Virtue Ethics Part II: The Cardinal or Pagan Virtues

In Part I, I situated virtue ethics within alternative approaches to morality in modern philosophy. This post describes four of the seven classical virtues known as the Cardinal or Pagan virtues: Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance. Part III will discuss the theological or Christian virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.

Deirdre McCloskey, in her Inaugural James M. Buchanan Lecture, argues that the seven classical virtues are as the primary colors of virtue. Just as every color in the spectrum is derived from the three primary colors, so every virtue imaginable, McCloskey asserts, can be derived from the seven classical virtues. For example, honesty is Justice and Temperance in matters of speech; thrift is prudence and temperance in money matters, etc.

It has been said that the Cardinal virtues are the virtues of the city, of public life, and that the absence of these virtues leads to failed cities and states. One can make a strong case that the four cardinal virtues are the virtues of citizenship, whereas the three theological virtues bind us to a higher vision of human nature. The best philosophical analysis of the virtues is by the philosopher Josef Pieper, a close student of St. Thomas Aquinas, and what follows leans heavily on Pieper’s work The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance.

Prudence: Prudence is the virtue most concerned with the self. It is foresight, practical understanding, proficiency, sagacity. Save some for a rainy day. The Latin phrase, recta ratio agilbilium constitutes the best definition of prudence: right reason about things to be done or the right method of conduct. Prudence, like all the virtues, is active. It is basically concerned with how we treat ourselves, how we prepare for our future and make ourselves useful in the present.

The contemporary term self-interest is often our poor substitute for thinking and talking prudently. The term “self-” makes the aim seem subjective rather than virtuous, but they are not always mutually exclusive. It is prudent for me to care for my own children, for example because they will be more likely to care for me. This may sound selfish rather than virtuous, but virtue adheres in seeing Prudence as one among the virtues. In other words, I may care for my own because it’s Prudent, but I may also do it because it is Just and because I Love them. Seeing this broader picture is a means of understanding that possessing one virtue does not make us virtuous.

Prudence is the father of the virtues, or the charioteer of the virtues, using Aristotle and Aquinas’s system, because it is the virtue of the mind that helps us find the golden mean in any given circumstance. It is the virtue of making right decisions and thus drives, as a charioteer drives a chariot, the other six virtues.

Justice: If Prudence is concerned with the self, Justice is the virtue that regulates our relationships with others. Justice is uprightness, equity, vindicating the right, giving to others what is due them with pleasure, consistently, and in a timely manner. It is paying what is owed, fulfilling the terms of a contract to a T, imparting fairly by good measure, pressed down and shaken together (see Luke 6:38).

Aristotle said that Justice is concerned with geometrical proportion, meaning that its interest is equality between two things. “This, then,” Aristotle says, “is what the just is – the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. Hence one term becomes too great, the other too small, as indeed happens in practice; for the man who acts unjustly has too much, and the man who is unjustly treated too little, of what is good.”

Much has been said and written about justice, its administration and its function. Different conceptions of justice have emerged to describe different aspects of the same coin: distributive justice is concerned with a just distribution of goods throughout society; retributive justice is the idea that a proportional punishment evens out a crime: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth (and if we followed this rule, Gandhi says, we’d soon all be blind and toothless); restorative justice is a way of conceptualizing crime as against individuals and communities rather than against the state, encouraging offenders to make reparations for offenses.

The question that should be asked, Pieper says, is when justice may be said to prevail in a nation? "One might almost say that the subject of justice is the “community,” although of course it is only the person, and, therefore, the individual, who can be just in the strict sense of the word. . . . it is the nature of communal life for men constantly to become indebted to each other and then just as constantly to pay one another the debt. We have further said that as a result the balance is in a constant state of shift and needs constantly to be restored to equilibrium. The act of justice is precisely to effect this process of compensations, restitutions, and satisfactions for debts" (Pieper, 70, 104).

Yet, at the same time, “the fact that some debts are not or cannot be paid is essential to the world’s actual conditions” (Pieper, 104). The community must pursue justice, but as a virtue it is only one piece of the puzzle of virtuous living.

Courage: Courage is spirit. Courage is heart. Courage is self-control in the face of fear. In Part I, I described courage as occurring on a continuum between over-confidence and cowardice. It is a willingness to take risks, to assert oneself – not always for the sake of oneself – but for the sake of a higher purpose, too. It includes a willingness to risk one’s life, but for the purpose of justice rather than merely saving one’s self.

