to a central social place. It now
becomes clear that it also involves a rejection of the modern
political order. … for modern politics itself expresses in
its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.[3]
Presumably most
if not all of us here are less pessimistic about the possibility
of inculcating virtue in a liberal society, or we would not be
here right now!!
However, it
cannot be denied that as a whole, MacIntyre has provided us with
the most comprehensive and compelling history of the virtues
available, and his narrative can only be ignored at our peril.
Two points of that narrative cannot be denied. The first is
that from the ancients more or less up through most of the early
moderns, ethics was understood to be about matters to do with
character, character formed through inculcation in the virtues.
The second is that a little more than two centuries ago, western
society's fundamental conception of ethics changes, and the
virtues are for the most part left behind. On MacIntyre's
account, this was a necessary consequence of, among other things,
certain economic and political transformations, the legacy of
which, I believe, are largely still with us.
The challenge
for us then is this: if at least part of the goal of this
conference is to think about how we might "bring back"
the virtues as part of the ethical fabric of our contemporary
liberal society, then it is incumbent upon someone to provide a
revision of MacIntyre's narrative, a narrative that like
MacIntyre's can account for the earlier demise of an ethics of
the virtues, but account for the demise in such a way that they
may be resurrected in a liberal society, so to speak. One
simple way to put the question is this: can something like an
Aristotelian or Thomistic ethics of virtue be recovered without
the concomitant Aristotelian or Thomistic politics?[4] If it cannot, one alternative
route for the recovery of virtue in a liberal society is a
recovery of a different kind of virtue, one that is neither
Aristotelian or Thomistic?
In the second
part of the paper, I am not offering a counter-narrative to that
of MacIntyre. What I am going to offer in the second part
of the paper is an account of a key difference between two
different conceptions of the virtues -- on the one hand the
Aristotelian-Thomistic conception, and Adam Smith's conception of
the virtues. In addition, I will draw on the work of
Charles Taylor in his magisterial Source of the Self to
trace some of the key theological developments of the early
modern period which shape the theological framework in which Adam
Smith puts forward his account of the virtues. I do
this because I believe that whatever its other problems may be --
and I do believe it has deep and serious problems -- it may well
be that Adam Smith's account of the virtues stands a better
chance of being appropriated as a basis for an account of
American virtues in our current economic and political situation
than do the virtues we identify with the Aristotelian-Thomistic
tradition. The theological presuppositions of this account
may also be more congenial to our contemporary American society.
It certainly was an influential account around the founding of
this Republic.
1.
A very brief and selective narrative of the recovery of Thomistic
virtue theory in recent theological ethics!
The re-emergence
of the virtues as a central category for theological reflection
by Christian ethicists and moral theologians has now been going
on for twenty-five or thirty years. In this as in
many instances, necessity was the mother of invention, or at
least mothered it while it was being recovered. What was
the necessity, at least amongst Protestant ethicists? A
major impetus, I believe, was the situation ethics debacle of the
1960's. While ethicists such as Paul Ramsey were busy
trying to ground their ethical principles in an adequate
conception of "in-principled" love, Joseph Fletcher
came along and grabbed the headlines and a vast readership with
his fetchingly -- if incoherently -- written little book called Situation
Ethics. By 1970, he would team up with a Catholic moral
theologian to publish that most dour little volume in ethics
entitled "Hello Lovers."
Unfortunately,
Mr. Fletcher didn't stick around to sort out the mess he had
created -- or perhaps only exposed -- for Protestant Christian
ethicists. By the early 1970's he had abandoned
Christianity, and no one seemed prepared to hold his mantle high.
Responses to Fletcher were fast and furious. In addition to
Ramsey's well-known but very long response and James Gustafson's
blistering attack in the Christian Century, there was the
carefully measured response of Donald Evans, and, perhaps most
rigorous of all, Gene Outka's defense of a principled love ethic
in his 1972 book entitled Agape.
Lost in the
midst of the biggest tempest that Protestant Christian ethics had
(and has) ever seen, an alternative approach was coming forth.
At Yale in the 1960's, James Gustafson was having his students
study Aquinas, and different one's were taking up different
aspects of his thought. One student, Stanley Hauerwas,
influenced by a) his mentor James Gustafson's attention to the
dispositions in Aquinas, b) the call to a study of moral
psychology by philosophers like Anscombe and Hampshire, and c)
his own Wesleyan tradition's emphasis of sanctification, decided
to analyze the question of character. This "shot in
the dark" doctoral dissertation, finished in 1968 and
published in 1975, was entitled Character and the Christian
life: A Study in Theological Ethics.
