Today,
analyses of moral issues by Catholic moral theologians echo an ethical
tradition grounded in Aquinas’s baptism of Aristotle, but they do not speak in
the same voice. Some, like Pope Benedict
XVI, invoke the Aristotelian metaphysical system which supports Aquinas’s
natural law theory. Others have
abandoned the metaphysical supposition that human nature is endowed with a
teleological structure, but invoke some version of Aristotle’s “middle way” as
a quasi-empirical framework for developing a virtue-ethics.
Here, I have no desire to belabor the fact
that Galileo and Descartes demolished the metaphysical system which frames the
theological and moral discourse indebted to Aquinas. But I do want to insist that, at best, a
virtue-ethics has a hollow center and, at worst, is positively pernicious. To do so, I first note that I agree with the
grounds for the distinction between virtue and vice used by Aristotle to locate
moral issues in an empirical fact: “Our
actions are formative of the sort of person we become.” But I cannot adopt the language of “character”
which he used as the centerpiece of the virtues Aristotle privileged. In its own right, this language was drawn
from a metaphor which depicted human beings as agents in a drama. And since a scripted drama is populated by
characters who play assigned roles reliably, virtues emerged as practices which
guaranteed that citizens (social beings) would become persons of good
character.
To supplement the metaphor in question,
Aristotle defined good character as “well-being” and “fullness of life.” By definition, then, vices were practices
which obstructed that development by an excess or deficiency of the virtue they
framed. (“Virtue lies in the middle.”) And since “character” is laden with a call to
reliability, virtues result from long-practiced strategies designed to
transform the need to master urges to excess or defect into spontaneous
expressions of a good character.
I question such a virtue-ethics on two
levels. One, as a philosopher of
language, I am convinced (1) that all human experiences are inescapably
historical, (2) that the everyday languages which transmit cultures carve up
reality differently, (3) that it is quite impossible to escape entirely from
the formative influence of these languages, and (4) that analyses of moral
discourse must recognize that languages indebted to literary traditions
transmit many forms of life, each designed to realize a distinctive
purpose. And the recognition that
everyday languages transmit many forms of life introduces a second-level
question concerning moral discourse. “Does
a moral discourse capable of transforming the longing for a more fully human
and uniquely personal existence grant priority to a participative social
existence or to intensely personal involvements?”
Historically, moral discourses grounded in
the social dimensions of human existence have been easily subjected to the rule
of the political, economic or religious dimensions which converge in a
prevailing social order. (In the most
influential versions, humans who share an existence as rational animals must
subject unruly passions and desires to the rule of reason.) In marked contrast, a moral discourse which
grants priority to the personal dimensions of experience focuses attention on
the implications of a distinctive form of life which implies that we are passionate,
imaginative, linguistic and purposive beings.
And this contrast forces moral agents to decide which form of life they
wish to embrace as the purpose to which all other purposes must submit.
In this regard, neither Aristotle nor
Aquinas were aware that everyday languages transmit forms of life designed to
realize distinctive purposes and that the quest for a fully human existence can
generate forms of life which are at present unimaginable. As a result, they assumed that analyses of
languages used to process everyday experience which were governed by the use of
reason would yield a single, timeless, universally compelling moral
discourse. Over the course of centuries,
however, that assumption fostered a contention among authors who supposed that
a distinctive form of life which they espoused would inscribe Aristotle’s
promise of well-being in a definitive description of a fully human
existence. In the ensuing dialogue of
text with text, they filled the hollow center of the distinction between virtues
and vices with very different definitions of human reality.
Two examples must suffice. Locke entered a contentious dialogue centered
in a conviction that societies emerged from social contracts, not nature. To counter Hobbes’s version of that contract,
he fused nature and nurture through an ingenious resolution of moral issues
inherent in the shared assumption that, since human beings naturally seek to
gratify passion and desire, reason must rule passions and desires. To counter the totalitarian implications of
Hobbes’s contract-theory of society, he posited a primordial state of existence
populated by human beings who, at their best, needed only one virtue: the ability to act out of enlightened
self-interest.