To be courageous and brave, Pieper argues, presupposes vulnerability. If there were no vulnerability and no fear there could be no courage. The ultimate injury is death, and courage “is basically readiness to die or, more accurately, readiness to fall, to die, in battle” (Pieper, 117). But the brave man does not suffer injury or risk death for its own sake, “but rather as a means to preserve or to acquire a deeper, more essential intactness,” meaning it is about achieving a lost wholeness (Pieper, 119).

Temperance: Like Courage, temperance is self-control, but self-control in the face of pleasure. Today it means being temperate in eating and drinking, but in the classical world it meant the moderation of anger, sexuality, and attitude (humility). Aquinas says that the second meaning of temperance is “serenity of spirit,” which must go deeper than the surface of intellectual and spiritual life to man’s inner order (Pieper, 147).

Temperance may apply to all pleasures, but Aristotle argues that it applies primarily to bodily pleasures of touch. In other words, we would not call a lover of honor or a lover of learning to be self-indulgent. Nor would we say that someone who delighted in objects of vision – like colors – or of hearing – like music – as acting self-indulgently, nor those who act towards these things as they ought temperate. As it applies to touch, however, temperance includes chastity and unchastity as well as food and drink. Anger, too, in this manner: “In the upsurge of his self-will,” Pieper writes, “the intemperately angry man feels as if he were drawing his whole being together like a club ready to strike” (195)

Temperance is the virtue most concerned with the body and with nature. Everyone gets hungry and thirsty or craves sexual connection. Where we most likely go wrong in these endeavors is the direction of excess. To become a slave to self-indulgence is voluntary, and means that we place our own pleasure at the cost of everything else.

This entry was cross-posted at www.omninerd.com.

Reaction to Delusions

The rather petulant subtitle that Christopher Hitchens has given his (rather petulantly titled) God is Not Great is How Religion Poisons Everything. Naturally one would not expect him to have squandered any greater labor of thought on the dust jacket than on the disturbingly bewildered text that careens so drunkenly across its pages - reeling up against a missed logical connection here, steadying itself against a historical error there, stumbling everywhere over all those damned conceptual confusions littering the carpet - but one does still have to wonder how he expects any reflective reader to interpret such a phrase. Does he really mean precisely everything? Would that apply, then - confining ourselves just to things Christian - to ancient and medieval hospitals, leper asylums, orphanages, almshouses, and hostels? To the golden rule, "Love thine enemies," "Judge not lest ye be judged," prophetic admonitions against oppressing the poor, and commands to feed the clothe and comfort those in need? To the music of Palestrina and Bach, Michelangelo's Pieta, "ah! bright wings," San Marco's mosaics, the Bible of Amiens, and all that gorgeous blue stained glass at Chartres? To the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and contemporary efforts to liberate Sudanese slaves? And so on and so on? Surely it cannot be the case that, if only purged of the toxin of faith, these things would be even better than they are; were it not for faith, it seems fairly obvious, most of them would have no existence at all. And since none of these things would seem to fall outside the general category of "everything," it must be that Hitchens means (assuming he means anything at all) that they fall outside the more specific category of "religion." This would, at any rate, be in keeping with one of the rhetorical strategies especially favored in New Atheist circles: one labels anything one dislikes - even if it is found in a purely secular setting - "religion" (thus, for example, all the twentieth-century totalitarianisms are "political religions" for which secularists need take no responsibility), while simultaneously claiming that everything good, in the arts, morality, or any other sphere - even if it emerges within an entirely religious setting - has only an accidental association with religious belief and is really, in fact, common human property (so, for example, the impulse toward charity will doubtless spring up wherever an "enlightened: society takes root). By the same token, every injustice that seems to follow from a secularist principle is obviously an abuse of that principle, while any evil that comes wrapped in a cassock is unquestionably an undiluted expression of religion's very essence.

- David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions

Bishop N.T. Wright and Historical Resurrection

forgyf us ure gyltas

Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum,
si thin nama gehalgod.
To-becume thin rice.
Geweorthe thin willa
on eorthan, swa swa on heofenum.
Urne daeghwamlican hlaf syle us to-daeg.
And forgyf us ure gyltas,
swa swa we forgifath urum gyltendum.
And ne gelaede thu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfle:
Sothlice.

- The Lord's Prayer as written in the southwest of England about the year 1000.

Virtue Ethics Part I: Virtue among Alternatives

There are, of course, as many theories for rationalizing human behavior as there are humans. In the west, in the last two-hundred and fifty years, there have been two influentially dominant modes of approaching moral behavior: the deontological approach favored by Immanuel Kant and the utilitarian approach invented by Jeremy Bentham and honed by John Stuart Mill and later the American pragmatists William James and the late Richard Rorty. The former emphasizes the morality of duty and focuses on individual motive, but often in idealized conditions. The latter determines the goodness (utility) of an act by its consequences, that is, its contribution to the quotient of happiness (the total happiness possible in a society) – if an act increases the total happiness it is good, if not, bad. Thus a sort of contest between the deontological approach (obligations, moral universals, and following rules) versus the utilitarian approach (responsibility solely for the consequences of our own actions) ensued.

