Transcript Christian Virtue Ethics

In pairs answer the following (you may need
two whiteboards):
• Give an example of one of Aristotles virtues other than
courage. Explain how someone might go overboard (excess) or
not practice it enough (deficiency).
• What is the meaning of the following terms?:
•
•
•
•
•
Eudaimonia
Moral Virtue
Intellectual Virtue
Final Cause
Akrasia
• Why is Virtue ethics considered to be agent centred rather
than action centred? Does this make it a stronger theory in
your view?
Summary
Problems with traditional
ethical theories.
We can look to people
we consider virtuous and
use our reason to decide
what virtues we need.
The doctrine of the
mean will allow us to be
specific in our virtues.
Instead try to base ethics
on how we should be as
people, not rules or
consequences.
Rationality tells us that
the best thing to do is to
apply right emotions, at
the right time, in the
right degree (virtues).
Some virtues are
intellectual and can be
taught. Some are moral
and must be practiced.
We can achieve
Eudaimonia by applying
our rationality
A combination of both is
what we truly need to be
good people and
ultimately achieve
Eudaimonia.
Ultimate aim of
Eudaimonia – happiness
and a good life for all.
Exam Questions
• Explain moral and intellectual virtues as found in
Virtue Ethics theory.
• Examine Aristotle’s theory of Virtue Ethics.
• Outline the main concepts of Virtue Ethics.
http://www.rsrevision.com/games/alevel/virtu
e_ethics/virtue_ethics_gg.html
Christian Virtue Ethics
• Following Aristotle, the idea of virtues was adapted
by early Christian scholars such as St Augustine and St
Aquinas.
• They used Aristotle’s main virtues of temperance,
wisdom, justice and courage. These are known within
Christianity as the Cardinal Virtues.
• Based on passages from the New Testament, the
virtues of faith, hope and charity (agape love) were
added. These three are known as the Theological
Virtues.
Christian Virtue Ethics
Cardinal Virtues
Temperance
Wisdom
Justice
Courage
Theological Virtues
Faith
Hope
Charity
• Although most Christians would agree that these are good
qualities to have, this list of seven virtues are a key part of
Roman Catholic teaching.
• Like Aristotle’s virtues, each one has a corresponding vice.
These seven Capital Vices are also commonly known as the
Seven Deadly Sins.
• Unlike Aristotle – there is not necessarily a deficiency and
excess for each virtue, there is usually only one.
Seven Deadly Sins
Cardinal Virtues
Temperance
Wisdom
Justice
Courage
Theological Virtues
Faith
Hope
Charity
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
In studying and teaching ethics one experiences a strong
pressure to spend most of one’s time with problematic issues
which appear to pose difficult moral dilemmas. But in our
focussing attention so sharply on abortion, war, divorce and all
the other thorny issues we are accustomed to arguing about,
there is a danger that an important dimension of ethics gets
neglected, a neglect which may in turn prejudice discussion of
the self-same issues. The dimension is that concerned with
character and virtue. To put the matter bluntly and personally,
ethics is not only about what you ought to do, and why you
ought to do it, but what you ought to be and why you ought to
be it.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
Certainly, when one reads the New Testament, the amount of
ethical material which provides direction on specific issues is
sparse compared with the great wealth of teaching which
exhorts the disciple to adopt certain attitudes and cultivate
certain qualities. Jesus’ teaching does not provide ready-made
answers to many concrete moral dilemmas. There are instances
of his actually refusing to take individuals’ decision-taking
responsibility away from them. (See Luke 12:13-14 and Mark
12:13-17).
13 Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to
13 Someone
in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to
divide the inheritance with me.”
14 Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter
between you?”
Jesus to catch him in his words. 14 They came to him and
said, “Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You
aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to
who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance
with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial tax[a] to Caesar
or not? 15 Should we pay or shouldn’t we?”
But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you trying to trap
me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at
it.” 16 They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose
image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.
17 Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is
Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
But taken overall Jesus’ teaching does provide a fairly clear
depiction of the sort of person a Christian disciple should be.
