5
BIBLICAL ETHICS
VIRTUE ETHICS
Until now we have been looking at action-based ethics: what a person ought to do. Virtue ethics is a different stream of thought entirely, for it focuses on how a person ought to be.
Memory Aid: The Hero or Saint
Contrasts
ACTION-BASED VIRTUE-BASED
What to do How to be
Derivative Fundamental
Conduct Character
Rules Traits
Outwardly manifested Inwardly developed
Overt behaviors Inner states
Temporary Enduring
Some famous lists of virtues:
BUDDHA PLATO ARISTOTLE PAUL
Enlightenment Courage Courage Faith
Right views Temperance Temperance Hope
Right intention Wisdom Liberality Love (Agape’)
Right speech Justice Magnificence Joy
Right conduct Pride Peace
Right occupation Friendliness Patience
Right willpower Justice Kindness
Right awareness Goodness
Right concentration Faithfulness
BOY SCOUTS: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient,
cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent.
Plato, On Virtue
Socrates (Plato’s teacher) taught that there are some things more important than life itself, such as being true to your principles. TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE, and THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING.
For Socrates, the GOOD LIFE is not a pleasant life in which we seek gratification for the sake of having a good time. The GOOD LIFE is strenuous, but gratifying in its own way because one knows that one seeks and sees the Truth, and one is in control of oneself.
Reason plays the central role in the Greek quest for living a good life.
· We can’t hope to attain virtue without the use of our reason.
· A person who does something unjust to others is either ignorant or sick.
· If he knew better, he wouldn’t have done it.
· His problem is that his appetites (the needs and wants of humans) rule him, and they must be controlled to achieve a good life. A person ruled by his appetites does not have a good life.
IN HUMANS THERE ARE THREE POWERS AT WORK
REASON SPIRIT APPETITES
Reason and spirit will keep the body healthy and the soul balanced.
· Reason is the name of the charioteer.
· Spirit (willpower, ambition) is the name of the well-behaved horse.
· Appetites is the name of the wild, unruly horse.
· The charioteer must make both horses work together; he can’t just untie the wild horse and let it go. His strategy is to make the well-behaved horse control the wild, unruly horse and subdue it.
When REASON rules, the person is WISE (virtue of the intellect).
When SPIRIT controls the APPETITES, that person is also BRAVE (virtue of the spirit).
When the APPETITES are completely controlled, that person is TEMPERATE (virtue of the appetites).
Such a person is well balanced and would not dream of being unjust to anybody.
Therefore, JUSTICE is the virtue that describes the WELL-BALANCED PERSON (virtue of the harmony of reason, spirit and the appetites).
Virtue takes on meaning when we consider the non-virtues or anti-virtues (known as vices). Paul mentions his list of virtues (he calls them fruits of the Spirit) after listing a variety of vices (he calls them works of the flesh): sexual immorality, impurity, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, selfish ambition, fits of rage, envy, drunkenness, orgies.
Aristotle, On Virtue
The virtues are the ways we attain the highest goal of humanity: HAPPINESS.
Why happiness? Why not honor, or pleasure, or intelligence, or good health, or wealth, or power?
Because each one of the latter are things which we strive to attain partly for themselves, and partly because they make us happy. But happiness is never sought to make us honorable, or intelligent, or healthy. So it alone is the final end.
This happiness is not something that you can attain in a moment or in an afternoon or over the summer vacation. It takes a lifetime. Happiness is more than an emotional state: it is a state of complete being, balance and harmony.
It is a state of character or soul.
Aristotle draws attention to the middle traits or virtues (he called them means) by describing the excesses and deficiencies. For example, consider the ranges of character traits possible to a soldier on the battlefield. On the one hand, he could run from the enemy, which we would define as cowardice, regarding this as a deficiency of what it takes to be virtuous on the battlefield. On the other hand, he could run headlong with no chance of surviving directly at the enemy, which we would define as foolhardiness, regarding this as an excess of what it takes to virtuous on the battlefield. How should he be? Brave, using his reason to discern what to be afraid of, and fighting with confidence against anyone that is not to be feared. This appropriate character trait, somewhere in the middle between the deficiency of cowardice and the excess of foolhardiness, we would call courage. This would also be called the GOLDEN MEAN.
Aristotle’s three practical rules for good conduct:
1. Keep away from that extreme which is more contrary to the mean.
2. Know your own weaknesses.
3. Guard yourselves especially against pleasure and pleasant things, because we are not impartial judges of pleasure.
A fourth rule to remember: the mean is not merely the halfway point between extremes of excess and deficiency. It is the optimal way to be.
Bernard Mayo on Moral Character vs. Moral Principles
Aristotle will not tell you what to do, but he will tell you what to be. If I am ruled by an ethical system of moral principles, my decision-making will have to go like this:
1. What kind of situation is this?
2. What kinds of rules govern actions in a situation like this?
3. If there is no rule, I will have to discover a new rule which will work in situations like this in the future.
If I am ruled by an ethical system of moral character, my decision-making will look like this:
1. What ought I to be, in this situation?
So there is a simplicity to character morality that cannot be found in principle morality.
Character cannot be summed up by a list of dispositions or rules. It has an organic unity that is greater than the sum of its parts.
In times of perplexity, we can ask not only “What shall I be?” but also “Who shall I be like?”
· Plato’s answer: the ‘just man’
· Aristotle’s answer: the man of practical wisdom
· Augustine’s answer: the citizen of the City of God
· Marx’s or Lenin’s or Mao’s answer: the good Communist
· John Wayne’s answer: the gunslinging, strong, quiet cowboy
Sometimes a particular role model is held up to be imitated, such as Socrates, Buddha, Christ, St. Francis, Mohammed, Michael Jordan. The Hero and the Saint are very much the expression of this approach to moral decision-making. Heroes and saints are not merely people who did things; they are people to be imitated in the way they were. We should not only act as they acted, in specific situations; we should be like they were. Their lives became examples for us to follow.
