The Turn to Classification in Virtue Ethics: A Review Essay

Virtues and Their Vices

By far the largest and most ambitious of the three volumes is Virtues and Their Vices, a 510-page OUP labour edited by Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd. The germ of this book was a 2012 summer seminar at Calvin College. Though not advertised as such, the volume is effectively a ‘companion’ or ‘handbook’ in format. The majority of the chapters seek to classify the virtues and vices in their representative historical groupings: cardinal, theological, capital, and so forth. Most of the contributors are philosophers and theologians. A few are psychologists. Almost all make fine interdisciplinary overtures.

Besides a very serviceable introduction, this weighty volume contains 22 chapters plotted out into five sections. As is common with multi-author books devoted to one loosely defined topic, the chapters are of uneven merit, they frequently overlap, and their methodologies clash. This renders the volume somewhat creaky. But on the whole, there is so much good work here that it is probably the finest single collection on the individual virtues and vices we now have.

The first section is on the four cardinal virtues, and it has strong stylistic and substantive affinities with the third section on the three theological virtues. This bodes well for the volume as a whole. The ‘seven traditional virtues’, as they are sometimes called, were for centuries a synecdoche of pagan and Christian virtue. They were the constant theme of popular homilies, medieval morality plays, Gothic stained-glass, ballads and poetry, Renaissance paintings, and allegorical statues and woodcuts. Dante portrayed them as ‘circling in a dance’ in the earthly paradise, and any treatment of the seven as a set that failed to capture their overall congruity would make the set look arbitrary, rendering books like this pointless. Fortunately, the editors have assembled a group of contributors who mostly manage to present the cardinal and theological virtues in a mutually consistent and luminous way.

In the cardinal virtues section, Jay Wood on Prudence, Daniel McInerny on Fortitude, and Robert Roberts on Temperance very capably re-tread well-worn ground. These chapters largely reproduce the views of Aristotle and Aquinas with an eye to contemporary questions and a talent for fresh exegesis that manages to get the author right while being struck anew by the problems they were trying to solve, throwing up new insights and imparting a sense of excited discovery. Throughout these chapters, firm and unwavering technical precision is lightened by patches of anecdotal chattiness and literary flair (McInerny even works in a wholly admirable discussion of Beowulf). These chapters would serve extremely well as upper year or graduate student introductions; all the more so because they introduce staple topics of virtue ethics as a whole. The reader is introduced to virtue cultivation, the relationship of prudence to the moral virtues, the theory of the ‘mean’, and the relationship between virtue and happiness. A jogging familiarity with the basic terrain is well conveyed.

In the theological virtues section, Charles Pinches on hope and Paul Wadell on charity very much follow suit. Each author keeps to Aquinas for the most part. Pinches distinguishes the passion of hope from the virtue, relates hope to faith and charity, and discusses how hope chastens utopian politics without depressing social endeavour. Wadell depicts charity as a friendship with God that is founded on a participation in the divine life, and does a fine job of explaining how this flows into love of neighbour and is expressed through other-regarding ‘ecstatic practices’. In both essays Aquinas is treated as though he essentially said all that needed saying, with the author’s role being to gloss the Summa and depart after an exegetical job neatly done. In theological research proper, stopping at that point can be fatal, turning Aquinas into a talisman and Thomism into groupthink. But the approach works in a section like this, because the goal is not to break new ground but to introduce a virtue in rich detail using a paradigmatic source. The result is a coherent presentation useful to non-specialists.

The sections I have discussed might have provided a clear and elegant introduction to the ‘seven traditional virtues’. But in the end results prove mixed because the chapters on justice and faith wobble in idiosyncratic directions. The entry on justice by David Schmidtz and John Thrasher engages Plato while stumping for Kant, and optimistically declares that a certain approach to Kantian dignity within pluralistic societies will manage to ‘constitute them as a kingdom of ends’ (pp. 72–73). Whatever one makes of this, the chapter’s style and substance are utterly incongruous with the other cardinal virtue chapters, so that they fail to form a coherent set. Robert Audi’s chapter on faith is an advanced piece of analytic philosophy that wonders whether faith even is a virtue given that we can believe stupid things and put faith in wicked causes. In the end, Christian faith counts as a quasi-virtue, at least, ‘given its anchoring in love’ and its ‘egalitarian element’ (p. 340). Combining theological hand-waving like this with some profound moral psychology, the chapter is completely alien to the volume’s essays on hope and charity. These two chapters awkwardly mar the overall presentation of the cardinal and theological virtues. But the other entries certainly earn their keep, and should not lose their place in an overview of the virtues.