By 1975, Hauerwas
had already published a separate collection of essays entitled Vision
and Virtue, which was continuing to explore issues of moral
psychology that for the most part were not being taken up by
those who tended to juridical or obligation-oriented approaches
to morality. While certainly indebted to the work of
his teacher as well as a number of analytic philosophers,
Hauerwas' work on the virtues was highly original and excited
immense attention and response in the late 1970's and into the
early 1980's. By 1984, when Gilbert Meilaender would
publish his The Theory and Practice of Virtue, he could
speak of an "ethics of virtue," and be raising
objections to such an "approach" to ethics, something
which would simply not have been discussed in the field ten years
previously. Similarly, in 1984 the Rockford Institute, directed
by Richard Neuhaus and which published small volumes on
"hot" topics for ethics, religion and public policy,
devoted a symposium and a volume to this new "hot"
topic of public versus private virtue.
While Hauerwas'
work was surely significant, the publication of Alasdair
MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981 was undoubtedly even more
significant. It's thesis was a blockbuster, and it came
about as close as is possible to single-handedly altering the
direction of the field of English moral philosophy. Analytic
moral philosophy, with its preoccupation with narrow debates
within metaethics, had been going through an incredibly sterile
period. The thesis of MacIntyre's After Virtue, influenced
by the work of Elizabeth Anscombe (may she rest in peace), and
indirectly by that of her teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein,
singlehandedly created the vacuum and the proverbial "great
sucking sound" which drew legions of moral philosophers into
the land of virtue theory. With "virtue's"
new-found philosophical respectability, theologians increasingly
expressed interest in this new avenue for moral exploration.
In the midst of
"virtue's" new-found fame in the world of theological
ethics, Hauerwas sought to distance himself from much of the
attention being devoted to understanding the Christian moral life
in terms of the virtues. Hauerwas began to insist that what
was of primary importance was not a theory of virtues per se,
but rather the nature and content of the specific virtues
themselves, and the adequacy of theological telos to which
they are directed. One's hears in his claim as echo of
Augustine's view that the virtues of the pagans, being
inadequately directed to God, were simply splendid vices. Similarly,
Aquinas' claim that one can do no good action without God's help
gives one pause before advocating too strongly the moral
importance of the virtues qua unspecified dispositions.
Thus in the mid-1980's, Hauerwas began to write essays on
distinctively theological conceptions of courage, truthfulness,
peacemaking, patience, and increasingly emphasized the kinds of
skills and forms of authority necessary in such communities for
this inculcation to go on.
Three other
significant early works on virtue in Protestant theological
ethics were by Craig Dykstra, Donald Evans, and Gilbert
Meilaender.[5]
Dykstra's book was a groundbreaking one on virtue and character
education. Evans' book Struggle and Fulfillment
never gained long-standing attention. Meilaender's The
Theory and Practice of Virtue is an important complement and
contrast to Hauerwas. Whereas Hauerwas' Methodist tradition
emphasizes sanctification, Meilaender's Lutheran tradition is
historically much more sanguine about the possibility of growth
in virtue in the Christian life. In The Theory and
Practice of Virtue, Meilaender raises concerns about the
centrality of self-perfection associated with growth in virtue,
for this seems to lose what is for some the crucial dimension of
morality, that its requirements may involve self-sacrifice.[6] More generally, Meilaender's
reservations about a number of aspects of the revival of the
virtues for thinking about the Christian life puts him much more
squarely in the tradition of Protestant thought on the virtues.
Traditionally, Protestant theology in the Reformed tradition
found the notion of virtue practically unusable for a number of
reasons. Typical concerns included that virtue understood
as a habit turned faith into a matter of practice, that it
overemphasized a person's natural powers and downplayed the
importance of God's grace, that it came to understand God's grace
as a possession, that as a result it downplayed the pervasive and
persistent reality of sin, and that as a result it misunderstood
the personal character of salvation.[7] At its worst, virtue ethics
is in danger of becoming a form of egoism.
Any sustained
effort to reflect on how the virtues may be inculcated into
aspects of American society, a traditionally Protestant society,
will have to take into account the traditional suspicion of them
in reformed theology. One of the most fruitful ways to
analyze the significant differences amongst Protestant traditions
on the virtues is to compare the work and conclusions of Hauerwas
and Meilaender. Interestingly, for both Meilaender and
Hauerwas Thomas Aquinas is a key influence on their understanding
and articulation of the virtues.[8] In such a project one will
expose many of the key issues and tensions involved when one
seeks to incorporate the virtues into particular Protestant
traditions.
