Virtue Reborn

The moral scheme which forms the historical background to their [Diderot's, Smith's and Kierkegaard's] thought had, as we have seen, a structure which required three elements: untutored human nature, man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos and the moral precepts which enable him to pass from one state to the other. But the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos.

What is abundantly clear is that in everyday life as in moral philosophy the replacement of Aristotelian or Christian teleology by a definition of the virtues in terms of the passions is not so much or at all the replacement of one set of criteria by another, but rather a movement towards and into a situation where there are no longer any clear criteria.

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. Moral education is an 'education sentimentale'.

- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

The point about the word "virtue" - if we can recapture it in its strong sense - is that it refers, not so much to "doing the right things", but to the forming of habits and hence of moral character.

I remember Rowan Williams [the Archbishop of Canterbury] describing the difference between a soldier who has a stiff drink and charges off into battle waving a sword and shouting a battle cry, and the soldier who calmly makes 1000 small decisions to place someone else's safety ahead of his or her own and then, on the 1001st time, when it really is a life-or-death situation, "instinctively" makes the right decision. That, rather than the first, is the virtue of "courage".

Yes, we modern westerners - and even more postmodern westerners - are trained by the media and public discourse to think that "letting it all out" and "doing what comes naturally" are the criteria for how to behave. There is a sense in which they are - but only when the character has been trained so that "what comes naturally" is the result of that habit-forming training.

The Christian vision of the ultimate future, the "end" or "goal" of our human vocation, takes the place within the New Testament's scheme of thought which in Aristotle's philosophical scheme (where the "virtue" language goes back to) is taken by his idea of the human telos, or goal. The way "virtue" works is that the "virtues" are the strengths of character you need to develop in the present so that you can be shaped for that ultimate goal.

When you learn a language, your brain literally changes: new connections are made, new possibilities emerge, new habits of mind, tongue, and even sometimes body language emerge and are formed. The result is not, though, that you can speak it for the fun of it, but that you can communicate with people in that language, and perhaps even be able to go and live in the country where that language is spoken, and feel at home there.

The illustration I sometimes use is that when you learn to drive a car, the idea is that you will quickly come to do most of the things "automatically", changing gear, using the brakes etc, and that you will develop the "virtues" of a good driver, looking out for other road users, not allowing yourself to be distracted etc; but that the highway agencies construct crash barriers (so that even if you don't drive appropriately damage is limited) and also those "rumble strips", as we call them in the UK, which make a loud noise on the tyre if you even drift to the edge of the roadway.

"Rules" and the "Moral Law" are like those crash barriers and rumble strips. Ideally you won't need them because you will have learned the character strengths and will drive down the moral highway appropriately. But the rules are there so that when you start to drift, you are at once alerted and can take appropriate action - particularly figuring out what strengths need more work to stop it happening again.

- N. T. Wright, The Rebirth of Virtue: An Interview with N. T. Wright

Incidentally, I read After Virtue for one of my modules in Spring Term last year, Contemporary Political Philosophy, and one of my modules in Spring Term this year is Theological Ethics. In fact, Theology Today (a journal published by Princeton Theological Seminary) calls Finite and Infinite Goods by Robert Merrihew Adams (the text for Theological Ethics) 'one of the two most important books in moral philosophy of the last quarter century, the other being After Virtue'.

It will be interesting to read Wright's new book, Virtue Reborn (which will be released in the UK on 18 Feb and on which the above interview is based), alongside the readings for Theological Ethics.

Link: After After Virtue (26 Mar 10)