The second section takes up the seven capital vices (popularly called ‘the seven deadly sins’) together with their opposed virtues. What the tag ‘capital’ (from caput, ‘head’) picks out is not that these are more wicked than other vices (though they may be), but that they are sources of other vices, and even, to some degree, their coordinators. This style of reflection goes back to the Desert Fathers and was a favourite theme during the Middle Ages. In contemporary work there are several ways in which the seven capital vices are pressed into normative service. The first is as a stimulant for overcoming moral stupor. Teachers have long known that ‘the seven deadly sins’ pique the interest of even determinedly bored and soporific students. The second approach is to draw on the iconic fame of the tradition—the hard-hitting, graphic and racy imagery of gluttons at table, outbursts of wrath, envious rivals, and ‘dens of iniquity’—while side-lining the tradition’s monastic and medieval particularities, more or less turning the capital vices into labels or placeholders for current categories that end up doing all the real work. Where this approach is taken, what Evagrius, John Cassian or Aquinas said about gluttony, drunkenness or wrath may get a dutiful nod only to be predictably superseded by discussions of ‘obesity’, ‘alcoholism’ or ‘anger management’ in the medical or psychological literature. But if ‘engaging with’ the capital vices requires little more than overlapping subject matter, then almost any research on sex, eating or anger conducted by any psychologist, doctor or philosopher can be made to count as that. This approach quickly becomes vacuous, and it may not even be coherent. It assumes that while contemporary researchers may differ from the older tradition in their answers, they are at least asking the same questions, or facing the same problems. But in many cases this is arguable or false (for instance, in the widespread view that acedia or sloth refers to laziness or idleness, a point to which I will return).

Of the chapters in this volume, those on lust and wrath come closest to this second approach. Zac Cogley argues that virtuous anger resists injustice in a mean between wrath, its vice of excess, and meekness, its vice of deficiency. He draws extensively on empirical psychology to develop his stimulating account, whose doctrine of the mean reveals its neo-Aristotelian colours. But the discussion is so far adrift from the capital vices tradition that he not only treats meekness—which the tradition took to be virtuous—as a vice; he even shows no awareness of having made a breach with that tradition, because it collects no notice at all. Like a Festschrift paper which never engages with or even mentions the honorand, it is good work shipped to the wrong address. For Colleen McCluskey, what counts as lust or chastity hinges entirely on whether it objectifies one’s partner. Ethically, sex is judged at the bar of the categorical imperative read through feminist critiques of objectification. But this important consideration hardly exhausts the concepts of chastity and lust, though it does manage to exhaust McCluskey’s essay. These two chapters illustrate various problems with the second approach and its tendency to treat the ‘capital vices’ as mere placeholders for anything an author may have to say on remotely similar subjects.

A far different and third approach to the capital vices is magnificently illustrated in the section’s five remaining chapters on these vices, which are the book’s really brilliant contribution. The hallmark of this approach is to engage the historical tradition seriously, drawing on monastic, medieval, and other figures while translating their insights into contemporary terms and advancing the discussion with fresh arguments. A good sign that an author is on the right track is that he or she shows interest in why these are considered ‘capital’ or source vices in the first place. Obviously, if that consideration is neglected, the whole point of the genre is lost; and ethical treatments of the seven as a set are reduced, in Descartes’ words, to ‘yesterday’s cabbage’.