In terms of the
interests of this paper, the most significant work that has been
and continues to be done on the virtues in relation to the
Protestant theological context is that of Hauerwas. For
Hauerwas is the one who has most seriously and thoroughly tried
to incorporate MacIntyre's point about the centrality of the
issue of the social location of the virtues. In both his
scholarly and popular work, he continually strives to find ways
to illumine how the language and practices of the virtues might
take root in local church congregations. His emphasis on
the particularity and distinctiveness of Christian virtues and
the concomitant importance of a distinctive Christian community
has also been the source of many of the most strenuous objections
to his work. The charge that Hauerwas is a sectarian or a
fideist or a tribalist (or sometimes all three!) has been the
most sustained and pervasive critique of his work. These
charges largely originate, I believe, in the period when Hauerwas
most determinatively seeks to take up MacIntyre's point about the
centrality of the "social location" question, and
increasingly emphasizes the Church as the primary(though not
exclusive) community in which Christians are to practice the life
of virtue.
1b) The
Catholic Context
At the same time
that the Protestant's were immersed in the situation ethics
situation, Catholics were having their own moral crisis. Vatican
II had effectively burned the pre-Vatican II moral textbooks, and
without new works yet in place, the discipline was on a kind of
moral holiday. While different Catholics tend to view the
days following Vatican II in starkly different terms, everybody
agrees on one thing. The promulgation of Humanae vitae
in 1968 stirred a crisis. In the period following the
promulgation of Humanae Vitae, a new Catholic approach to
morality arose, namely that method for making moral judgments
called "proportionalism." As a theory of moral
judgment, its range of concerns and general conception of the
moral life paralleled remarkably with situation ethics. However,
it arose later, and the moral formation and intellectual vigor of
its practitioners meant that it would not be quickly reduced to
the kind of conceptual incoherence to which situation ethics fell
prey. Yet, as a moral theory, it is ultimately a species of
the same genus of morality that situation ethics falls under,
namely the moral theory known as consequentialism. Throughout
the 1970's and 1980's, most Catholic moral theologians seemed to
have a stake in only acknowledging the existence of
proportionalism and its rival, a kind of Kantian natural law
theory advocated by Germain Grisez and his associates. As a
Catholic moral theory, the life of proportionalism effectively
expired with the promulgation in 1993 of Veritatis splendor,
Pope John Paul II's encyclical on fundamental moral theology.
Analogous to the situation in Protestant ethics, a significant
number of Catholic ethicists would only turn their attention to
questions related to the virtues once debates over moral norms so
central to the proportionalism-natural law dispute seemed to wane
and/or show the inadequacies of both approaches.
While
Catholicism had not entirely abandoned the language of virtue, it
was clearly a little used key in the symphonic repertoire of 20th
Century moral theology. Its minor position was maintained
largely by some Thomists, whose continual reading of St. Thomas
assured it's continued place at some level in theological
reflection. Dominicans as diverse as Joseph Pieper, Herbert
McCabe, and Servais Pinckaers come to mind. In 1985, when
Fr. John Crossin published What are they saying about virtue?,
the answer from Catholic moral theologians was "Not
much!" Crossin's little volume included a chapter
entitle 'Virtue in Contemporary Catholic Thought.' In that
chapter, three of the four most significant Catholics thinkers
discussed were not moral theologians (Joseph Pieper, OP, Romano
Guardini, and Karl Rahner) and the one moral theologian, the
great Bernard Haring, wrote about everything!! Well into
the 1980's, Catholic moral theologians in North America simply
weren't doing constructive work on the role of the virtues in the
Christian moral life. This would begin to change in the
late 1980's. Even as late as 1992, when William Spohn's
review essay on "The Return of Virtue Ethics" was
published in Theological Studies, the vast majority of
essays discussed were not by Catholic moral theologians, nor even
by theologians period.
However,
distinctively Catholic voices arguing for a recovery of virtue,
and specifically the virtue theory of St. Thomas, emerged in the
late 1980's and early 1990's. Like the Protestant movement on the
recovery of virtue, almost all of these works draw largely on
Thomas Aquinas' understanding of and approach to the virtues.
Paul Wadell has published books on the virtue of friendship, and
charity as the form of the virtues; Simon Harak S.J.'s Virtuous
Passions has explored the rationality of the emotions in both
the work of Aquinas and Ignatius; Romanus Cessario, OP has
published important work on both the moral and the theological
virtues. Timothy O'Meara has emphasized the centrality of grace
for understanding all of the Thomistic virtues. Recent work
by William Spohn and Timothy O'Connell on moral formation has
emphasized the significance of the virtues. Important studies of
particular virtues in Aquinas have been done by Stephen Pope and
Jean Porter, to name just two.