A third way of thinking about the morality of behavior is known as virtue ethics. It originated with Aristotle and has ebbed and flowed along with his reputation, but its greatest expounder was St. Thomas Aquinas. Virtue ethics has experienced something of a resurgence in the last fifty years. Rather than emphasizing duty or consequences, this approach emphasizes habits. Developing character is a function of good habits developed within particular circumstances.

Aristotle taught in his Nicomachean Ethics that each virtue should be seen as existing on a continuum. Achieving virtue means finding the place along that continuum that fits the occasion. Consider, for example, courage. Courage exists on a continuum between cowardice and foolhardiness or recklessness. A general may see that the odds are stacked against him, and thus his decision to walk away from a fight might be a courageous one (see, for example, the career of General George Washington). On another occasion, that same general may decide to lead a charge in which he and all his men are massacred, but still they acted courageously. In different times and circumstances, the virtue of courage may be closer to recklessness than cowardice and other times it may all be reversed. Wherever virtue happens to fall on the continuum, given all the elements of the circumstances, Aristotle names the golden mean. The golden mean, in other words, moves along the continuum at different times and different places and hitting that mean is the achievement of virtue in that circumstance.

This is not to say that the virtues are relative so much as contextual. Consider the elaboration of the virtue of gratitude by another great virtue ethicist, Adam Smith, from Part III of his brilliant work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The general rules of almost all the virtues, the general rules which determine what are the offices of prudence, of charity, of generosity, of gratitude, of friendship, are in many respects loose and inaccurate, admit of many exceptions, and require so many modifications, that it is scarce possible to regulate our conduct entirely by a regard to them. The common proverbial maxims of prudence, being founded in universal experience, are perhaps the best general rules which can be given about it. To affect, however, a very strict and literal adherence to them would evidently be the most absurd and ridiculous pedantry. Of all the virtues I have just now mentioned, gratitude is that, perhaps, of which the rules are the most precise, and admit of the fewest exceptions. That as soon as we can we should make a return of equal, and if possible of superior value to the services we have received, would seem to be a pretty plain rule, and one which admitted of scarce any exceptions. Upon the most superficial examination, however, this rule will appear to be in the highest degree loose and inaccurate, and to admit of ten thousand exceptions. If your benefactor attended you in your sickness, ought you to attend him in his? or can you fulfil the obligation of gratitude, by making a return of a different kind? If you ought to attend him, how long ought you to attend him? The same time which he attended you, or longer, and how much longer? If your friend lent you money in your distress, ought you to lend him money in his? How much ought you to lend him? When ought you to lend him? Now, or to-morrow, or next month? And for how long a time? It is evident, that no general rule can be laid down, by which a precise answer can, in all cases, be given to any of these questions. The difference between his character and yours, between his circumstances and yours, may be such, that you may be perfectly grateful, and justly refuse to lend him a halfpenny: and, on the contrary, you may be willing to lend, or even to give him ten times the sum which he lent you, and yet justly be accused of the blackest ingratitude, and of not having fulfilled the hundredth part of the obligation you lie under. As the duties of gratitude, however, are perhaps the most sacred of all those which the beneficent virtues prescribe to us, so the general rules which determine them are, as I said before, the most accurate. Those which ascertain the actions required by friendship, humanity, hospitality, generosity, are still more vague and indeterminate.

Smith’s argument is that general rules for ethical behavior are usually not that useful. We cannot regulate our conduct by general rules. Instead, he suggests that achieving virtue depends on making good decisions in conditions of uncertainty.

A requirement for this kind of thinking is a belief in free will and a capacity for a high degree of self-reflection about one’s actions and how they are or may be perceived by others. The aim of acting virtuously is human flourishing, which will be variously defined depending on the circumstances that an individual perceives. Passing judgment on another’s virtue is often difficult because we do not see the circumstances as they see them. Hence, Smith and other virtue ethicists often advocate human liberty. And yet it should be acknowledged that the virtues can be described, in their description is a key to their achievement, and in understanding how to achieve virtue our capacity for judgment increases. If we are actors making choices we need to know what it is we are choosing about.

There is a long history of describing the virtues, and Part II of this post will describe the four cardinal virtues while Part III will describe the three theological virtues.

(This article was cross-posted at www.omninerd.com).