The themes of self-sacrificial love, willingness to forgive,
childlike humility, wariness of the enticements of wealth,
chastity in mind and body, and an unreadiness to judge other
people are far too central to the Gospel record to allow
Christians to be in any doubt that these are the traits which
their lives should exhibit. Jesus gives vivid examples of what
these character traits mean in practice, but they are only
examples; the Christian is left with the challenge of displaying
the dispositions of discipleship in many situations other than
those referred to by Jesus.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
In the letters of Paul one finds rather more in the way of
detailed guidance on specific moral problems which troubled
the church. Nevertheless the underlying ethical emphasis is on
the Christian character, upon what sort of person an individual
who has died to sin and risen to new life in Christ should be.
That Paul saw no value in right action which was not informed
by right motive is evident from 1 Corinthians 13:3:
“If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned,
but have not love, I gain nothing.”
In that chapter Paul places love alongside of, but also ahead of,
faith and hope as three qualities which above all should mark
the Christian life. In lists of virtues given elsewhere in Paul, love
retains its primacy, but in company with qualities other than
faith and hope, eg.
<Two quotes listing valuable character traits on your sheet>
Other New Testament passages which string together a series
of virtues are 1 Timothy 6:11, James 3:17 and 2 Peter 1:5-7.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
What all this adds up to is that the business of being a Christian
involves acceptance of a certain obligatory shape to one’s life.
Individuality is not extinguished when one becomes a follower
of Jesus but there is such a thing as a recognisable Christian
character. This character is seen both as a gift and as a task; the
qualities viewed as desirable are described as fruit of the Spirit,
stressing that they emanate from God. The fact that the nine
qualities of Gal 5:22-23 are described in the singular as fruit
suggests that they are inter-related, and that it is the Christian’s
responsibility to ‘grow’ them all.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
Familiarity with this tradition immediately brings to light two
striking facts: that going back to the Fathers there has existed a
consistent seven-fold categorisation of the virtues, and that
part of this categorisation has been based not on any Scriptural
reference to certain virtues but on an ancient classification of
virtue found in Plato and Aristotle. From the Greek
philosophers Christianity inherited the four cardinal virtues:
prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. To them it added
as three theological virtues the qualities highlighted by Paul in 1
Corinthians 13: faith, hope and love. The most extensive
analysis of these different virtues is that found in Aquinas’
Summa Theologica, and his account remains the starting point
for most Catholic moral theologians today.
What can you remember from last lesson?
3 Facts about Christian Virtue Ethics!
Richard Higginson – Story So Far…
- Most ethics is action-centred, but we really shouldn’t forget the agent
- In fact in Christianity a huge amount of the NT is about agent-centred
ethics rather than action centred.
- Jesus made a point of teaching virtues; how he thought people should
behave instead of what they should do in each situation. He went as far as
deliberately avoiding specific moral guidance.
- Although Paul offered some specific moral guidance he generally
continues the theme started by Jesus – with the added caveat that an
action is not “right” unless performed for the right motive.
- Paul outlines three virtues that he considered to be the most important
for Christians: Love, faith and hope (theological virtues).
- It seems then that there is such a thing as a Christian character, a way of
living. The virtues may be given by God, but they must be practiced and
developed by Christians themselves.
- Later Christian thinkers added four virtues from the Greeks to the three
previously outlined by Paul – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude
(cardinal virtues).
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
Stated as it has been thus far in a bald sort of way, the
sevenfold classification of virtues comes over as rather artificial,
somewhat fragmented, and owing a dangerous amount to a
pagan rather than a Christian frame of mind. However, these
criticisms are difficult to sustain when one actually examines
how the great Christian writers have handled the different
virtues.
