61. ETHICS — Part A
This week’s triptych plunges into the thinking of a group of scholars about ethics: Co-editors James Van Slyke, Gregory Peterson, Michael Spezio, Kevin Reimer, and Warren Brown produced a comprehensive review of ethics in a book entitled Theology and the Science of Moral Action: Virtue Ethics, Exemplarity, and Cognitive Neuroscience. In their approach, the co-editors included an integration of research in moral cognition and behavior within the fields of neuroscience, moral psychology, and virtue theoretical ethics in philosophy and theology.
When I read this book, I thought about all that goes into our commitments to act on our principles. What leads us to behave as we do? I will not attempt to summarize this book. Instead, I will select quotes from the book, hopefully to stimulate your thinking. As is the case in each of my posts, I will end with a question for your reflection based on these quotes.
“For Aristotle, the moral life is not merely a rational or intellectual pursuit; virtues are practiced or cultivated like the skills of a master craftsman or musician. … Virtue ethics assumes that as one develops a specific virtue there is less need to consciously direct moral actions. Instead, a person’s character becomes formed to naturally act in a virtuous manner.”
“Martha Nussbaum proposes a Capabilities Approach that seeks to reclaim the authority of emotion in reasoned human judgment and to produce a new political theory to promote justice in multicultural contexts. She grounds her approach in two architectonic capabilities: attachment to justice, which is our practical reason, and love of others, which is our affiliative agency. This is what, for Nussbaum, it means to be fulfilled as a human person, and what it means to live in a manner worthy of human dignity.”
“Human dignity in Nussbaum’s understanding is not established by meeting a threshold of rationality, but simply by being a human agent, being a human who has the innate potential for ‘active striving,’ or conativity.”
“Thomas J. Oord argues that love is primary for any adequate ethic. Yet love is perhaps the most misunderstood word in the English language. Oord argues for a definition of love in the following way: to love is to act intentionally, in response to God and others, to promote overall well-being. This definition grounds well what we should consider as an act of love; although it allows for a wide variety of various types of love, include agape, eros, and philia.
“A definition of love does not itself account well for the fact that some people — moral exemplars — develop characters we consider virtuous. Moral exemplars frequently express love and thereby develop habits of love. Successive moments and ongoing histories of love shape people in ways that change their character in positive ways.”
“Whereas deontology and utilitarianism ask the question, ‘What should I do?’ virtue ethics poses the question, ‘What kind of person should I be?’ … If moral decision-making is not simply a matter of identifying and applying rules, and if we are not simply born with moral virtues, then the virtues must be taught through the development of a person in the context of a particular community.”
“Thus, acting virtuously in the world means embodying virtuous stable deliberative dispositions for moral action, known as habitus. Habitus is a word derived from the Latin habeo (to have, to maintain), and although our current concepts of ‘habit’ derive from some aspects of this older concept, it is very clear that habitus is not to be identified with habit or with the habitual.”
“Indeed, [Servais-Théodore] Pinckaers makes this point very clear. [Habitus is] not to be confused with our ordinary understanding of habits — psychological mechanisms that diminish the moral commitment to an action. The habitus as St. Thomas intended it is a principle of progress and resourcefulness through full commitment. It is through these habitus or stable dispositions that we acquire mastery over our actions and become entirely free.”
“In Aquinas, habitus is necessary for three reasons: (1) so that our action is ‘steadfast’ and stable; (2) so that our actions are ready-to-hand, to incline deliberation in a given direction and to avoid interminable inquiries about what we are to do whenever a situation arises; and (3) to perfect our activity by joining our actions to our nature or character, such that the action we take emerges as a pleasurable fulfillment of who we are.”
“Equally important for understanding moral functioning is recent work in mindreading or, as more commonly called, theory of mind, the ability to think about the thoughts of others and correspondingly, to infer how others may act as a result. … Mindreading would at least be required for the capacity for empathy, and while empathy may not by itself be enough for moral action, it would be a necessary component of many, if not all, moral theories.”
“At its most modest, exemplarism may be understood to claim that much can be learned from the study and consideration of moral exemplars with respect to moral performance and applied ethics. Alternatively, and a bit more strongly, the referencing of exemplars, by means for instance of imitation and simulation, may be understood to play an integral role in moral decision-making, possibly implying that any moral decision-making that does not involve such referencing will be deficient in character.”
“Linda Zagzebski places exemplars at the foundation of normative ethics. … Thus, exemplars define the content of morality rather than the reverse. To be a good person is precisely to be like an exemplar, and a right act is the kind of act an exemplar might do in a similar situation.
“Consequently, imitation plays an important role in Zagzebski’s account: we learn to become moral by imitating exemplars, and moral decision-making involves the referencing of such exemplars. Imitation of exemplars involves (ideally) imitation of both their behavior and motives.”
“From a developmental perspective, the identification of moral exemplars begins (one may assume) in childhood, and indeed the first and most important moral exemplars in these early years are arguably the child’s parents and immediate family. Yet, as the child grows, other exemplars are identified, perhaps one might even say, tried on for size. Some will inevitably be found wanting — the slightly older and apparently ‘cool’ role model may prove a poor choice for imitation, and so another role model, perhaps an admired teacher, becomes a source of reflection. Yet, these choices do not occur in a cultural vacuum.”
“Some of these exemplars will also deeply inform individuals’ lives, and, again, some may be found wanting. Indeed, precisely how the exemplar is embraced and informs action can be quite divergent.”
Q: What leads you to act ethically?