But perhaps the
most significant figure of all for the recovery of the virtues
for Catholic moral theology is that of the work of Servais
Pinckaers, OP. From his earliest essays published in the late
1950's, Pinckaers has emphasized the centrality and priority of
the virtues for Catholic moral theology.[9] Furthermore, Pinckaers' work
on the virtues has been perhaps the most thoroughly theological
of expositors of Aquinas' understanding of the virtues, writing
extensively not only on the theological and the infused virtues,
but also on the place of the gifts and the beatitudes. Perhaps
most importantly of all, Pinckaers has decisively shown the
centrality for Thomas Aquinas of the new law, the Law of the
Gospel. In a recent essay in the Irish Theological
Quarterly, Pinckaers notes that while this is not as yet
widely recognized amongst Catholic moral theologians, it has been
recognized in both Veritatis splendor and The Catechism
of the Catholic Church.[10] While Pinckaers is not well
known in North America because most of his writings have not been
translated into English, there is hope that that will be at least
somewhat rectified before long.
Finally, one
other important Catholic moral theologian whose theological
project has largely turned on the recovery of the virtue theory
of Thomas Aquinas for contemporary ethics is Jean Porter. She
has very ably developed a systematic reading of Aquinas, but one
very different from that of Pinckaers. Unlike Pinckaers'
reading of Aquinas, which emphases the supernatural element of
the human telos and the law of the gospel, Porter follows
a long tradition over the last three hundred years within
Catholic theology of emphasizing Aquinas' scattered remarks on
the natural end for humans, the natural telos of human
life. As such, her reading of the virtues in Aquinas is
freed of some of the "theological baggage," baggage
which is problematic if one wants to recover virtue for an era
and a society which cannot incorporate a theological telos.
Whatever one's opinion is of her Thomistic exegesis, her reading
of Aquinas is certainly more conducive for a "social
location" that resembles one which Americans presently
inhabit.[11]
Despite
significant differences amongst the many figures in the
renaissance in interest in the virtues in contemporary theology,
what they share in common, almost without exception, is a deep
debt to the work of Aquinas on the virtues. The dominance
of this Aristotelian-Thomistic account of the virtues has two
important corollaries. First, almost all of these
theologians thus accept some conception of a human telos, of the
significance of final causality for ethics.
Secondly, almost all are thus committed to a kind of
eudaimonism, or what we might call a kind of moral perfectionism.
Morality is not fundamentally about simply doing one's basic
duties, but involves a more general striving to goodness, to
moral perfection. Thirdly, and finally, these theologians
are largely agreed upon the view that when persons pursue the
good through the exercise of the virtues, that their good does
not conflict with, but complements the common good. These
are all fundamental theses in relation of the
Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the virtues. We shall
see their significance more fully at the end of this paper.
2.
"Perfectionist" and "Realist" Conceptions of
Virtue
As I noted
above, the recent theological developments on the recovery of
virtue have been dominated by a recovery of a Thomistic account
of the nature and role of the virtues. Theologians have not
paid much less attention to alternative schools or ways of
understanding the virtues. For instance, the great 18th
century philosopher and economist Adam Smith began his
examination of ethics in The Theory of Moral Sentiments with
the question "Wherein does virtue consist?" Much
moral philosophy up through the 18th century shared
with the ancient and medieval approaches to ethics this one
thing, that a study of the virtues is central.[13] However, Smith's
understanding of and approach to the virtues is very different
from that of Aristotle, as we shall see. The work of Smith and
other Scottish moral sense theorists constitutes a kind of
counter-tradition regarding the virtues.
Why has so
little attention been paid to these other conceptions of the
virtues -- that is, both "civic virtues", or
counter-traditions such as Smith's regarding the virtues. It
seems to me that at least amongst theologians, the presumption is
that virtues are for the most part "virtues simply."
One person who has raised this question is -- Jean Porter. Porter
asks which virtues are "perennial" and which are
"timely," particular to a particular society, a
particular time and place.[14]
Leaving aside the not insignificant point that Aristotle makes
the distinction "spatially" and Porter makes it
"temporally, we are left with the big question: What
are we to make of the fact that Aristotle makes justice the
central virtue, Aquinas makes charity the form of the virtues,
and self-command is the key to understanding the virtues of Adam
Smith? Although all three appeal to the virtues of
temperance and prudence, the prudent Thomist and the prudent
Smithian will often exercise their prudence very differently, as
we shall see.