Christian theology did not adopt the cardinal virtues ‘in any
slavish spirit of imitation. It reinterpreted them and filled them
with a Christian context’ (Kenneth E. Kirk, Some Principle of
Moral Theology, 1921) In particular, various aspects of
Aristotle’s treatment of the virtues were found wanting and
discarded.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
For instance, Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, whereby moral
virtue is seen as a ‘mean’ between extremes of excess and
defect, was recognised as containing value in pointing towards
the self-control epitomised by temperance, but was ultimately
seen as incompatible with the self-sacrificial strand in Christian
teaching which calls Christ’s followers to be unstinting and
uncalculating in their love. Paul Ramsey contrasts Aristotle’s
doctrine of the mean with Jesus’ ethic of the extreme (see his
Basic Christian Ethics, 1950). Again, Aristotle took it for granted
that pride was a virtue, indicating a proper self-respect. The
New Testament emphasis on humility, in contrast, forced
Christian theologians to remove pride from the classical list of
virtues and place it instead at the head of their corresponding
list of vices.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
The Virtue approach points towards the need for stability and
settled habit in the Christian moral life. It is biblical in its
emphasis on God’s insatiable interest with the type of people
who we are. Not only in the New Testament, but also in the Old,
we come across evocative statements of God’s call to a certain
pattern of character:
“He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the
Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and
to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
Despite this eminently biblical emphasis on character and
virtue, the fact is that these are themes which have been far
more prominent in Roman Catholic writing on ethics than they
have been among Protestants. Even among Protestants whose
sphere of interest has extended beyond immediate practical
issues, concern for character has been minimal.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
However, in the USA there has been a recent rediscovery
among Protestant ethical writers of this traditionally Catholic
emphasis upon character and virtue. Leading the way in this
movement is the Methodist Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas’
conviction is that Christian ethics ‘begins in a community that
carries the story of the God who wills us to participate in a
kingdom established in and through Jesus of Nazareth’ (The
Peaceable Kingdom, 1984). The church is (or should be) in the
process of learning to make God’s story its story, and that
means coming to display the characteristics of peace,
forgiveness and non-violence which were the hallmarks of the
life of Jesus. We are called to assume a certain sort of character,
to cultivate certain virtues, and Hauerwas believes that what
we are is ultimately determinative of what we do.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
He therefore rejects the widespread preoccupation in ethical
debate with problematical moral decisions, alternatives usually
being presented either in terms of invariably keeping absolute
rules (the deontological approach) or doing whatever works out
for long-term happiness (the teleological approach). True,
Christian communities have their prohibitions, but that is
because the nature of the activities prohibited is in
fundamental contradiction to the type of character being
promoted in those communities. Hauerwas believes, for
example, that if we are genuinely non-violent then it becomes
quite unthinkable that we should use violence, even though an
exceptional situation might seem to justify it; the decision
against such an option has already been made by the type of
people we are.
Girding Our Ethics With Character – Richard Higginson
However, there are certain dangers with Hauerwas’ extreme
acceptance of the Virtue approach. Concern with cultivating
desirable qualities can encourage a narcissistic obsession with
one’s self. Perhaps this is one reason why Protestants of
previous generations have placed so little emphasis on
character. To look inwards on oneself is to run the risk of
seeking assurance of one’s justification through one’s own
merits. The attempt to become a harmonious and virtuous
personality is indeed very likely to lead to the sin of pride,
unless the goal of being conformed to the image of Christ is
constantly stressed. Ephesians 4:13 speaks of Christian maturity
as growing into ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of
Christ’, and the example of Christ is a constant challenge to
forget oneself and serve others.
Key Questions – Summarise Christian Views on VE
1.
Why does Higginson think that the New Testament supports the idea of
virtue ethics over more action based ethical systems?
2.
What did Paul think was important to consider when we act?
3.
What is the Christians responsibility when it comes to the virtues given by
God?
4.
What did Christianity inherit from the Greek philosophers?
5.
Why were some of Aristotles virtues considered to be problematic in
Christianity?
6.
Which denominations of Christianity have emphasised character over rules?
7.
What is the danger with accepting VE as a practicing Christian?
Exam Question
On whiteboards plan a rough answer to this question given what
we’ve discussed over the last few lessons:
“Virtue ethics is completely compatible with a
religious approach to ethics” Assess this view (20)
Exam Question
On whiteboards plan a rough answer to this question given what
we’ve discussed over the last few lessons:
“Virtue ethics is completely compatible with a
religious approach to ethics” Assess this view (20)