The most successful illustration of the third approach is Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung’s chapter on acedia. Though it is often translated ‘sloth’, no English word can really get at what acedia means. To many it suggests being idle or lazy, but DeYoung rightly declares this simplistic. She surveys an intriguing literature from the Desert Fathers through to Josef Pieper, and with Thomas Aquinas concludes that sloth is essentially ‘sorrow at the divine good’. This raises the question of why anybody would be sorry about that. The suggestion is that the slothful resent the demands of love and are disgusted that God calls them to something more than a contented mediocrity. Being a capital vice, acedia must have offspring. DeYoung surveys these with great effect. Sloth may produce a dreary boredom whose symptom is outer laziness. But equally, acedia may beget what Gregory the Great called the ‘wandering of the mind after illicit things’, or the escapist search for ‘diversion’ diagnosed by Pascal. Most interestingly of all, DeYoung notes that acedia may disguise its spiritual laziness precisely through workaholism and busyness, so as to give itself the impression of doing something. The virtue opposed to acedia is charity, which resists sloth through ‘staying the course, resisting the temptation to flee or deny love’s demands’ (p. 196).

Robert Krushwitz’s chapter on ‘Gluttony and Abstinence’ likewise draws on traditional figures such as John Cassian and Gregory before taking up with Aquinas. Gluttony is far more than eating to excess. The glutton may in fact eat little, but exhibit the vice through being too picky about food items, too dainty about food quality, or too fussy about dish preparation. Helpfully drawing on the medical and psychological literature, Krushwitz argues that such behaviour disorders our sensory appetites, disorienting us ‘in relation to the full good’ (p. 145). The opposed virtue of abstinence is expressed through fasting and the like, which Krushwitz regards not just as a therapeutic technique, but as an expression of sacred grief—analogous to losing one’s appetite during life’s tragic events—one that reorients us ‘toward the full good’ (p. 153). Craig Boyd’s chapter on pride helpfully contrasts Aristotelian magnanimity with Christian humility. Magnanimity’s fantasy of self-sufficiency denies one’s dependence on others. Humility, by contrast, gratefully acknowledges the sources on which we do depend, and therefore gives a more accurate insight into the human condition. The chapter by Timothy Perrine and Kevin Timpe draws on economics and psychology to supplement Thomistic insights and demonstrate the misery wrought by envy, which they insightfully describe as ‘the disposition to sorrow over another’s good because of a perception of inferiority regarding the other’s good’ (p. 232). In a truly elegant and compelling chapter, Andrew Pinsent construes avarice as the ‘disordered desire for, or delight in, money or monetary value’ (p. 160). With some help from empirical psychology and a fine use of Dante, Pinsent argues that avarice ‘inhibits or destroys, culpably, second-person relatedness with others’ (p. 166), so that we view others impersonally, marring our social bonds and capacity to flourish. The capital vices section of the book is by far the longest and most ambitious. For almost 200 pages we are in racy and ribald ‘seven deadly sins’ territory, watching as the marmoreal, Greco-Roman sheen of virtue ethics meets with the scorching wind of the Desert Fathers. Taken as a whole, the results are notably brilliant and this section is by far the most interdisciplinary and original.

The book’s third section concerns virtue epistemology, a fairly recent discipline which assigns the intellectual virtues a central role in resolving epistemological questions. John Greco provides a fine neo-Aristotelian account of episteme or understanding. Jason Baerh follows suit on sophia or theoretical wisdom, and Linda Zagzebski completes the section with an examination of epistemic self-trust. The essays are very well done, though they focus on clannish debates within Anglo-American analytic epistemology, disregard the theology that informs most of the book, and strangely manage to ignore even the vices. Though it will reward advanced students with overlapping interests, the section’s place in the book has a scissors-and-paste look to it.