The failure by
the theological community to analyze other approaches to the
virtues becomes particularly problematic if and when one wants to
propose set of virtues for a modern, liberal democracy. First
and foremost, the Thomistic conception of the virtues requires
some conception of a human telos or a notion of final
causality for human nature which orders the virtues. Thus,
in his Summa Theologiae, Thomas begins with the
fundamental notion of the good, which all pursue. There are
goods that humans share with other creatures, and goods
distinctive to humans as rational creatures. When we pursue the
good in a rational and integrated fashion, we act according to
right reason. To act and to live excellently -- or even
adequately -- humans require the dispositions that order them to
these goods, these being of course the cardinal virtues and their
various sub-virtues. However, God has not ordered the lives
of human beings to ends connatural to them-- especially not in
their fallen state -- but to a higher end, that of beatitude or
friendship with the God who creates and redeems them, and to whom
they journey toward in this life. The ultimate guide for
the Christian is not the natural law, a law apprehended by
connatural human reason, but the new law, the law of the gospel.
As Thomas puts it
That which is foremost in the Law of the New Testament and in which all its virtue resides, is the grace of the Holy Spirit given by faith in Christ; the New Law is therefore, above all, the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is given to Christ's faithful one's. (ST, I-II, 108.1)
This new law is
not simply an elucidation of the natural law, nor simply the
natural law's fulfillment with the aid of grace, but a
distinctively new law, which transforms the person who lives it.
In order to live according to the law of the gospel, Christians
require the virtues that dispose them to this end, namely the
theological virtues. Furthermore, the cardinal virtues are
also transformed and ordered to the new law when they become
"infused" virtues, such they also direct the Christian
toward their end in God. This, for St. Thomas, is the
fundamental "social location" for the virtues when
ordered theologically.
But what of the
situation of our contemporary liberal democracies? Can
aspects or elements of Aquinas's account of the virtues be
extracted from the whole and function for that purpose. As
we have discussed above, Jean Porter's reading of St. Thomas in
her The Recovery of Virtue is one way of reading St.
Thomas that focuses almost exclusively on those elements of
Thomas theory of the virtues which can be ordered to a strictly
natural end for humans. Her reading St. Thomas in this way
is by no means unique. Whatever one's view is as regards
the adequacy of her reading of Aquinas in relation to Aquinas'
own views, her account is certainly an able one in terms of how
one might appropriate the more "philosophical" elements
of Aquinas' ethic of virtue for a modern liberal democracy.
However, despite
the attempt to eliminate or at least downplay much of the more
overtly theological elements in Aquinas' account of the virtues
to make his work more serviceable for contemporary polities, a
more fundamental problem remains. Both Aristotle and
Aquinas have a conception of the virtuous person as one who, in
becoming virtuous, not only limits their pursuit of their
self-interest, but in acting as virtuous comes not to distinguish
their good from the common good. The virtuous person is not
one who merely controls their self-interested desires (i.e. the
continent person), but who in becoming virtuous transforms their
interests such that they harmonize with the common good.
This fundamental
anthropological claim is not the one assumed by our contemporary
economic and political institutions. Practitioners as well
as theorists assume the fundamental posture of self-interest,
however rational or controlled it may be. It is by no means
clear that an Aristotelian or Thomistic conception of the virtues
can be reconciled with this assumption, upon which much of our
economic and political institutions rest. This was not the
starting point of the Scottish moral sense theorists generally,
nor that of Adam Smith particularly.
In Adam Smith's
moral framework, as elucidated in his The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, the fundamental starting point and driving force
behind his ethics is not an understanding of the good as a telos
which one rationally pursues through the exercise of the virtues,
but the sentiments or passions which are at the core of each
human person. Smith recognizes no shared human telos,
accepts no substantive account of final causality. The
sentiments with which Smith begins his account are not endowed per
se with a moral character, and morality is about making
sentiments moral. [15]
For Smith, the sentiments are not ordered to and transformed by
the virtues, but rather virtue consists in the right guidance and
ordering of the sentiments. Of Smith's four
"cardinal" virtues, namely self-command, prudence,
benevolence, and justice, self-command is pervasive through all,
as it is that which enables one to rightly order the sentiments.
Smith further indicates that self-command must permeate all the
virtues because it is this quality that checks self-love to the
appropriate degree.
Here we may note
a significant divergence of Smith from the Aristotelian/
Thomistic understanding of the virtuous life. Whereas the
notion of virtue preoccupies Smith throughout The Theory of
Moral Sentiments, and Smith clearly understands morality in
terms of the promotion of virtuous character, virtue is not
understood by Smith as unequivocally about self-perfection as it
is by Aristotle and Aquinas. Whereas, like Aristotle, Smith
advocates excellence, it is not an Aristotelian excellence in
which the passions are transformed by being order to and shaped
by the virtues, but rather a Stoic ideal of self-command in which
the passions are controlled and moderated. For Smith, the
goal is tranquillity.
