In Virtue of Ethics

You just ordered a pipping hot latte from your favorite local shop, and you are close to running late to work (again). As you walk out, you come across a terrible situation. Someone is attempting to rob an elderly woman who you know was former drug lord. The money in her purse was gained from selling drugs to kids. The person attempting to rob her will use the money to pay for their child's brain life-saving brain surgery. If you stop to call the police, the woman will be robbed & the robber will get away. If you throw your latte at the robber, the robbery will be stopped & the robber will be caught. But if you take the time to call or throw your latte, you will be late to work, get fired, & be resigned to a life of menial work rather than your profound contributions to ending world hunger.

What do you do?

or, perhaps just as importantly,

How do you decide what to do?

First off, I hope you never find yourself in this particular situation! And while these kinds of ethical scenarios help tease out what you really think & believe, most of what we call ethics occurs in the simple, mundane moments of your day. Moral deliberation, for most people, rarely occurs as a nuanced algorithm or flow chart. Here, I will describe one particular way of thinking about ethics that both academics & everyday people find helpful & true. Many who have come before us ascribed to something like Virtue Ethics, and we would do well to hear their voices today.

If you Google the word ethics, you will find the following two definitions:

(1) moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity.

(2) the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles.

The way we use the word 'ethics' today generally deals in what rules I ought to follow or what I should do that has the best consequences. And while principles, rules, & consequences factor greatly in what action one ought to take, a guy named Aristotle charted a different course for ethics about 2,300 years ago. Stated simply, Aristotle's conception of ethics asks first, "What kind of person am I trying to become?" as the foundation for answering, "What action should I take in this particular situation?" In order for rules & consequences to be intelligible, Virtue Ethics aims at the ideal end (telos in Greek) for human life. For Aristotle in particular, happiness (the good, full life) is the proper end for man and it may only be reached through the cultivation of the virtues.

Virtues are excellences, specifically excellences of one's character. For example, consider courage. It is good to become a courageous person, someone who does not rush into things too quickly nor run away at difficulty or danger. In order to reach the kind of happiness fit for human beings, you will need to become courageous, temperate, patient, truthful, & friendly to name a few of the virtues Aristotle writes about. Ethics then concerns intentionally doing the actions which cultivate the kind of excellences that reach the ends all human beings ought to be. We exist with potential that we desire to actualize. But how does one decide what action to take? Do I throw my coffee or not?!

Virtue Ethics presupposes what is called practical rationality. Human beings are rational by nature, but a unique kind of reasoning exists when one considers the particular situation one is in & the action/s which will actualize the virtues. To reach one's telos, one must utilize both reason and action, including the resources necessary to make an action. Human reason refines the ends one aims at & considers the actions to get there. This is why Aristotle delineates between moral virtues (virtues of character which govern one's appetites) & intellectual virtues (virtues of character which concern wise reasoning).

Part of becoming a virtuous person is identifying the important & unimportant factors that make a choice virtuous. But Virtue Ethics always aims beyond deliberation & vice up into actualization, and this is much more difficult than one would think. Aristotle even said no one ought to be called happy until after their death, as only the measure of a whole human life could amount to properly formed virtuous character. Good action will always involve asking what goods one aims at actualizing.

Now, why does any of this matter? Ironically, such a question would have perplexed someone like Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas (who ingeniously integrated Virtue Ethics & Christian theology in the middle ages). We as human beings naturally aim at ends, whether they be true happiness, success, popularity, union with God, or Instagram followers. We aim because there is an end for all human beings, so to ask for any justification why is to risk missing the point altogether.

So instead, I will answer why it matters in terms of what happens if we do not adopt at least an ends-concerned (teleological) account for ethics. First, you will most likely miss what you don't aim at. Intentionality is so key to Virtue Ethics that to merely commit an act of courage or temperance is not enough. If you do it from ignorance or external pressure, you cannot cultivate virtue. This also means if we do not aim for the good human life, including all that is required to get there, we will never arrive. Second, rules & consequences are not fit groundings for ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre, among other notable scholars, argues that the Enlightenment attempt to find the first principles of reason not only did fail, but it had to fail. MacIntyre filters the disarray of moral discourse today through the lens of when world culture shifted away from teleological & Virtue ethics.

Today, Virtue Ethics undergoes a kind of revival in academia & in everyday practice. Why? Perhaps because human beings, whether we recognize it or not, have ends we ought to aim towards. Rules alone may help, but remain purely external apart from a shared notion of goods & excellences of character. The consequences of your actions matter, but they will most fundamentally show what kind of person committed the actions.

In the end, the matter remains far more complicated than I have here expressed. Nailing down what ends human beings ought to aim at is tricky enough, let alone without the realities of competing & differing cultural resources to achieve these ends. And as a Anglican Christian, I also acknowledge the deep messiness & disorder of human desire, as well as aiming for not only happiness here on earth, but also eternal union with God. I personally conclude that the life of faith, confession, prayer, & resting in God's grace is in fact the only way to achieve the fulfillment of human life. Yet, the world doesn't need another set of rules or ideals to follow, and it clearly does not yet care about the consequences of its actions. We need to know who we are aiming to become & how to get there. Virtue Ethics might not be a bad place to start.