The volume’s last section assesses the role of virtue within various disciplines: particularly theology, political science, positive psychology, neuroscience, and a feminist ethic of care. It resolutely ignores the style, method and interests shown in every other section, which by this point arrives like a thing expected. The entries mostly consist of unambitious but quite serviceable state-of-field reports. For Christian ethicists, the psychology entries will likely prove the most revelatory. The chapter on positive psychology alleges a convergence between virtue ethics and positive psychology with its focus on positive emotions, happiness or well-being, and character traits. James van Slyke’s intriguing chapter argues that research into ‘mirror neurons’ (by which we mimic others) supports the claim that character traits are formed in significant part through the imitation of role models. These two essays are very helpful in light of situationist critiques of virtue ethics by John Doris and other experimental psychologists. ⁴ This last section, which reads like an interdisciplinary parish bulletin, gives the distinct impression that virtue ethics really has generated excitement throughout the disciplines, and is not just the in-group totem of various philosophers and theologians.

Themed multi-author volumes like this are the academic equivalent of a supermarket. Other specialised shops have better versions of many of the products, but getting at them would require a lot more ‘posthaste and rummage in the land’. With the exception of the capital vices section, few of the essays in this volume are the best recent treatments of individual virtues and vices. At the same time, the book’s methodology is acutely slapdash. The chapters do not even try to do roughly the same thing. Some are basic summaries, some do advanced research, some are rather eccentric. Because of this, the book will not entirely suffice as a single-volume textbook for an introductory course on the virtues and vices. A teacher would need judiciously to replace certain chapters and augment the book from other sources. It is also problematic that the growing and important work on the virtues by Kantians and utilitarians earns no place in this volume. But virtue classification has been lagging for so long that a bold, comprehensive effort must simply be forgiven such things if at all possible. Most of the chapters are very good indeed, and a single work that patches up so many holes on a tattered garment commands respect. As a single-stop, comprehensive resource on the virtues and vices, this volume is probably the best we now have. In a still emerging field which this book will further stimulate, that is certainly contribution enough.

Virtue and the Moral Life

Coming out of a 2010–2012 lecture series on ‘The Intersection of Virtue and Ethics’ at Villanova University, Virtue and the Moral Life is made up of ten essays parsed into five sections. Unlike Virtues and Their Vices it does not aim to be comprehensive. It is, instead, a collection of original research papers addressed to wide-ranging themes of obvious importance. Featuring some of the most interesting and senior scholars working on the virtues today, the volume makes a fine contribution to the literature.

The first section asks ‘Why bother with virtue ethics at all?’ (p. viii). James Keenan’s ‘Seven Reasons for Doing Virtue Ethics Today’ compresses many of the best stock arguments for virtue ethics: it uses familiar language, accounts for the role of exemplars, is socially embedded, and so forth. Keenan does not address the sophisticated critiques of virtue ethics made by Kantians, utilitarians, and others. He simply tries to show what makes the virtue approach persuasive to begin with. Read as one part campaign leaflet, one part Virtue 101, this eminently detachable essay splendidly opens the volume.

Jennifer Herdt follows with ‘Augustine and the Liturgical Pedagogy of Virtue’. Particularly since her magnificent 2012 book Putting on Virtue, Herdt has been required reading for anyone following virtue ethics. Here she draws on Augustine to explain the role which liturgy plays in cultivating virtue. Herdt endorses Augustine’s view that the ‘holy spectacle’ of Christian liturgy develops humility whereas the ‘perverse spectacle’ of pagan theatre encourages ‘glittering vices’ (p. 24). But while affirming Christian distinctiveness this way, Herdt resists the conclusion that Christians should quarantine themselves from secular society as from the new pagan Rome. Instead, she argues, Christian liturgy prompts us to act ‘for the sake of common goods in a pluralist secular society’ because such activity is itself ‘an expression of worship’ (p. 24). The essay appears to be directed in part at Christians tempted to despair of pluralistic modernity, and who (presumably under the influence of MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank) have been packing their bags in preparation for the new St Benedict. Herdt’s proposal is intriguing, and I hope that in future work she will develop a full account of what it means, precisely, to stipulate civic projects as acts of ‘worship’ and to speak of ‘citizenship as liturgy’ (p. 31).