In Smith's
schema of the virtues, self-command takes on the role that phronesis
(i.e. prudence) occupies in Aristotle's ethics. Self-command
is not only a virtue in itself, but also functions in all of the
other virtues. Smith's virtue of self-command consists not
of transforming self-love into self-perfection, but with
regulating and moderating "self-approbation." The
difference with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of the
virtues is even more apparent with the virtue of prudence. Smith
delineates different kinds of prudence, and he includes both the
classical understanding of prudence as a moral virtue -- what
Griswold calls "high" or "noble" prudence,
and our more modern self-regarding form of prudence, which Smith
speaks of as that which is "concern[ed] with our
happiness" and is "recommended to us by our selfish
… affections."[16]
This sense of prudence is associated with such characteristics as
frugality, industry, discipline, thrift and economy.
Here we note a
second key difference between the Aristotelian-Thomistic account
of the virtues and that of Smith. Whereas, as we noted
above, the Aristotelian-Thomistic account is a
"perfectionist" account, Smith's clearly is not. One
of the key criticisms of the Scottish moral sense theorists with
regards to Aristotle's ethics is what they perceived to be its
elitism. Setting aside the brute fact that Aristotle's
ethics was only aimed at the citizens of the polis (i.e.
one had to be both free and male), the general thrust of their
criticism was that this perfectionist ethic was too hard, too
demanding, and was thus elitist. It could only be practiced
in an aristocracy, or an oligarchy, but not a democracy. Bentham's
famous critique was that while Aristotelian virtue was only
concerned with the state of one's own soul, his ideal was in
improving the lot of mankind. The gist is that the
perfectionist ethic is too demanding, and in an age of
egalitarianism -- it cannot be applied to a democratic society.
Thus, Smith will contrast Aristotle's high virtues, his
"high" prudence, with his own appeal to
"middling" virtue and "ordinary prudence."
For Smith,
central to the virtue of "ordinary prudence" is the
goal of "bettering our condition." Appropriate
motivation for such prudence lies in the pursuit of security, but
not merely in that. For Smith, the external goods of
fortune and reputation are legitimate motives for the exercise of
this virtue. At various places throughout The Theory of
Moral Sentiments, Smith explains this "ordinary
prudence" by means of a character who exhibits it. As
Griswold summarizes it
The
prudent man is cautious, frugal, parsimonious, polite, decent,
capable of friendship, not particularly passionate, reliable.
He is not interested in putting on a public show, is sincere but
reserved, and dependable. He will do his public duty when
called upon but essentially minds his own business. That
is, he is disposed to be an apolitical citizen. He
sacrifices present enjoyment for future enjoyment, lives within
his means, and gradually works himself into a position of gentle
retirement and relaxation. He is parsimonious but not a
miserly penny pincher. He attains "secure
tranquillity". … He warrants our
confidence, esteem, and goodwill. The prudent man earns
both the "cold esteem" as well as the "entire
approbation of the impartial spectator. There is nothing in
him an impartial observer could object to, and much to praise. [17]
This is about as
good a picture as might think we can hope for from a next door
neighbor in America today. He'll certainly keep his grass
cut and the trash off the porch.
But more
seriously, Smith's prudent citizen is undoubtedly one of
modernity's great products -- a product of what Taylor calls the
affirmation of ordinary life. By ordinary life, Taylor is
referring to "those aspects of human life concerned with
production and reproduction, that is, labor, the making of the
things needed for life, and our life as sexual being, including
marriage and the family."[18] Taylor is not making the
preposterous claim that prior to modernity industry was scorned
or that people did not love their children. Rather, he is
claiming that in modernity the sense of the importance of these
activities changes.
What
changes is not that people begin loving their children or feeling
affection for their spouses, but that these dispositions come to
be seen as a crucial part of what makes life worthy and
significant. For whereas previously these dispositions were
taken as banal, except perhaps that their absence in a marked
degree might cause concern or condemnation, … now they are
seen as endowed with crucial significance.[19]
For Aristotle,
these kinds of activities are what he calls the activities of
"life." Such activities are a necessary condition
for the possibility of the good life, but do not in themselves
constitute the good life. The good life (and for that
matter, a true polis) is constituted by particular
practices, namely contemplation or deliberation about the true
and the good, and political participation. This
Aristotelian viewpoint, which Taylor refers to as "ethical
hierarchy," is also evident in the early modern period in
some of the resistance to Baconian experimental science by the
scholarly humanists, and the derogation of commercial trade by
the civic humanists.[20]
The latter considered an over-interest in "acquisition"
a danger to the free life of the republic.[21]
Our question, of
course, is, what role does the affirmation of ordinary life play
in the transformation of our understanding of virtue from a skill
that allows us to perform excellently throughout a whole range of
activities to Smith's "middling virtue" and
"ordinary prudence," which includes acting in accord
with one's self-interest?