In this context, Adam Smith wove themes
from both Hobbes and Locke into the analysis of the workings of the emerging
economic system today referred to as a single form of life, Capitalism. Though Smith explicitly rejected the rhetoric
now invoked by laissez faire
Capitalists, he adopted Locke’s privileging of enlightened self-interest and
framed it with a metaphorical reference to the workings of an “invisible hand”
which echoed biblical passages which assured Israel that her God held her in
the palm of his hand. And he could not
prevent others from using these metaphors to lend authority to a rhetoric which
legitimated practices which exploited some individuals as the price for the
ultimate recovery of the paradisiacal existence lost by the sin of Adam. According to this rhetoric, an unregulated
working of this economic system would show that greed functioned as a virtue,
not a vice.
In sum, I suggest that an ethical theory
centered in a distinction between virtues and vices cannot produce what it
promises. It does not expose the
depersonalization inherent in an ethical theory which elevates a norm or
practice conducive to the realization of a distinctive purpose to the status of
a moral virtue. That exposure requires
an analysis of everyday experiences which shows that virtues are designed to
subject passion and desire to the rule of reason.
This critique expresses my conviction that
a virtue-ethics is inherently depersonalizing in two ways. (1) Intensely
personal involvements are inherently passionate and (2) Subjecting passion to
the rule of reason fosters the sort of impersonal exchanges (transactions)
which function well in relationships between detached individuals. For an empirical analysis which supports this
conviction, we need only consider the everyday experiences of so many Catholics
who were taught that, to deal with outbursts of frustrated rage, they must
acquire the virtue of patience.
This moral discourse does not explicitly
invoke the supposition that our passions must be subjected to the rule of
reason, but that supposition is inherent in the way that a call to be more
patient is surrounded with a language which fosters emotional reactions encoded
in an extensive repertoire of judgments and strategies. To appreciate the fact that these emotional
reactions do violence to one’s deepest feelings, note that anger and
frustration are triggered by pain and complicated by a fear of erupting
violently which generates judgments that anger is immoral (or less than
human). And since unrestrained eruptions
of passion can disrupt transactions between and among detached individuals, the
process of socialization transforms these judgments into strategies designed to
bury the pain and anxiety which evokes anger.
And a language centered in a distinction between virtues and vices
allows them to pose as moral judgments.
(Addendum: Years ago, I encountered a statement that
still rings true: “Emotional reactions
designed to master pain and anger bury these deep feelings alive. They may serve
us well socially, but the feelings they bury will eventually become weapons to
be used against somebody.”)
To clarify the point at issue: I often suggest that the language which
enables unique individuals to process experience in ways conducive to deepening
person-to-person involvements calls us to integrate our deepest feelings rather
than to control them. Clearly,
presenting patience as a virtue (1) encodes practices designed to enable moral
agents to endure pain and control anger and (2) calls individuals to practice
the strategies in question until they become so habitual that they seem to be
spontaneous. Equally clearly, they call
individuals to focus their moral energy on subjecting anger to the rule of an
ethical theory purportedly legitimated by the rule of reason.
In marked contrast, the language of
intimacy generates empirical analyses of language and experience which reveal
that such a project is ultimately counter-productive. Like it or not, feelings buried alive take
revenge by distorting other feelings evoked by intensely personal
involvements. Consequently, my critique
of any virtue-ethic is an expression of my conviction that the language of
intimacy calls for vulnerable and respectful self-revelations which escape the
formative power of the repertoire of emotional reactions which have given shape
and form to our personal histories.
At the very least, therefore, a
virtue-ethics cannot enrich the inner journey which is essential to any shared
journey to deepening person-to-person involvement. And for those who are seduced by a rhetoric
which suggests that one must work at being more patient, it encodes an illusory
promise of self-sufficiency indebted to the time when metaphors of
individuality first emerged as counter-points to totalitarian social orders.
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