The second section deals with topics in the public sphere. Margaret Urban Walker argues that for liberal democracies reliably to tell their histories in a truthful way they require the virtue of ‘civic integrity’ which commits them to historical accountability and an honest confrontation with the problem of dirty hands. The project is urgent and necessary, but I wonder if Walker has given grounds to sustain it. She trenchantly claims: ‘If one believes one’s society is worthy, then one must believe it can stand its own truths’ (p. 52). But since civic integrity only attends to society’s flaws, it is unclear what in the long run would sustain the belief that one’s society was worthy. This is a serious problem since the desire not to despair of one’s society often prompts self-deception about its past in the first place. Some virtue of civic appreciation or even civic hope ought to have balanced the sin-sleuthing and tortured conscience which is all that civic integrity leaves a society with. In the second chapter on public life, Mark A. Wilson argues that the best response of soldiers and others to the guilt of moral injury is not just therapeutic oblivion but the virtue of moral grief with its capacity for penitential mourning. Making good use of Augustine and Aquinas, this moving and clear-headed essay is all the stronger for being rooted in Wilson’s own work with soldiers returning from war.

The third section devotes two chapters to virtue and the family. Mary M. Doyle Roche addresses how to foster virtuous agency in children, given the predatory omnipresence of consumer culture. Julie Hanlon Rubio discusses the task of ‘passing on the faith in the rising era of “nones”’. Given how many children reject a religious upbringing, she argues that Christian parents ‘simply cannot be held responsible for their children’s salvation’ (p. 109). In past ages parents were confidently to form ‘athletes for Christ’. Now they should instead encourage faith, and model Christian practices, while respecting the choice of some children to leave the Church. None of the authors in this volume engages the others’ essays, which is a pity. Wilson’s discussion of ‘moral grief’ might have posed important questions for Rubio’s account, such as whether it too hastily rules out as an option for us the kind of tears which St Monica shed.

The fourth section concerns virtue and moral failure. There is perhaps no more constructive and brilliant figure in theological virtue ethics today than Jean Porter, whose 2005 book Nature as Reason is a field-defining work. Her chapter on sin notes the odd fact that ‘most theologians who focus on ethics have little to say about sin’ (p. 115). Her present paper seeks to fill the gap somewhat. She examines two competing medieval models of sin which ‘collectively frame what we might call the problematic of sin, for their own age and for our own’ (p. 118). The first approach, developed by Peter Abelard, views sin as a freely chosen crime or transgression ‘liable to both judgment and forgiveness’ (p. 123). The second, formulated by Anselm of Laon, stresses the psychological dead-weights which tempt us to sin prior to choice, and which create the impression of ‘sin as sickness, sin as bondage’ (ibid.). Porter persuasively tries to show why each model captures half of the truth, and suggests that future theologies of sin should aim to integrate sin conceived of both as transgression and as sickness. The discussion touches upon certain ecclesial discontents many have with virtue ethics itself. When a stress on one’s own virtuous agency becomes central, it may seem that the ancient Greeks through their medieval proxies have handed St Paul a certain defeat: that the concepts of the law, sin, grace and forgiveness have dispersed like mist in a blaze of Attic sunshine. The strongest form of this suspicion regards virtue ethics as a kind of neo-Pelagian scouting party. Milder forms simply ask that virtue ethics do a better job accounting for the role of the commandments, for the way grace takes the initiative in our moral and spiritual lives, and for sin taken not just as vice to overcome but as guilt needing forgiveness. ⁵ Porter’s essay does much to restore balance here by showing how a therapeutic model of sin easily adapted to virtue ethics can partner with a forensic model that stresses forgiveness of sins. The volume’s final section addresses the virtues of humility and forgiveness. But apart from calling them virtues, no account is given of them as virtues, and this is hardly satisfactory.

This book is far smaller and less ambitious than Virtues and Their Vices. It does not aspire to fill the handbook or companion niche. Despite many excellent essays, it is unclear what this book is finally about. The chapters do not engage each other, and are unified only through some kind of reflection upon, or even just a nod towards, ‘virtue ethics’. But most entries do significantly advance research into their chosen topics, and so it very much succeeds as a loose collection of forays or soundings. The volume will be useful to more advanced students who want to see issues of public and family life run through a virtue ethics filter, and it will be studied closely by specialists who look to figures such as Porter and Herdt for pioneering developments in the field.

Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice

Many of questions that arose in connection with Jean Porter’s essay come up in Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung’s Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice. This slender book builds upon her excellent 2009 Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies. That vainglory is indeed The Forgotten Vice can be gathered from the fact that it was forgotten even by the editors of the Virtues and Their Vices volume, in which it finds no place. Yet part of DeYoung’s argument is that vainglory is so pervasive as to be almost invisible to us, a point she makes with compelling observations and a fund of anecdotes. In part this makes the book a familiar kind of exercise in moral unmasking: one in which a forgotten concept is retrieved to subvert our self-image and astound us with a novel diagnosis about where it is we are morally standing. That approach carries obvious risks. It often gets no further than cultural jeremiads or morbid exhibitionism. But DeYoung takes it in a far better direction. She notes that ‘past thinkers who analysed the vice of vainglory did so for medicinal reasons’ and that the ‘purpose of this book is not to bog us down in sin or overwhelm us with a sense of failure, but to promote desires for health and promote responses that bring healing’ (p. 7). Judged by this standard the book is a marvellous success.

As in De Young’s contribution to the capital vices section in Virtues and Their Vices, she draws a great deal here on the Desert Fathers and Thomas Aquinas. Since vainglory is by hypothesis the forgotten vice, our initial task must be to get clear on what it is. But first, what is ‘glory’? The term is as conceptually vague as ‘vainglory’. DeYoung agrees with Aquinas that glory is ‘any display of goodness’ or any instance of goodness ‘apparent and manifest in its splendor’ (p. 14). Glory only becomes ‘empty’ (vana) if sought under petty or false auspices or for wicked or contemptible purposes. She distinguishes vainglory from pride, with which it is often confused. The distinction, again borrowed from Aquinas, rests on ultimate motives: ‘the prideful desire superiority, and the vainglorious desire the show of superiority’, she writes, ‘although these can easily be entangled in practice’ (p. 8). In fact, vainglory in the capital vices tradition was said to be typically motivated by pride. But DeYoung makes an original and intriguing argument that it may also be motivated by fear.

Vainglory is ‘capital’ in begetting further, derivative vices: such as boasting, hypocrisy, presumption of novelties (adopting ‘the latest fashions’), and so forth (pp. 38–39). In an insightful analysis, DeYoung notes how the fully deserved recognition of one’s excellence and virtue may first be enjoyed and eventually become addictive, tempting the slide into vainglory. But vice does not get the last word in this book. DeYoung proposes remedies and practices of resistance, such as solitude and a prayerful silence that locates our self-worth in God. The insight is that vainglory, at bottom, is the symptom of a legitimate need that has been denied. We do require the full recognition and appreciation of our created glory: ‘To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a parent in a child’ (C. S. Lewis quoted on p. 41). Human recognition can be an innocent foretaste of this, but vainglory turns it into a substitute (p. 23). In these reflections, DeYoung beautifully gets us past the idea that vainglory is cured by pretending to be worthless and by humiliating others so as to break their self-esteem. The last part of the book takes up concerns touched upon in my discussion of Porter. How can we stress practices that seem to overcome vice by the sweat of our brow without becoming crypto-Pelagians? DeYoung’s satisfying answer is that growth in virtue involves God’s grace working through human agency rather than apart from it, ‘transforming us into a new creation’ (p. 116).

I know of no finer recent book-length classification of a single vice than DeYoung’s Vainglory. The blunt and subtle forms which this vice takes are cannily exposed, and remedies are described in terms applicable to present-day formation. The book’s intended audience is popular as well as academic. Sonorous quotations from Cicero jostle with Lady Gaga references and U2 soundbites. Yet DeYoung’s learning is formidable, and the book does not just recapitulate research on the vices, but advances it (for example, in her argument that vainglory can be motivated by fear as well as pride). This slim book would make an excellent supplement to a course on the virtues, and should be a mainstay in any course on the capital vices.