According to
Taylor, the origin of this affirmation of ordinary life is
theological, that its first flowering is the Protestant
Reformation. One of the central tenets of the Reformation
was its rejection of hierarchy and mediation. For instance,
this involves the rejection of the "two-tiered" ethic
in Catholicism, the rejection of the view that some in the body
of Christ may be more dedicated, and thereby winning merit and
salvation for others who are less dedicated. Secondly, it
involves the rejection of the Catholic insistence on the Church
as the necessary mediator of salvation. Salvation is the
exclusive work of God. As Taylor so memorably puts it, as a
Catholic
[one
can be] a passenger in the ecclesial ship on its journey to God.
But for Protestantism, there can be no passengers. This is
because there is no ship in the Catholic sense, no common
movement carrying humans to salvation. Each believer rows
his or her own boat.[22]
Secondly, the
understanding of vocation changes. Whereas in Catholicism
"vocation" signifies a connection with the priesthood
or with religious life, for the Puritans "vocation"
comes to mean any occupation useful to the common good and which
can be credited as service to God. One's work in one's
vocation or calling becomes "serious business," and one
honors God in one's work by always working diligently and
earnestly. Therein lies the sanctification of the ordinary.
Thirdly, Francis
Bacon succeeds in reorienting science from its focus on knowledge
as contemplation, and focuses it instead on relieving the
condition of mankind. Science is not a higher activity that
ordinary life should serve; rather, ordinary life is to be served
by science. Taylor argues that the Baconian revolution was
made possible by Puritan presuppositions. For both Puritan
religion and Baconian scientific ideals were
rebelling
against a traditional authority which was merely feeding on its
own errors and as returning to the neglected resources: the
Scriptures on one hand, experimental reality on the other. Both
appealed to what they saw as living experience against dead
received doctrine -- the experience of personal conversion and
commitment, and that of direct observation of nature's workings.[23]
Fourthly, it
also attacks various forms of social hierarchy. The good
life is not to be reserved to the nobleman and the gentleman.
It is to be something that everyone should be able to achieve.
For this to happen, the older ethic of honor must be replaced
with those virtues necessary to sustain the life of commerce and
the science that serves that commerce. Here we see the
genesis of an ethic that will fully flower in Adam Smith.
These factors
coalesce into what Taylor considers to be a rationalized form of
Christianity called Deism. In this view, what the Puritans
considered to be a kind of sacralizing of all work becomes the
Enlightenment viewpoint that a way of life exists in which
service to others (beneficence) and self-service coincide. This
is the case because in the Deist picture of the world, the world
is "a vast interlocking order of beings, mutually subserving
each other's flourishing." Human beings unite
beneficence and self-service because God unites them. The
Deist God is an increasingly scrutable God. One of the most
straightforward Deists, John Tolald, notes that "God is kind
enough to make our acting for our present happiness the way of
securing our future goods."[24]
According to the
Deist theology influential in Smith's time, there would no longer
be any opposition between the individual good and the common
good. The opposition was not dissolved by the Aristotelian
understanding of final causality in which in through seeking
one's perfection through the exercise of the virtues one
understanding of one's own good is transformed such that it is
complementary to the common good. In Smith's time, the
opposition between one's self-interest (a brute reality given by
the selfish passions which was to be regulated but not rejected)
and beneficence was overcome by a theology which decrees that
when one acts in one's own rational self-interest one is in fact
serving the common good, because our good God unites the two.
How, through God's invisible hand!
The rest, so to
speak, is history. In fusing together this theological
conviction about the world as "a vast interlocking order of
beings, mutually subserving each other's flourishing," his
understanding of humans as fundamentally driven by passions, and
a Stoic conception of the centrality of regulating and moderating
the passions, Smith provides us with a justification for a new
understanding of virtue and a new set of virtues, the virtues of
enlightenment.
Now, of course, there remains one small problem. Shortly after the time of Smith, the virtues are soon no longer a central issue in moral philosophy. Is that a fault of Smith's account and other similar accounts, or does the reason lie elsewhere? The answer to that question is another key element of the kind of counter-narrative to MacIntyre that waits to be written.
Conclusion
Where
have we come? In examining the movement to recover virtue
amongst theologians, the question of the social location for the
virtues -- the point MacIntyre argues is so central -- has yet to
be significantly addressed by most Christian virtue ethicists.