Kant predictably said that this idea of emulation was fatal to morality. The exemplar is useful only to render visible an instance of the moral principle. Should we say that principles are less important than personalities? No, since we identify role models by the principles they follow. Yet, the person is not nothing, when you are struggling to decide how to be moral.
The morality of character gives room for ideals, and more importantly, it appeals not only to the reason but also to the psyche. Heroes and saints embolden us by their example in ways that mere principles cannot. They can win our hearts and our heads.
Alisdair Macintyre On Virtue
I best understand my life when I see it as a story, with episodes in which I acted out a certain role. I am the subject of a narrative that runs from birth to death. My life furthermore is a part of the story of your life and your life and your life and your life, and in each I have a certain role. I can only answer the question, “What am I to do?” if I have already answered the question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”
We learn what a child or a parent is through the stories we are told, as we are developing as moral agents. Deprive children of stories, and your leave them unscripted, “anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.” Mythology is essential for teaching virtues.
Since each one of us is the star character of the narrative which is our individual life, we are accountable for what we do, if our life is to be narratable. The story of your life is supposed to make sense, but if you can’t give any reasons for the way you acted in a situation, it doesn’t make any sense.
Since I am also a character in the narrative of someone else’s life, I can ask them to give account of their actions as well. Asking what you did and why, saying what I did and why, are the essential elements in all narratives. Without this, the narrative becomes unintelligible.
In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The unity of a narrative in a single life.
What is the good for me? It is the best way to live out the story and bring it to completion.
What is the good for humanity? It is what all answers to the former question have in common. This commonality has different names.
In Aristotle’s thought: happiness.
In Plato’s thought: justice.
In the Apostle Paul’s thought: Christlikeness.
In Buddha’s thought: enlightenment.
In Marx’s thought: communist utopia.
In Hollywood’s John Wayne mythos: the American dream.
How is it that people think they see things as they really are when they only see a shadow of reality?
This was and is the philosopher’s burden, and the first to bear it was Plato.
In his famous Allegory of the Cave, he taught that people are prisoners of an artificial idea that the physical world is all that there is. Isn’t it obvious, though, that everything in the physical realm is but a poor copy of its perfect form? Cat, chair, color, and character traits: these conjure up images, ideas, which serve as templates for what we actually sense. We compare what we see to those images, those ideals, those concepts of catness, chairness, redness, treeness, beauty, truth, justice, and judge how close to the ideal the physical approaches. We never will see a perfect copy, with our senses. Yet we can reflect and discover the perfect Form, or prototype, upon which all copies are based. There is a realm of the Forms, but it is not a physical place. It is an intellectual and psychic state, to which we are liberated at death, according to Socrates and Plato. While we stay in the flesh, we struggle with the imperfect copies, believing they are all that there is, yet knowing that perfection is yet to be attained, in every area.
Yet there are some who by Reason comprehend the Forms. By training the mind, they break the chains of merely empirical observation and ascend out of the cave and its darkness into the pure light of the Form of the Good. As they grow accustomed to the real light radiated by the Good, they see things as they really are. Equipped with this vision, they gain control of their minds, spirits and appetites. By Reason their lives are transformed, and they learn to embrace the ideals and to esteem them most highly above the physical, which is illusory and shadowy.
The Forms of Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Justice, Beauty, Truth and ultimately the Good, constitute the real meaning of life. These virtues are changeless and eternal, worth basing one’s life upon, and if need be, worth dying for. Once beheld, Plato believed, they will never be turned away from, and will continue to bring one’s life into conformity with them. The reflective mind, exhilarated by the perfection of the Forms, will never again be satisfied merely with the changeableness of the physical realm. The Forms provide landmarks which never move by which one might plot one’s course from birth to death, and a life well lived from cradle to grave, a GOOD LIFE, will result in being reborn, not in the physical realm, but in the realm of the Forms.
Was Plato a religious man? Certainly. He worshipped as all Athenians did the gods of the Greek Pantheon. But obviously the real object of his devotion was the perfection of the ideal realm of the Forms, and the means by which humans can ascend out of the cave-like existence to behold the Form of the Good: REASON.
Does this idea of IDEALS find expression in other thought-systems?
· HINDUS seek the perfection of awareness of the ONENESS OF ALL THINGS IN BRAHMAN.
· BUDDHISTS seek the end of craving and absorption into the perfect realm of NIRVANA.
· TAOISTS seek to enter that stream of harmony with the world in which all is recognized as being as it should be: the TAO.
· The great MONOTHEIST RELIGIONS seek communion and fellowship with the ONE GOD, who is perfect and unchanging, whose character embodies in one Person the purest expression of the Virtues.
· Even New Age religions and Earth-worshippers recognize and aspire for a perfection which transcends mere physical existence.
Are they all alike in every way? Not hardly.
Are they all correct? Not hardly. The specifics of each system contain truth claims which contradict the truth claims of other systems. A ¹ non-A.
Is there some similarity they seem to share with one another? Yes.
It appears to be, in one form or another, the belief in the existence of an IDEAL.
A LIFE OF VIRTUE is a life well lived, the ancients all affirm:
THE GOOD LIFE.
· For PLATO, the saying “It takes a village” would be restated as “It takes a POLIS.” A Polis ruled by philosophers, in which each person had discovered and accepted his/her proper role in the society, and worked together with other citizens to attain virtue and a realization of the Form of the Good.