But among those who have, two key figures stand out. On the
one hand, Stanley Hauerwas has taken up MacIntyre's argument
about social location, and designated ecclesial communities as
the primary locus for inculcation of the virtues amongst
Christians. This is not the only possible theological
appropriation of MacIntyre, but it is an important one. An
important alternative is the approach of Jean Porter, whose
social location for the virtues is, at least implicitly, the
liberal democratic society in which we live as Americans. This
approach will be attacked by certain Thomists as an inadequate
reading of Thomas, and by secular theorists as an attempt to
smuggle final causality into the public square, but it remains a
second alternative. Both of these first two approaches
retain an understanding of the virtues that is fundamentally
perfectionist, fundamentally Aristotelian-Thomistic. The
final option which I have presented acknowledges the deep
difficulties with either of these two approaches for an ethic of
virtue for a liberal democracy which acknowledges the right of
every individual to determine the meaning and purpose of their
own life(e.g. The Supreme Court Casey decision). An
American ethic cannot be a theological ethic in either of the
"stronger" or "weaker" versions outlined
above. It is perhaps not surprising that I do not know of a
theological virtue theorist who is seeking to develop such an
approach. One well-known secular theorist of the virtues,
Martha Nussbaum, has cited Adam Smith as "a central
inspiration for the project" of her recent Poetic Justice:
The Literary Imagination and Public Life. No doubt there
are others. When it comes to the virtues, both Aquinas and
Smith draw strange bedfellows.
In conclusion, I
am not seeking to advocate -- at least not openly -- for one of
these three options. But I think one of the central
questions that one has to answer, and that may help in
adjudicating between these options is a very basic one: Why
do I want to be virtuous?
Notes
[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. (South Bend,
IN.: UNDP, 1984), 194-195.
[2] Both of these points are further linked to questions
about the degree to which local communities are able to sustain
institutions which are in turn necessary to sustain practices for
any length of time? On the necessity of institutions for
the long-term sustenance of practices, see After Virtue,
194. This presumes MacIntyre's related point that without
practices, there can be no virtues.
[3] After Virtue, 255.
[4] My linking of Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics and
politics should not be taken to mean that I am conflating either
Aristotelian ethics with Thomistic ethics, nor Aristotelian
politics with Thomistic politics.
[5] Another important and more recent work(1996) is The
Christian Case for Virtue Ethics by the Mennonite theologian
Joseph Kotva.
[6] Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue,
41.
[7] For more on this characterization, see Otto Hermann
Pesch, "The Theology of Virtue and the Theological
Virtues" in ed. Dietmar Mieth and Jacques Pohier, Changing
Values and Virtues, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1987, 92-93,
and see Helmut Thielicke's Theological Ethics, Volume 1.
[8] For Meilaender, this influence is at least somewhat
mediated through the work of Joseph Pieper.
[9] Unfortunately, Pinckaers ceased publishing in moral
theology from the mid-1960's until the mid-1970's. Pinckaers'
location in Switzerland and the fact that he writes in French
kept his voice largely foreign to the English-speaking world
until the early 1990's.
[10] See Servais Pinckaers, "the Recovery of the new
Law in Moral Theology." Irish Theological Quarterly(1999),
3-15.
[11] Ironically, on this count, Porter's work has a strong
parallel in the natural law theory that has been developed by
Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Robert George. The
parallel is that both develop an understanding of the human telos
that allows for a fairly sharp separation -- at least in practice
-- between a natural end and a supernatural end, even for
Christians. As such, both ethical theories are fairly
conducive to the social location known as "modern
democracy." The irony is that the two are fairly
critical of each other. I won't at this juncture speculate
on the sources of those disagreements.
[12] In R. J. Neuhaus ed., Virtue: Public and Private.
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1984) 55.
[13] On this point, see Alasdair MacIntyre, "How moral
agents became ghosts or why the history of ethics diverged from
that of the philosohy of mind," Synthese (1982) 53,
295-312.
[14] On this see Jean Porter, "Perennial and Timely
Virtues: Practical Wisdom, Courage and Temperance," in ed.
Dietmar Mieth and Jacques Pohier, Changing Values and Virtues,
T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1987.
[15] See Charles Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of
Enlightenment (New York: CUP, 1999), 46.
[16] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
edited by Raphael and Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976),
VI.concl.1.
[17] Charles Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of
Enlightenment (New York: CUP, 1999), 205.
[18] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. (Cambridge,
MA: HarvardUP, 1989) 211.
[19] Sources of the Self, 292.
[20] See Sources of the Self, 212.
[21] We see a view akin to this in the discussion of
Jefferson in Bellah et al. in Habits of the Heart
(Berkeley: UCPress, 1985).
[22] Sources of the Self, 217.
[23] Sources of the Self, 230.
[24] On this, see Sources of the Self, 244-245.
John Berkman is Assistant Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
This lecture is copyrighted by John Berkman (Berkman@cua.edu), and is not to be cited or quoted without the author's permission.
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